Five years ago, while visiting his native Korea, physicist Zang-Hee Cho took a tumble down a hiking trail. "We were in the mountains for a picnic, and my shoes were not quite correct," recalls the 62-year-old professor from the University of California at Irvine. "I was thinking, as usual, and I fell down. It was like a flight, like a big jump down the mountain. The next day I returned to California and tried to stand up after 12 hours on the plane. I couldn't stand up. I said, 'Uh-oh, big trouble.'"
Eventually, Cho hobbled off the plane and made his way home, and later he began to look for some relief from the pain in his back. Relatives suggested he try acupuncture. Though he initially scoffed at the idea-as an educated person, he says, he didn't believe in acupuncture-he tried it. And much to his surprise, it worked. "After about ten minutes I felt the pain melting away."
Cho's unexpected relief prodded his professional curiosity. As a physicist working in radiology, Cho develops ways to image the complex inner workings of the body; one of his inventions was a prototype PET scanner around 1975. How, he wondered, could inserting needles into seemingly random points on the body possibly affect human health? So he decided to take a closer look, and what he found astounded him. While sticking needles into a few student volunteers, he took pictures of their brains and discovered that by stimulating an acupuncture point said to be associated with vision-but that is nowhere near anything known to be connected to the eyes-he could indeed trigger activity in the very part of the brain that controls vision. There just might be something to this acupuncture thing, he figured.
