Around 1600, William Gilbert, an English physician, coined the word “electric” and established the difference between electricity and magnetism. In 1752, Johann Schaeffer published the book “Electrical Medicine.” By that time, many physicians were reportedly using electricity in their practices. In 1830, Carlo Matteucci, a professor of physics at Pisa showed that electrical current was generated by injured tissues. In 1858, Dr. Francis, a Philadelphia physician, was first to describe the relief of dental pain by electricity. In the early 1950’s, Reinhold Voll, a German medical doctor, developed an electronic testing device for finding acupuncture points electrically. He was successful in finding acupuncture points and demonstrating that these points, known to Chinese acupuncturists for millennia, had a different resistance to a tiny electrical current passed through the body, than did the adjacent tissues. Many other researchers have also verified that electrical conductance at the acupuncture points is significantly greater than the surrounding tissue. Dr Voll and Acupuncture Points Voll then began a life long search to identify correlations between disease states and changes in the electrical resistance of the various acupuncture points. He thought that if he could identify electrical changes in certain acupuncture points associated with certain diseases, then he might be able to identify those diseases more easily, or earlier, when treatment intervention was likely to be more effective. Voll was successful in identifying many acupuncture points related to specific conditions and published a great deal of information about using acupuncture points diagnostically.” (Until Voll, these points had been used mainly for treatment.) He found, for example, that patients with lung cancer had abnormal readings on the acupuncture points referred to as lung points. Changes also occurred in the electrical conductance of the acupuncture points supplying musculoskeletal structures that are inflamed. These changes in acupuncture point resistance related to lung cancer have been verified more recently by researchers from UCLA and USC. In a double-blind study, 3 patients with lung cancer and 20 controls (who had negative chest x-rays) had the electrical resistance of several acupuncture lung points and several small intestine points measured. There was an 87 percent correlation between the testing results and the results of the X-ray diagnosis for the lung points, and no correlation with the small intestine points. Of interest, there were no false negatives and 4 “false” positives. Two of these false positive readings were from the same patient who had an “inconsistent shadow” on his lung X-ray but had shown no evidence of disease with tomograms and a CT scan. 5 These “false positive” readings could have been from lung cancer not yet diagnosed, or some other degenerative disease process, or could have been merely incorrect readings. A “false positive” is when the patient has a preclinical condition that cannot yet be detected using allopathic methods but is picked up using bioresonance testing. A “false negative” is when the patient has a clinical or preclinical condition that is not picked up using bioresonance testing. Another study from the Pain Management Clinic, Department of Anesthesiology, UCLA School of Medicine, evaluated the ability of electrodermal testing to identify, in a blinded fashion, areas of pain. Forty patients were determined by medical examination to have musculoskeletal pain. Each patient was draped to hide any physical evidence to suggest where the pain might be. The physician conducting the electrodermal testing had no prior knowledge of the patient’s history, and was not allowed to talk to the patient. Based on increased skin conductance at specific acupuncture points of the ears, the physician determined, with greater than 75 percent accuracy, the location of the pain, a highly significant result. This study also pointed out that electrodermal testing technique “is often sensitive to pathological problems of which the patient is only minimally aware. When some patients were told of their auricular diagnosis results, they suddenly remembered having a minor or old pain problem in that bodily area, a problem which they had neglected to mention during the medical evaluation,” and thus were considered to be “misses” in the statistical analysis .The results of this test were therefore more impressive than the statistical analysis would indicate. (1) A great deal has been done throughout the world correlating changes in electrical conductance at acupuncture points with various disease entities. Much of the German, French, Japanese, and Chinese literature has not been translated. Only a few examples of the many articles related to finding and measuring acupuncture points electrically are referenced in this lesson. Dr Voll and Allergy Testing Voll discovered that certain acupuncture points showed abnormal readings when subjects were reacting allergically. He made several serendipitous discoveries related to “allergy” testing. He noted some as usual readings on certain acupuncture points when a patient had a bottle of medicine in his pocket. He could remove the bottle and consistently get different readings when the bottle was in his pocket compared to when it was not. At first he was baffled as to how a closed bottle of medicine outside the body could affect the acupuncture readings. It was even more baffling when he discovered that the glass bottle of medicine could change the readings when it was in contact any where along the closed electric circuit involved with the testing procedure. Voll and his colleagues then began work to identify the nature of this strange phenomena. They inserted a metal plate into the circuit and demonstrated that many substances that precluded changes in acupuncture point readings when ingested could produce the same changes when placed on the plate (even in closed glass bottles). They