Our Body Runs on electricity
We're just starting to figure out what this means
by Giacomo Kyle Hatanaka, LAc, MAcOM | Hidden Summit Acupuncture
Okay, this is a weird one (weirder one). Here’s something that doesn’t get nearly enough attention in conversations about health: your body is, at its most fundamental level, an electrical system. It’s an electrical machine.
Not metaphorically. Literally (Well, you’re not a robot. At least, I hope you aren’t). But every cell in your body maintains a voltage, a measurable electrical charge across its membrane, and that voltage is one of the most accurate indicators of how well that cell is functioning. Healthy cells run at around negative 25 millivolts, which basically means they have a lot of electrons in them. Just think of them has little balls of energy, and they have a “negative” charge. When someone is chronically fatigued, they lose those electrons, and that number tends to drop to around negative 15. When someone is sick (yes, losing even more electrons), it drops further to around negative 10. Cancer cells, interestingly, tend to run at positive 30 millivolts, a dramatic reversal of the polarity that healthy tissue maintains.
Basically, the more electrons your body has, the healthier it is.
These aren’t fringe numbers. They come from decades of cellular biology research, and they map onto something that practitioners of electroacupuncture have been working with clinically for years. The basic principle is straightforward: more electrons in the tissue means a more negatively charged cellular environment, which means better oxygen delivery, better metabolic function, and a harder environment for pathogens and dysfunction to take hold in.
This is, in essence, a modern scientific restatement of something Traditional Chinese Medicine has been saying for a very long time. A body with abundant, freely flowing qi is a body that resists disease. A body where that flow is blocked or depleted is a body that struggles. The language is different. The underlying observation is remarkably similar.
The terrain Theory
Revisited
There’s a long-running debate in medicine between two ways of thinking about disease. The dominant model, which most of us grew up with, traces back to Louis Pasteur. Yeah, the guy who cooked milk. But he did more than that. He theorized that disease comes from specific external pathogens, and the solution is to identify and eliminate them. This model gave us antibiotics and vaccines and has saved an enormous number of lives. It’s not wrong. But it’s incomplete.
The competing view, associated with Pasteur’s contemporary Antoine Béchamp, argued for a much different way of looking at it. He said the internal environment of the body (what he called the “terrain”) mattered more than the pathogen itself. A body with a healthy internal terrain is resistant to disease even in the presence of pathogens. A body with a compromised terrain becomes vulnerable. The germ, in this framing, is less the cause of disease than an opportunist taking advantage of a weakened environment.
This idea never disappeared from biology, and in recent decades it’s been getting significantly more serious scientific attention, particularly in cancer research, in microbiome science, and in the study of chronic inflammatory conditions. The terrain concept, reframed in modern cellular and immunological terms, is increasingly mainstream. It just hasn’t made it into the fifteen-minute primary care appointment yet.
The cellular voltage framework fits squarely within this tradition. A cell running at negative 25 millivolts has the electrochemical environment it needs to do its job: produce energy, repair itself, communicate with neighboring cells, resist infection. A cell running at negative 10 doesn’t. Improving cellular voltage is, in this model, one of the most direct ways to improve the terrain.
Where electrons
Go missing
Dr. Jeremy Steiner, whose work in electroacupuncture I’ve been studying, identifies seven primary sources of what he calls electron leakage: situations or conditions that chronically drain the body’s electrical reserves and keep cellular voltage depressed. They’re worth knowing about because they reframe a lot of common health complaints in a way that’s clinically useful.
Allergies and environmental toxins place a continuous oxidative burden on the body, consuming electrons in the process of neutralizing reactive compounds. Thyroid dysfunction disrupts the metabolic machinery that generates and distributes cellular energy. Chronic stomach issues, particularly those involving low stomach acid or dysbiosis, impair the gut’s ability to extract minerals and other raw materials the body needs to maintain its electrical environment. Dental infections and chronic oral inflammation create a persistent low-grade bacterial load that taxes the immune system and generates systemic oxidative stress. Adrenal dysfunction, particularly the chronically elevated cortisol output that comes with long-term stress, depletes cellular resources over time. Scar tissue, which is electrically resistive, can interrupt the flow of bioelectrical signals along the body’s tissue pathways. And everyone loves this one: unprocessed emotional stress, which keeps the nervous system in a state of sympathetic activation, runs down the body’s electrical reserves the same way leaving your car headlights on drains the battery.
