We've known that there had to be a brain/immune connection of some sort. We didn't know that there was a tube.

Remember that most of the interesting stuff in biology is invisible to the naked eye. Also, despite a few hundred years of poking around in corpses, we're still pretty crude in terms of what we can see and understand anatomically. The assumption that we have this stuff "mostly figured out" strikes me more as wishful thinking than fact.

It's interesting to find a new tube lurking around, but then, it sounds like a pretty small tube. Animals are messy on the inside. Also, dark.

Loved this comment as you did a great job of distilling the level of wonder that still remains to be discovered.

While I'm not in any way qualified to assess this, it seems the fact that there's essentially a new piece of human anatomy that we've discovered is game changing. Potentially on the level of things that cause entire fields of medicine to re-evaluate what they thought they knew.

I wonder what this means for other things we've taken for granted about neurochemistry. Any qualified individuals care to speculate on the possibilities?

Very likely I will get downvotes for this but: I suspect we will find there was far less quackery in some of the eastern medicine practices than we thought.

How does the discovery that one culture's beliefs about medicine were less accurate than expected, make you think that a different culture's beliefs are more accurate? It's not like eastern and western medicine are binary opposites, where if one is wrong the other must be right. Especially since this inaccuracy was only discovered through careful dissection and observation: what comparable practices did historical eastern medicine use, that should make it any more accurate than the equivalent old western superstitions? If "western" medicine has missed this detail up until now, I highly doubt that "eastern" medicine somehow accounted for it.

I thought the point was that this provides another channel (etiology?) for materialist explanations of "Eastern" medicine.

I'm not taking a position on that question, as I haven't studied it sufficiently (though acupuncture, for example, seems more compelling that reiki).

Western medicine and science is often very dismissive of things that you can't observe and measure. Positive thinking for example. It is well known that negative thinking in the form of stress can have negative physiological effects. Yet there is little research into finding out if positive thinking can have a positive effect. And surprisingly little research into the placebo effect, considering that it can be as effective as prescribed drugs for some situations.

The downvotes likely are as a result of using the word "quackery," but I think the general sentiment of your post is relevant.

The issue I've had with Eastern medicine along with other folk remedies is the methodology and fact that they are not truly applying the scientific method in the way Western medicine does.

That said, I would not at all be surprised to find that many things in medicine, Eastern, Western, folk medicine, etc. that were previously unproven (by Western medicine standards) suddenly start having testable, verifiable reasons for why they work.

I don't know... Science does not discard what cannot be explained. a lot of western medicine is also based on empirical knowledge that was understood only later.

I have read that some points of acupuncture have been shown to have the effect they claim, and how it works can be explained. Some other points have been shown to have no measurable effect. And some point have been shown to have effects, but cannot be explained.

Which eastern practices, and why?

I assume your parent commenter is referring to the general concept of 'qi', and its manipulation in practices such as Qigong. If there really does exist a direct linkage between the brain and the immune system, the idea that through focused effort we can in fact change qualities of our health becomes much less radical. These ideas have already been partially validated in the multitude of studies showing the positive effects of mindfulness practice/meditation.

Exactly this. While the concepts had no reasonable explanation of "how" they work given our present understanding of biology, that does not mean there wasn't a real mechanism at play here. Heck, this exact linkage could entirely explain the placebo effect, couldn't it?

> If there really does exist a direct linkage between the brain and the immune system

The interaction of the CNS and the immune system has been more recently studied over the past 10 years. This field is known as neuroimmunology. The most recent and obvious clinical application of neuroimmunology are vagal nerve implants, where stimulation of the vagus nerve can help improve vagal tone and reduce inflammation. Meditation is another well known method of improving vagal tone; however, we live in a society of quick fixes.

Not being overly familiar with the depth of research around Eastern concepts like 'qi,' can you share any insights around the depth of Western medical research that have attempted to explain it under more measurable standards?

I'd be shocked if a concept so widely believed in like that had not gone under insane scrutiny by Western practitioners.

'Qi', or more accurately 氣 (traditional) or 气 (simplified) dates way back to very early Chinese history and is not exclusively used in the medical or health fields.

In later and current periods of Chinese history it's usually considered to mean air or breath, but also vital energy or life force, this latter sense being the sense in which it is deployed for traditional medicinal techniques such as 'Qigong' - 氣功 （traditional) or 气功 (simplified) - which is literally '[getting positive results from] [the energy]'. However, not many people are aware that initially it was used to refer to 'sickening vapors that rise from a corpse' (an early concept for bacterial/airborne illness, a concept later repurposed in premodern Chinese medicinal thinking to describe the acquisition of malaria and similar illnesses in tropical areas).

Qi today is basically a catch-all word for energy flowing (possibly 'in a manner roughly like vapor') and could be reasonably roughly seen, from a medical perspective, to refer to the combined effect of circulatory, lymphatic and respiratory systems.

Being such a vague term, approaching it from a western perspective seems difficult. You would perhaps get further looking for western studies of the health benefits of Qigong practice.

Fascinating--thanks for sharing.

In Vagina: An Autobiography, Naomi Wolf explains how the clitoris wasn't fully mapped out until (IIRC) the 70's. There is a lot of internal structure that was missed for a long time... I find it amazing that this could have happened, and it doesn't surprise me that there are still important features of human anatomy to be discovered.

BTW, I don't think I agree with everything she writes, but It's a really interesting book.

We now know there is at least one tube, and perhaps much much more.

In terms of mostly figured out I think we are still below 1% of what we may know in 2100 about the body.

Michael Murphy wrote a very interesting book "The History of the Body" in 1993 http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Body-Explorations-Evolution... curating a number of observations on the potential extent of our capabilities.

What boggled my mind is that in this day and age there could still be tubes within the human body that we don't know about! How is this possible?

So you are saying that this was an known unknown, what other known unknowns are there about the human body?

Heh. If you want to be cynical about it, pretty much anything anyone has a grant to research is a known unknown. We don't give money to people to look for unknown unknowns; those happen accidentally while looking for the known unknowns.

CRISPR would be an example of something that we really didn't know about popping out of research into other questions. Those kinds of discoveries are the really interesting ones, IMO: you aren't even looking for it, and suddenly, you've discovered a pathway that changes your understanding of bacterial genomics, and provides a crazy new tool for molecular biology.

I don't know if the authors of this set out to find a lymphatic duct connecting to the brain, but the existence of one was not completely unpredictable.

Sorry if I came out as cynical, that wasn't my intention. I'm genuinely interested in knowing if there any other big mysteries to solve, like this one or the neurons found in the gastrointestinal system.

You didn't. I was the one being a little cynical -- there's obviously more "known unknowns" in the world of science than those that get funding, and science does occasionally go after blue-sky research. ;-)

I'm not a doctor or neuroscientist either, but from what I gather it is indeed significant.

It potentially makes the link between the brain and the body chemically study-able. Up to now there's always been the assumption of a brain/blood barrier stopping much of the chemical transfers. Now it appears there's a mechanism that might bypass that.

Again, this is just what I gather from reading. I have no special expertise.

Blood is not the same as lymph. This is a lymphatic drainage vessel, not a blood vessel.

Think of the lymphatic system as a kind of a superhighway for your immune system. It doesn't carry blood.