Page 43 - The Power of Light, Colour and Sound for Health and Wellness draft

41
In 1987, the World Health Organization, recognized auricular therapy as a therapeutic method, especially apt for the treatment of pain. In 1991, the correspondence between point of the body and on the ear was standardized in a meeting of international experts.
In 2001, Dr. David Alimi, neurophysiologist at the University of Paris, where auriculotherapy is currently taught, carried out an experiment with Functional magnetic Resonance which proved the correspondence between the thumb and the thumb point on the outer ear. The experiment consisted on softly touching the thumb and observing at the same time the activation of the corresponding brain area; they then stimulated the thumb auricular point and the same brain area was activated.
Mechanism of action
The mechanisms of action of auriculotherapy were mainly studied by Professor Jean Bossy, neuroanotomist at the University of Montpellier, France. Auriculotherapy is truly a form of Refexology; to explain this in a didactic manner it is useful to remember at this point the “Gate Control System” theory developed by Melzack and Wall.
Pain-sensitive pathways carry the nociceptive stimuli (e.g.: painful trauma) to the dorsal root ganglion where 1st order neurons reside.
2nd order neurons are located in the in the ascending fbers of the lemniscal and extra-lemniscal systems which take nociceptive stimuli from the spinal cord to higher-level structures of the Central Nervous System; reaching the Thalamus, the Periaqueductal gray matter and Reticular Formation.
3rd order neurons are located in the axons that take nervous signals from the Thalamus to the Cortex or other subcortical structures like the Hippocampus, the Amygdala, the Hypothalamus and the Rinocephalus.