Advancements in AI and Robotics Pave Way for Cellular Acupuncture

Cambridge, MA - Researchers in ancient Chinese medicine and advanced robotics near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) believe that they are close to a breakthrough that would allow for successful acupuncture treatments on the cellular level.

An acupuncturist and acupuncture anesthetist performing robotically-assisted acupuncture on a patient who has been feeling kind of tired lately. Also...AI?

"This is kind of the Holy Grail of acupuncture that many experts in the field have thought would be impossible," project leader Malt McCoy explained. "But with recent advances in both robotics and artificial intelligence, we may soon be able to revolutionize the way we approach the management of most, if not all, human illness."

As is often the case throughout human history, personal tragedy served as an inspiration for future discovery. McCoy, who lost his mother when he was a sophomore in high school, has never forgotten how it felt to be truly helpless in the face of an adversity that doctors said wasn't something that they could help with. He dedicated his life to finding a way to cure all human illness as a tribute to his mother, who he later found hiding in the upstairs linen closet.

Robot-assisted surgery is a well established treatment modality in modern medicine. According to McCoy, technology such as Intuitive's da Vinci 5 Surgical System, which boasts state-of-the-art robotics featuring 3D high-definition magnification and enhanced haptics, has given acupuncturists the ability to maneuver with far greater precision than human wrists and fingers on their own. "We just needed needles small enough to work at the microscopic scale of individual cells, which are much smaller than most people realize."

Why would acupuncture treatments focusing on individual cells be better than inserting needles into the skin? I reached out to Dr. Mort Fishman, a gynecological acupuncturist who works with the da Vinci system in his fertility acupuncture practice, for an explanation:

Cells are the fundamental building blocks of life. They make up all our tissues, organs, and body systems. Shoving a tiny needle through a cell's membrane and directly into an organelle, like a mitochondrion, a ribosome, a golgi body, or even the nucleus itself, is going to do something spectacular in terms of health.

"The first and arguably most important step in this long journey was the development of needles small enough to enter a cell without just smooshing it," McCoy revealed. "The process involves highly advanced microfabrication techniques like photolithography, reactive ion etching, and nanowhittling to produce such sharp and incredibly tiny needles."

The second step, and one that might take even longer, will be the development of clinically verified acupoints. McCoy admits that it won't be easy. "It's going to take a combination of electron microscopy and intuition when it comes to mapping meridian channels in each organelle. In many ways, acupuncture is a hard science. But in others, it's an art. An intimate dance between provider and patient, or in this case, a patient's rough endoplasmic reticulum."

Why AI? Couldn't the team simply program the acupuncture robots to function based on treatment protocols once they are established? McCoy disagrees with such superficial critiques of his work. "To be human is to explore the unknown and shine the light of science into the darkness. And if there wasn't at least a small chance that what we are doing might one day kill us all, what is the point? Do you see what I did there? Because it's acupuncture?"