VLVL2 (9): Ninja Death Touch

[Dave Monroe]

   "'I have heard,' Ralph almost misty-eyed, 'there's
this touch that you can put on somebody, so lightly
they don't feel it then, but a year later they drop
dead, right when you happen to be miles away eating
ribs with the Chief of Police.'" (VL, Ch. 9, p. 131)

Is the "ninja death touch" real?
21-May-2004

Dear Cecil:

Is there such a thing as the "touch of death" in
martial arts? Can I walk up to someone, pinch them in
a certain spot, and kill them instantly? I've heard
people swear such a thing exists, but I find it
extremely hard to believe. --Jon Huff, via E-mail

Cecil replies: 

Even martial arts enthusiasts don't take this one too
seriously, except for the impressionable souls who
think assassins used the touch of death to kill kung
fu star Bruce Lee in 1973. (The more widely held view
says he was done in by an allergic reaction to
painkillers.) One smartarse on a martial arts message
board observes, "One time I hit a guy in a pressure
point, and he EXPLODED! It was like something out of a
video game man! I swear, there is a point somewhere
that makes a human being just burst into giblets if
you hit it right!" However, we scientists don't
dismiss such phenomena antecedent to inquiry. Having
browsed the medical literature, I'd say the verdict on
whether this mysterious Oriental skill has any basis
in reality is as follows: The touch of death, no. The
less-forceful-blow-than-you-might-expect of death,
occasionally yes.

Known in Cantonese as dim mak and in Japanese as
kyusho jitsu, the touch of death is said to be
something like acupuncture's evil twin. The idea is
that chi, or energy, flows through the body along
lines called meridians. A blow or squeeze applied to
certain pressure points on these lines will supposedly
put the whammy on the victim's chi, leading to
incapacitation or death. Though none of the techniques
of dim mak seems likely to work consistently as
advertised, medical journals describe many incidents
in which a seemingly mild trauma results in
disproportionately serious injury, and the sites of
some such traumas correlate with dim mak pressure
points. Cases like these include: 

Commotio cordis, also known as cardiac concussion.
This is a syndrome in which a nonpenetrating impact to
the chest causes heart failure but little or no
structural damage. The classic victim is a kid or
young adult who takes a baseball, hockey puck, or
other hard object in the chest, but a 44-year-old
teacher died when she caught an elbow while breaking
up a fight at school. About half the time the victim
collapses immediately, and in the balance of cases
within a minute or two. Death is thought to result
from ventricular fibrillation, a state in which the
lower heart chambers start fluttering and stop pumping
blood. One study of 128 cases found that 84 percent of
the victims died, and nearly all the survivors
received prompt defibrillation. Relatively little
force is required for the killing blow--one researcher
estimates that the blunt instrument need be moving at
only 30 mph. Don't think this is something you'll be
able to pull on the next ninja who leaps from the
shadows, though. Animal experiments suggest that you’d
have to strike within a 15-20 millisecond window in
the heartbeat cycle to have a reasonably good chance
of taking down your attacker.

Trauma to the carotid artery. Located in the side of
the neck, the carotid artery provides blood to the
head. Pressure on the carotid sinus, an especially
sensitive area where the artery divides into two
branches, can damage the blood vessel walls, leading
to stroke followed by partial paralysis, other
neurological problems, and, once in a while, death.
The precipitating event can be surprisingly trivial--a
karate chop has been known to do it, but so has the
strain of playing the French horn.

Miscellaneous unexplained injuries. A 13-year-old girl
fell in gym class, struck her head on the crossbar of
a hurdle, and died. Finding little obvious trauma and
stumped for a cause of death, doctors blamed
"transmission of a concussive force through the
reticular activating system." Michael Kelly, an
osteopath and author of Death Touch: The Science
Behind the Legend of Dim Mak (2001), claims that the
hurdle hit the girl on the "bladder-10" pressure point
at the base of the skull, "one of the most lethal dim
mak points." 

Case reports suggest that incidents like the above are
mostly accidents, more often than not unrelated to
martial arts training or theory. The question remains:
Can some dim mak practitioners achieve these results
at will? I'm skeptical, but sometimes you have to
wonder. In a 1999 report in the Journal of Sports
Medicine and Physical Fitness, C. Terry et al tested a
dozen participants in a demonstration of kyusho jitsu
pressure-point techniques intended to produce
"knockouts." Experts hit the volunteers with
successive blows at prescribed spots, e.g., just above
the right wrist, just above the right elbow, and in
the middle of the back. The recurring result: a
"period of unresponsiveness" lasting from 11 to 55
seconds. The tests, which included EEGs and the like,
showed no loss of blood flow to the brain or other
obvious physiological cause. Were the KOees going into
a hypnosislike trance or faking it? The authors think
not, commenting, "The exact mechanism for this
phenomenon remains uncertain." I'm not about to invoke
chi and meridians, but it's possible there's more
going on here than we currently understand. 

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040521.html

And see as well ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0311&msg=86984

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0311&msg=87281

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0405&msg=90647

Okay, one last item to get back to, and then ...


	
		
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