2006 Filipinas Magazine Achievement Awards

Medicine: Lupo Carlota, M.D.
Sponsored by Seton Health Services Foundation

?Dr. Lupo T. Carlota, Jr. has been better known to the Filipino American community as an appointee of Pres. George W. Bush to the Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and the Advisory Committee on Aging. He was also one-time vice-mayor of Lakeland, Tennessee, a contender for a seat in the U.S. Congress, past president of the Association of Philippine Physicians in America and president of the National Filipino American Council.

In the mainstream medical community, however, Carlota is considered one of the leading practitioners of scientific acupuncture, as founder and president of MARIA, or Medical Acupuncture Research Institute of America.

While the Chinese describe acupuncture as “energy medicine,” based on the concept of chi (or qi), meaning energy, and its harmonious flow throughout the body, chi itself had only been explained in nebulous, almost spiritual, terms. It was Carlota who developed “The Quantum Theory of Acupuncture,” postulating that chi is a “mild electrical impulse” that can be activated by acupuncture. Along with his theory, he developed Meridian Regulatory Acupuncture (MRA), a system designed to measure the circulation of chi through the pathways in the body called meridians.

It was in 1972, while maintaining a private medical practice in New Jersey, that Carlota first became fascinated with acupuncture. President Richard Nixon had just made a breakthrough visit to mainland China and America had begun to be intrigued by Chinese alternative medicine. Attending an acupuncture seminar in Hawaii, the concept, he said, “blew my mind.” He resolved to make it a career mission to study the scientific basis of acupuncture.

In May 1976 at the McCormack Hotel in Chicago, some 200 doctors, nurses and other health specialists gathered to listen to Dr. Wuu Wei Ping of Taipei, president of the International Acupuncture Society and one of the most revered names in the practice of acupuncture. One of the speakers at that conference was Carlota with his quantum theory. Wuu was so impressed that he invited Carlota to present his paper a few months later, in December 1976, at the International Acupuncture Society Con-vention held in Taipei.

In 1983 Carlota was invited again by the Chinese—this time to the mainland—for a three-week round of lectures and briefings on MRA before acupuncture experts and medical professionals in Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai.

For decades, Carlota has been practicing scientific acupuncture and conducting intensive seminar workshops on MRA across the U.S. mainland, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, for doctors who wish to use acupuncture in their medical practice.

In 1993 Pres. Fidel V. Ramos conferred the Pamana Ng Bayan (Legacy of the Nation) award on Carlota “for his outstanding achievements and contributions in the field of medicine, particularly through pioneering efforts in modern scientific acupuncture research.”

Carlota earned his Doctorate of Medicine, meritissimus, in 1960 from the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, and completed his internship and a psychiatric residency in Cleveland, Ohio and in Warren, Pennsylvania, respectively.—GBM