What’s useful about this framework isn’t that it replaces other ways of thinking about these conditions. It’s that it connects them. A patient dealing with adrenal fatigue, chronic gut issues, and persistent inflammation isn’t dealing with three separate problems; they’re dealing with a system that’s losing electrons faster than it can replace them, across multiple fronts simultaneously. That’s a different and arguably more useful way to think about treatment.
what electroacupuncture
actually does
Traditional acupuncture works along pathways in the body, channels through which the classical texts describe qi as flowing. Modern research has identified these channels as lines of reduced electrical resistance in the connective tissue, which is a different vocabulary for describing the same anatomical reality. Acupuncture points along these channels show measurably different electrical properties than the surrounding tissue.
Electroacupuncture builds on this by introducing a small, controlled electrical current through the needles at specific points and specific frequencies. The mechanism, understood through the cellular voltage framework, is that the current supplies electrons to tissues that have become depleted, restoring the electrochemical environment those cells need to function properly. Different frequencies appear to have different physiological effects (lower frequencies tend to influence pain modulation and tissue repair, higher frequencies tend to affect inflammation and nerve function), which is why frequency selection matters clinically rather than just cranking everything to the same setting.
One of the conditions where we see this most clearly in our clinic is peripheral neuropathy, the nerve damage in the hands and feet that produces numbness, tingling, burning, and eventually loss of function. It’s a condition that conventional medicine manages primarily through medication, with limited ability to actually restore nerve function once it’s been lost.
Our approach is to apply electroacupuncture at specific points that access the channels supplying the affected extremities, at frequencies calibrated to support nerve regeneration and tissue repair. What we see, consistently, is improvement in sensation, reduction in pain, and recovery of function in patients who had been told their neuropathy was essentially permanent. The working hypothesis, through the lens of Steiner’s framework, is that we’re restoring the cellular voltage in tissues that had become too electrically depleted to maintain or repair nerve function. Essentially recharging the environment the nerves need to heal.
This isn’t a claim that electroacupuncture cures neuropathy in every case or that it replaces medical management of the underlying cause. It’s that the results we see clinically are consistent with what the cellular voltage model would predict, and they’re better than what most of these patients had experienced through conventional approaches alone.
Why this matters for
The conditions we actually treat
For the people who make up the majority of our practice, people dealing with fatigue, hormonal dysregulation, chronic pain, sleep disruption, digestive issues, headaches, the cellular voltage framework offers something genuinely useful: a coherent explanation for why these things tend to travel together, and why treating them as isolated problems tends to produce limited results.
A body running low on electrons is a body that’s struggling across multiple systems simultaneously. The fatigue is real. The hormonal disruption is real. The pain sensitivity is real. They’re not separate misfortunes. They’re different expressions of the same depleted internal environment.
Electroacupuncture is one of the tools we have for directly addressing that environment. Traditional acupuncture, dietary changes that reduce oxidative burden, sleep that allows genuine cellular repair, stress reduction that stops draining the battery faster than it can charge; these all work toward the same goal through different mechanisms. The framework just gives us a more precise map of what we’re trying to restore and why.
Medicine has always advanced by getting better maps. The cellular voltage model is, I think, one of the more useful maps to emerge in integrative practice in recent years. We’re still early in understanding its full implications. But clinically, it’s already changing how we think about treatment, and for patients with conditions that haven’t responded to conventional approaches, that matters.
If This Sounds
Familiar
If you’re curious about electroacupuncture and whether it might be relevant to what you’re dealing with, we’d love to talk through it. Hidden Summit Acupuncture is in Boise, working with patients across the Treasure Valley including Meridian, Nampa, and Eagle. Book a visit at hiddensummitacu.com.
Giacomo Hatanaka is a licensed acupuncturist and co-owner of Hidden Summit Acupuncture in Boise, Idaho, where he focuses on pain, nervous system regulation, stress physiology, and helping overwhelmed high-functioning people feel like themselves again. He’s especially interested in why so many intelligent, capable people can function at a high level while feeling terrible almost all the time.