I'm not a doctor or neuroscientist, but this strikes me as a significant find if I'm understanding it correctly, right? "We were pretty sure the lymphatic system doesn't directly connect to the brain. Well we were wrong, (points) there it is."
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.
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?
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).
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 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.
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.
I'd be shocked if a concept so widely believed in like that had not gone under insane scrutiny by Western practitioners.
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.
BTW, I don't think I agree with everything she writes, but It's a really interesting book.
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.
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.
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.
Think of the lymphatic system as a kind of a superhighway for your immune system. It doesn't carry blood.