Chronic diseases plague people most, causing the significant deaths and medical costs. Chronic diseases can be attributed to miscellaneous origins that are often unidentified, resulting in ineffectiveness of a certain single biological-medicine healer, and leaving chronic diseases refractory. Chronic diseases require long-term, even lifetime, medication and/or therapy, often leading to toxicity and side effects due to overuse of medications. For instance, Vioxx, which is developed by Merck & Co. Inc. for treatment of arthritis, claims 60 thousand lives worldwide, outnumbering death toll of Americans in the Viet Nam War. Annually there are around one million people die of adverse events of medications in the world. In China, about 190 thousand people die of adverse events of drugs annually, ten times higher than that die of major infectious diseases (see Foreword for Prevention and Control of Adverse Events, 2002 edition, People's Medical Publishing House).
In an effort to eschew increasing adverse events of medications, some non-medication therapies known as Complementary and Alternative Medicines (CAM) have come into wide use in some developed nations. However, current CAM procedures have many pitfalls, including difficulty to be practiced, high cost, less evident in effectiveness and too painful to accept. Therefore, CAM requires new techniques and gadgets. In recent decades, gadgets of rehabilitative CAM have been springing up, outnumbering those intended for diagnosis (see China Medical Machines, 2001, volume 7, page 46).
Recently invented and used machines for treatment purpose are in general active ones, that is to say, electricity powered medical devices, falling into radiological therapy, microwave therapy, radiofrequency therapy, ultrasound therapy, laser therapy, millimeter wave therapy, infrared therapy, as well as other gadgets that apply sound, light, electricity, magnetic, mechanics and even medication. The machines and gadgets risk harmfulness to human body, including: electric shock, over-big output, energy distraction, explosion, fire danger, cease-function, abnormal performance, out of power, mechanic accident, malpractice, bacterial contamination, and interfering with other machines (see China Medical Machines, V01, 17 No 1). Passive medical machines are often non-invasive, free from using needle, electricity, electricity-mechanic parts and radioactivity. Medical machines that are non-invasive yet with evident rehabilitative effect on chronic diseases have not made debut so far.