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PERSONAL JOURNEYS
Adam Griffi n
Dr. Griffin is the founder and chief acupuncturist at Acutonix Acupuncture and
Wellness Center. His clinics are a leading center for the practice of traditional
Chinese medicine in the Los Angeles area. Dr. Griffin loves to cook for his family,
backpack, fly-fish, and surf.T.E. What is your take on the meridians?
A.G. When you look into a book and you look up meridians and you think about
acupuncture lines as they traverse the body, what you’re looking at is actually
not Chinese medicine. The Huangdi Neijing, or Yellow Emperor’s Classic of
Internal Medicine, is the mother of all books. There are no meridians in the
Huangdi Neijing. Much of what we know about Chinese medicine comes from
this book. It’s this huge encyclopedic text.
In the early 1900s, a French bank clerk named George Soulie de Morant
came across a description of a word in the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal
Medicine that he couldn’t translate. It was called mai. He thought, “This looks
like a nadi. I’m going to use this French word that would describe what we know
about nadis. I’m going to call them meridians.” But they weren’t meridians. The
word mai, thanks to other people being able properly translate this book, is a
vessel. There’s a big difference between a meridian and a vessel.
What if all of this idea of energy and meridians is a false translation or an
improperly translated text? What if what we are really talking about is some-
thing like the vagus nerve? Maybe what we’re talking about are things like the
peripheral nervous system, central nervous system, nerve bundles, and blood
vessels. The way acupuncture works is by stimulating blood flow to parts of
the body, which hyperoxygenates areas of injury, which in my opinion, is really
what yoga is. It’s breath. What follows breath? Oxygen.T.E. So you’re saying that in order to stay true to the authenticity of
true Chinese medicine, we need to reframe the word meridian to
vessel?
A.G. Yeah, I think that the blood vessels, within the context of Chinese medicine,
are the channels of the body. They are the way that the joints and the muscle
tissue become nourished. They’re the way the organs become nourished. In
Chinese, they call this zang-fu. So really, acupuncture is about how can I increase
or decrease circulation to a particular area of the body through the manipula-