When a magician came to town, 12-year-old George Ulett hid backstage to discover how the magic worked. The boy saw hidden mirrors and strings, and resolved to become a magician himself. At 18, he almost joined a carnival. "But my father said, 'No, you're going to college,'" Ulett recalls. So he studied psychology, probing tricks of the mind instead.
Now 82, the retired psychiatrist has spent the past three decades exploring another kind of magic -- the mysterious workings of acupuncture. In 1972 he won the first federal grant to investigate the physiological basis of the Chinese tradition. His findings made him a leading proponent of what he calls "scientific acupuncture."
A Japanese psychiatrist piqued his interest in acupuncture in the late 1960s, several years before the practice gained U.S. attention in the wake of Richard Nixon's trip to China. Ulett went on to study classical Chinese acupuncture in several Asian countries and found that it helped his patients with chronic pain. "Although for several years I practiced according to the cosmological beliefs of this ancient healing profession," he recalls, "it became increasingly clear to me that if acupuncture worked, it must do so by some neurophysiological or biochemical means."
Ulett's research revealed that 80 of the 365 traditional acupuncture points trigger the body to release pain-suppressing chemicals. Any benefits from stimulating the other points, he concluded, must arise from a placebo effect. He also found that he could double the response at the 80 sites by adding electrical stimulation. "The newer findings have made the traditional theories obsolete," Ulett says. Scientific electro-acupuncture, he adds, "is a beneficial treatment for pain control that is easily learned and should become a valuable technique for physicians in all specialties, once insurers understand the difference."
Ulett published his findings in Beyond Yin and Yang (W.H. Green, 1992), then discussed various "new age" treatments in Alternative Medicine or Magical Healing (W.H. Green, 1996). "Alternative medicine is like a great garage sale," he says. "A lot of stuff is worthless, but if you search diligently, you can find some things you'd like to take home."
Ulett lives in St. Louis with his wife, Pearl Ulett, MD, whom he met in medical school. Pearl was born in China and is responsible, he says, "for my love of all things Chinese." Clearly, there's magic there.
