1 . Acupuncture (针灸) is a traditional Chinese medical practice of treating various physical and mental conditions. It won respect and interest in the United States after New York Times reporter James Reston visited China with President Nixon and needed an operation.

Chinese doctors used acupuncture on James after surgery (外科手术) to reduce his pain, and his recovery was quick. Curious about this, James was allowed to watch surgery on patients who received acupuncture for anesthesia (麻醉). Patients talked with their doctors during the operation and then walked back to their rooms on their own.

Acupuncture left James such a deep impression that he wrote a front-page article in New York Times about his operation upon returning to the United States. “A leading medical expert sent by Premier Zhou Enlai removed my appendix (阑尾). I was awake in the whole process.”

The National Institutes of Health began to organize some of their top doctors to visit China to investigate acupuncture and its possible functions in western medicine. With years going by, acupuncture has become popular across the world with magical effect.

4 . If doctors want to test you for something, they’ll usually take a blood or urine sample. But wouldn’t it be much more convenient if they just asked you to breathe through a special instrument?

In fact, your breath can say a lot about you. In traditional Chinese medicine, doctors draw a conclusion about the health state of a patient based on the smell of his or her breath; trained dogs and rats can identify the smells of the breaths of people suffering from certain cancers; traffic police also monitor drivers’ alcohol consumption by testing their breaths.

Just like blood and urine, your breath contains lots of “metabolites” —the waste chemicals that the body produces, which vary from person to person. They are like personal health fingerprints, which is why scientists sometimes call them “breathprints”, according to Science Daily.

Compared to blood or urine testing, breath testing takes only seconds instead of hours, and it requires neither a needle nor a container to hold the body fluids(液). This means the test can be taken frequently to better detect early signs of diseases and monitor the progress of a medical treatment.

On the other hand, as an identifier, you might think that breaths are not as reliable as fingerprints since they might change based on what you eat. However, researchers in Zurich, Switzerland mapped 11 healthy volunteers’ chemical patterns by having them breathe through a special instrument, and they found that each pattern was unique and the patterns didn’t change much throughout the day, reported BBC.

“Our goal is to develop breath analysis to the point where it becomes competitive with the established analysis of blood and urine,” said Malcolm Kohler, professor at the University Hospital Zurich.