The Science Behind Energy Medicine
For so long now, whenever we used the term “energy medicine” there was unapologetic eye rolling. Sometimes the eye rolling was even followed by “you don’t believe that do you?”. It was almost as if people expected a claim that the walls were going to shake and ghostly moans would follow. Instead it is just the best reflection we could muster to describe the system of Traditional Chinese Medicine. For millennia Chinese scholars discussed how energy started, how it flowed, how energy transformed, and so on. To our surprise the science behind energy medicine has often been overlooked for decades! This could open so many opportunities for cooperation and integration in healthcare!
The cell’s mitochondria generate 90% of a body’s energy. Could scientists harness that power to fight disease and perhaps even aging?
Scientists often refer to the mitochondria as the energy factories of the cell. For good reason. The intracellular organelles transform the food we eat and the air we breathe into an electric potential that drives processes like DNA replication or protein building. Individually, the impact of any given mitochondrion is small. The potential energy within a cell is about 0.2 volts. But add all those cells up, and the potential energy within a human body is roughly equivalent to a lightning bolt.
And yet mitochondria, for all the energy they contribute, have been largely overlooked in medicine. “All the clinical subspecialties are based primarily around anatomy, and so you have neurologists, ophthalmologists, cardiologists, nephrologists, dermatologists and so on, but that model doesn’t take into account mitochondria,” says Wallace. “Since different organs rely on mitochondrial energy to different extents, partial mitochondrial defects result in organ-specific symptoms.”
That’s now changing. Led by Wallace, scientists are now digger deeper into the role mitochondrial disease might play in many of our most pervasive diseases and even into aging itself. The idea is nothing short of a paradigm shift, viewing energy broadly rather than organs specifically. And if Wallace is right, that idea could change millions of lives for the better.
“My belief is that mitochondrial dysfunction underlies the etiology of most common complex diseases, as well as aging,” Wallace says. He explains that a person suffering from chronic headaches might see a neurologist, but there’s also the possibility that “there’s a systemic energy defect causing the headache. There’s nothing wrong anatomically with the brain.” Wallace believes the same can be said for problems with the heart, muscles, renal and endocrine systems.
Source: Defeating Diseases with Energy – Scientific American
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