A patient grips copper rods in his hands as Doctor Julia J. Tsuei of the New Yuanshan Clinic measures 20 separate points on the inside and outside of the fingers. For each point of measurement, the instrument gives out 50 readings.

“This is the large intestine,” she notes. Placing a pathological section for the large intestine on the opposite end, she conducts further testing, explaining that if the numbers return to 50 after placing the slide upon it, then the patient has a particular ailment.

Energy medicine posits that each person is a magnetic field, and that investigating bodily conditions through waves and information can ascertain what signals of pathological changes are being transmitted by the cells a step ahead of blood-testing instruments. “We speak of bodily information changes, detecting which places are out of balance, using electronic instruments to measure electrical fields. Then we compare those against external information,” relates Tsuei. “Energy medicine is biostatistical medicine,” she explains.

In fields of disease that humans have been unable to completely explain, like cancer, a considerable number of people have recently been looking to energy medicine for alternative explanations.

They are circumscribing the limitations that conventional medicine has because it only looks at changes in material substances.

“Western medicine suffers from a blind spot, because it views the world and the human body from a material perspective. In contrast, we observe using non-material things, like waves and information,” explains Dennis Tang of the Yi-An Clinic in Taipei. This principle works much like a cell phone, where only the cells with the given number (certain traits) respond. Apart from the cellular information, their research gives consideration to external energy, like electromagnetic waves and radiation, and how it affects the body. Cancer often develops as a result of harmful external forces and toxins within the body that are not purified from the system.

Still, the medical community is not quite convinced and continues to question the increasing number of energy medicine treatments.

“It’s not beyond the realm of possibility,” says Yale University pharmacology lecturer Yung-Chi Cheng. But more stringent scientific testing is necessary to provide further evidence.

Translated from the Chinese by David Toman