New experiments look at the effect of acupuncture needles on the number of ions arriving to a body in an electric field.
(From Compliance Engineering Jan/Feb 2003)
 
For centuries, acupuncture—the subcutaneous insertion of needles in certain parts of (mostly) the human body—has been practiced for diagnostic as well as remedial purposes. Plenty of reports have noted the surprising effects of acupuncture on many types of diseases or discomforts. It should be stressed, however, that these reports are normally anecdotal, often collections of single cases, and are rarely based on strict scientific investigations such as double-blind tests, etc. These reports also fail to explain why and how acupuncture works (if it does).

Volumes are written about acupuncture practices relative to various ailments. Almost all of these treatises talk about meridians and acupuncture points, but very little can be found in terms of explaining scientifically why the insertion of a needle in one of these points should have any kind of effect.

For the sake of the argument, assume that meridians and acupuncture points are scientific facts and that they represent especially sensitive zones of the body. Is there then a way that a needle in such a point might interact physically with the environment?

It has been suggested that a flow of unipolar atmospheric ions plating out on the skin of a grounded person gives rise to effects similar to those claimed to be associated with acupuncture.1 If it is assumed that a static electric field exists around the person, the needle will distort the field (see Figure 1) and attract (more) atmospheric ions to the person. The ions will be neutralized when arriving at the needle, resulting in a current through the body, possibly along meridians or other paths of low resistance.

I decided to demonstrate this effect. However, the currents involved in these processes are very low (on the order of 10–14 A, or even lower). Therefore, it would have been extremely difficult to measure directly the current flowing to a person caused by an acupuncture needle. Even a person's unavoidable movements (e.g., breathing) would interfere negatively with the measurements.
 
Experiment
It was decided to try to simulate the situation shown in Figure 1. The setup used for the simulation is shown in Figure 2. Between two metallic field plates (0.35 x 0.35 m2) at a distance d, an electric field is established. One plate was connected to a high-voltage supply; the other plate was virtually grounded through an electrometer. The field plates were placed about 0.5 m above the floor in an approximately 70-m3 room. The electrometer was connected to a recorder because the presence of persons in the room during measurements would interfere with the results.

If the voltage difference between the field plates is V, an electric field exists between the plates with the mean value of

 With the experiments performed in this investigation, the voltage V was negative; i.e., negative ions were driven toward the plate connected to the electrometer (and positive ions in the opposite direction).

A series of measurements were performed where the voltage V and the distance d were varied. For each value of V and d (i.e., for a given field strength E, Equation 1), the mean value of the current I to the electrometer was calculated from the charge q integrated over the measuring time t by

 In the first series of measurements, both field plates were planar and even. To simulate the effect of an acupuncture needle, a sewing nee