assumed that there must be some kind of electro-magnetic energy being emitted from the substances, and that these energy fields somehow traveled along the electric circuit to the body (perhaps like the energy waves representing a person’s voice travels along the electric circuitry of a telephone line). Voll and other scientists have conducted various experiments in an attempt to characterize the energy form that is being measured. As yet, no clear consensus of opinion exists as to exactly how this phenomenon functions. For that matter, no clear consensus exists how any electric phenomena function. Although it used to be thought that electricity was fairly straight forward and well understood, many discoveries in the last few years have made many scientists question older theories. Robert Beck, a physicist well known for his pioneering work in various areas of electromagnetism, said the following, “Man is an extremely complex biocosmic resonator. And it will be quite a few years before even the effect of some of these simple stimulation-type devices are well understood, much less fully understood.” (2) Electrodermal testing devices have been extensively studied by Dr. William Tiller from Stanford, who is a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He has written extensively in an attempt to explain the electric behavior of the skin and how electrodermal diagnostic and treatment instruments function. (3),(4) Dr. Cyril Smith, Ph.D physicist in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Salford, England, has also written extensively in an attempt to explain various electromagnetic phenomena, including electrodermal testing on acupuncture points. (5) Other world leaders in bioelectric medicine include Robert O. Becker, M.D. and his landmark book entitled, The Body Electric – Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life, (6) and Bjorn Nordenstrom, M.D. and his books The Electric Man, and Biologically Closed Electric Circuits. (7) Whether or not a diagnostic or therapeutic modality is fully understood has absolutely no bearing on its effectiveness or usefulness. Evidence for Reliability of Electrodermal Testing The chairman of the Utah Unproven Health Practices Committee in 1985 was asked what constitutes adequate evidence that a technology has been adequately proven? His reply was that a good double-blind study is reasonable proof, and that several double-blind studies reported by researchers from different centres is excellent proof.” Others involved in this issue have suggested that the agreement of experts in the field of the effectiveness and usefulness of the technology is good proof. Also, the clinical use of a technology by various medical practitioners is also good proof of its efficacy. Electrodermal testing instruments have been around for over thirty-five years and have been used widely in Europe and virtually around the world for allergy testing as well as for a variety of other purposes. These instruments, however, have been used for only a few years in this country. Electrodermal testing instruments have been manufactured in Germany, Japan, China, France, Denmark, Russia, and more recently in the United States. Perhaps the most convincing evidence for the accuracy and reliability of electrodermal testing came from using this testing to quickly identify correct optimal treatment doses for patients who had unpleasant reactions to provocative testing. An effective dose to turn off the response would often take more than an hour by trial and error but could almost always be found within seconds using the instrument. On those few misses, the optimal dose was within one dilution, and could easily be found. In 1984, researchers from the University of Hawaii compared 6 different diagnostic modalities for assessing food allergies. These tests included history, food challenge, skin, RAST, IgE antibodies, and electrodermal testing on 30 volunteers. The testing was done in a double blind fashion, with the patients not knowing what antigens were being tested, and the instrument operator not knowing anything about the patient’s food sensitivities. In over 300 tests, electrodermal testing matched the history 74 percent of the time, the food rechallenge test 77 percent of the time, skin testing 71 percent of the time, and RAST testing 69 percent of the time. The authors concluded that “the EAV (electrodermal testing) data obtained in this experiment demonstrates the highest degree of compatibility with the food challenge test, which is considered to be the most sensitive of the currently available diagnostic techniques for food allergy. In addition, the EAV results were comparable with both skin and RAST tests. (8) REFERENCES (1) Oleson TD, Kroening RJ, Bresler DE: An experimental evaluation of auricular diagnosis: The somatotropic mapping of musculoskeletal pain at ear acupuncture points. Pain 1980;8:217-229. (2) Hutchison M: High voltage: the bioelectric interviews. Megabrain Report 1990;1(1):1 34. (3) Tiller WA: Explanation of electrodermal diagnostic and treatment instruments: Part 1. Electrical behavior of human skin. J Holistic Med 1982;4(2):105-127. (4) Tiller WA: What do electrodermal diagnostic acupuncture instruments really measure? Am J Acupuncture 1987;15(1):15-23. (5) Smith CW, Best S: Electromagnetic Man: Health and Hazard in the Electrical Environ ment. St. Martins Press, New York 1989;105-108. (6) Becker RO, Selden G: The Body Electric. William Morrow, New York, 1985 27. Nordenstrom B: The Electric Man, 1985. (7) Nordenstrom, B: Biologically Closed Electric Circuits. Nordic Med Pub, Sweden, 1983. 29. Goodwin JS, Goodwin JM: The tomato effect. JAMA 1984;251:2387-2390. (8) Tsuei JJ, Lehman CW, Lam FMK, Zhu DAH: A food allergy study utilizing the EAV acupuncture technique. Am J Acupuncture 1984;12(2):105-116. 35. Bernstein M: Double-blind food challenge in the diagnosis of food sensitivity in the adult. J Clin Immunology 1974;54:165.
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