On optics of human meridians

Two kind of experiments are developed:

One of the experiments is realised to visualize acupuncture meridians using infrared thermal imaging technique in subjects at different day times, and it has been found evidence that human meridians are a source of infrared radiation, so their silhouette can be seen in the images.

An alternative experiment that also use infrared thermal imaging technique to detect meridians, but in this case provoking a heating in related acupuncture points, can be found in [1].

The other experiment is to measure optical transport properties of light propagating along the meridians compared to non meridian trajectories of light, for this they project laser in acupuncture points of the pericardium meridian and in other non acupuncture points, and compare the relative attenuation rates of light propagating along the pericardium meridian and non-meridian directions at the same distance by putting a detector (connected to a photomultiplier) in different related acupuncture meridian points or in non related points.

They have found that the light attenuation is lower along the meridian direction than in the non-meridian direction, this confirms a previous study of the same authors [2] that use other acupuncture point but that has similar experimental setup.

[1] Schlebusch, K. P., Maric-Oehler, W., & Popp, F. A. (2005). Biophotonics in the infrared spectral range reveal acupuncture meridian structure of the body. Journal of Alternative & Complementary Medicine, 11(1), 171-173.

[2] Yang, H. Q., Xie, S. S., Liu, S. H., Li, H., & Guo, Z. Y. (2007). Differences in optical transport properties between human meridian and non-meridian. The American journal of Chinese medicine, 35(05), 743-752.