"It was a very interesting trip," Mukhitdin was telling us. "We happened to arrive in Athens during the annual medical conference. We were there while they were discussing which of the Greek physicians should be awarded the Hippocrates Prize for best doctor of the year. Then I was asked to work a bit – to check the health of the participants in the conference by their pulse – and after they confirmed that my diagnoses were correct, they suddenly told me that I deserved the prize … a great honor, particularly for a foreigner."
That’s how we began to talk about pulse diagnostics, not right away but after our other guests had left. That conversation, which I had been dreaming of for many months, became very serious and important for me.
The thing is that, thanks to meeting the doctor, I had touched upon the secret of the pulse code, and it excited me more and more. After I had obtained a copy of Ibn Sina’s works, I read the part of the “Cannon” entitled “The Science of the Pulse” with the greatest interest. I couldn’t stop wondering how Ibn Sina had managed to write so simply, understandably and interestingly about such complex things.
Pulses came to life on the pages of the book. They sang, and I listened to their music. It seemed to me that I could visualize an artery in which life was pulsating rhythmically… Here, under one of the pulse reading positions on the wrist – and there are six of them – a frightened “gazelle” galloped by. And here “the tail of a mouse” wagged. The mouse itself couldn’t be seen. It was hiding behind a bush. And a bit farther on, a piece of soil rose forming a tiny mound. It was “a worm” that crawled, wiggling its rings. And here was a strange little creature, obviously sick, it trembled, wriggling like “a twisted thread.”
You can imagine all of that so vividly while reading the book. But how can you hear it? How can you decipher it? Why are those signals so different? Why… I didn’t finish the sentence, understanding that I was asking Mukhitdin too many questions. I suddenly remembered a boy whom I had seen in Namangan, in Mukhitdin’s office. He was sitting next to me by the window, that dark-complexioned little Uzbek boy, gazing steadily at the doctor who was feeling the pulse of a young woman, obviously his mother. He wasn’t just watching; he was feeling the pulse on his own hand and moving his lips. He was certainly a doctor at that moment and wanted to know as badly as I did what the tabib could hear.
Mukhitdin, as if he had read my thoughts, smiled and put his fingers on my wrist. He pulled a sheet of paper toward him and picked up a pencil with his other hand. The zigzag of a sinusoid began to appear on the paper. “Each twist is the surge of an artery,” I thought. Then a second sinusoid appeared on the paper followed by a third.
"All these show your pulse," Mukhitdin said. "I listen to these three spots. The first one," he pointed to the upper sinusoid with his finger, "tells me about the functioning of your heart, colon and stomach. The second one…"
That was a lecture given with a demonstration of the method, a lesson that was long and at the same time extremely concise and brief. Many books are dedicated to the functioning of the pulse in the Chinese system of pulse diagnostics, which is very similar to the Eastern system. So, was it possible to talk even about the basic points in one evening?
But I still learned a lot that night.
Apart from simple “indices,” – rhythm, frequency, force of a strike, angle of decline, flexibility of arteries, etc. – the pulse has many other, more complex features that help one to diagnose. The doctor told me about some of them.
An artery didn’t just expand and contract. Each of its movements varied. Surges occurred, and it was necessary to know how “to hear” them with the tips of one’s fingers. Eastern physicians believed that an artery could have up to 16 surges from the moment of shrinking to full expansion, and return to the initial point. Doctor Mukhitdin could feel seven. His pupils, after they completed their studies, three. We people who aren't trained can feel only the last splash at the moment an artery relaxes close to the skin.
What do these surges tell physicians? What do they transmit and how?
According to Eastern and Chinese medicine, every living thing has energy that operates at different frequencies and spreads along different channels. That energy is called the life force. (Ibn Sina called it the pneuma.) It circulates through a body along certain meridian just as invariably as blood through blood vessels. There are twelve basic and two auxiliary invisible energy channels, or meridians, in one’s body. Each of them has a name that corresponds to the dominant organ through which that meridian runs. They all cross the body along certain curves and either start or end in different areas of the head, feet or hands.
That energy, the pneuma, controls the functioning of the principal organs and systems of the organism. It must flow unhindered along the meridians to maintain our organs in normal condition. But if its flow is hindered, unbalanced, or if it charges an organ insufficiently, diseases arise. There are many reasons why the energy state of a meridian may deviate from the norm. It can be an imbalance of humors, stress, or… but that deserves a separate explanation.
So, each of the three points where one feels the pulse on the wrist offers an opportunity to obtain information about the energy state of one or another meridian.
Of course, it's very difficult to explain how this can be detected by feeling a pulse. It’s only possible to understand the written instructions after one learns how to hear.
By the way, here it’s appropriate to compare some ingenious discoveries of ancient scholars and contemporary science. First of all, modern medical apparatuses confirm that meridians – electronic, thermal and radiation – exist. I’ve read about it recently. Secondly, and no less significantly, it turns out that pulse diagnostics is very reminiscent of research on the so-called “black box” by modern scientists.
The black box, just like homeostasis, is one of the basic notions of the contemporary theory of complex systems. In practice, it is any device whose inner structure we know nothing about. How can one analyze it? Obviously, the only reasonable way is to send it different signals and analyze the answers. In other words, to do what Kozma Prutkov wrote about: “Give a mare a flick on the nose and it will wag its tail.”
Joking aside, it is possible to learn many extremely interesting things about the contents and structure of a black box. Scientists usually send it the simplest signals, the simplest vibrations – a sinusoid. (Remember the sinusoids that Mukhitdin drew on the sheet of paper?) Those signals are distorted inside the black box and turn into complex vibrations before leaving it. Let’s say, if an instrument tuner uses a tuning fork to send a simple signal, or note, to a violin, it will answer him with a more complex sound, since overtones will be added to the note. That’s where a tuner begins his “diagnostics.” By listening to the violin's response, he discovers harmful distortions, analyzes them – why they could have appeared – and then corrects defects in the instrument.
A human organism is also a distinctive black box. It’s extremely complex, unbelievably complex. Today, scientists know how to send numerous signals into it and analyze answers given by the organism. Even thousands of years before our time, the great scholars of antiquity and their ingenious pupil Ibn Sina performed an even greater miracle.
When the heart, our tuning fork, sends blood through the arteries in spurts, the organism affects that flow according to its state of distortion, further complicating the amplitude of vibration of the artery. Ibn Sina, without the benefit of any devices, without the theory of complex systems, received the outgoing signals from the black box, or the beats of a pulse, and learned to decipher them, interpreting the meaning of numerous distortions as a message about different ailments of the organism.