Nature Created The Wonder of Your Body

You, in the beginning was a cell, a fusion of sperm and egg. Individually they were nothing, but combined they could conquer the world.

The story of how that cell became you is the most amazing story ever developed in nature. It is a story that has not only created the astronomical complexity of you brain and the virility of your heart, but is also responsible for human civilizations and art, love won and life lost.

The cell contains everything within it to produce this, including the magic self-healing power.

When your cell first starts it is in a world of space: a cellular being floating in the primordial soup of the fallopian tubes. It has just emerged from its own Big Bang: the moment of fusion of sperm and egg that has created your universe. It knows no up, no down, and it has no reference to right and left, back or front, for it has no need.

Soon it divides. Then these two cells divide again, and again, and again, until it is a ball of cells, a morula (Latin for the mulberry fruit it resembles), and an awareness is beginning within the cells that there is a spatial relationship with other cells. There is the embryogenesis of organization. Within a few days the outer and inner cells of the morula start differentiating. They are performing individual roles. They are specializing.

The cells are responding to their relative positions by subtly altering their function. Those in the centre begin to secrete fluids. An egg is forming and the inside of this egg is even named the Yolk Sac. Those cells on the outside become stronger, tougher, more like skin.

The process continues at an astonishing rate. Within a week there are thousands of cells. Now the ball of cells is tumbling down the walls of the womb. It grabs a place to hold on and burrows into the endometrium - the surface of the womb. The ball of cells now has not only an inside and outside but also a left and right, up and down, near and far.

The parts on the outside start forming the placenta; the inside divides and creates the embryo. The cells decide that one end will become the head, the other the tail. The primitive spinal cord appears, and one end becomes bulbous, the primitive brain. Cells stream off from the other side and form organs and muscles.

Tissues fold over themselves, bend and rotate, move from one end to the other. It should be chaos, but instead it is poetry in motion. The result is a perfectly formed mass of ten trillion cells. That's ten thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand cells!

Each cell knows not only where it is but also what it should be doing and which cell it should be next to. They have formed structures of immense complexity: an upside-down gossamerleaved tree of a lung, a million nano-filtration units in the kidney, and a brain that can organize life into human civilization - and they have done all of this from one invisible cell.

All of this is possible because of those 23 double-stranded spirals of DNA, and an epic level of organization. When cells lose this organization, then what happens is called disease. These cells worked together can also self-restore the lost organization, that is, your body has the capability of self-healing.

Through thousands of years of accidentally observations and trial and error, the ancient Chinese found a smart way to evoke the magic self-healing power of our body to restore our health.

This smart medical technique is called ACUPUNCTURE.

Cited/Modified from:

Daniel Keown, 2014, The Spark in the Machine: How the Science of Acupuncture Explains the Mysteries of Western Medicine.*

*In this book Dr. Daniel Keown challenges the popular belief that acupuncture cannot be part of truly scientific medicine. With a radical new approach which ties together Western medicine and the Chinese energetic system, The Spark in the Machine will take you on a journey over billions of years to the outer realms of medical science to explain what the ancient Chinese always knew, but God forgot to tell surgeons.