Hypotheses Needed When I asked about the scientific principles underlying these results ("Please other then panacea stuff!"), Valeri handed me a folder with copies of the conclusions of investigations conducted by five Moscow clinical institutes. By the way, I had to write them down by hand in his office, because Valeri couldn't allow me to make copies: at this time, to make copies in Russia, one needed to obtain a special permit from the censoring department of the police. These summaries are the only medical documents I can refer to. Let us put it as an appendix for those people who wouldn't be bored by reading quite specific medical information. By the time I had seen all this information, I was not too surprised to find my ten year study had not uncovered many failures -- no matter what ailments were dealt with using the applicator: from insomnia to asthma! In the early 1990s, I was employed at the University of North Carolina -Chapel Hill in the physical therapy department and for the first time I encountered the necessity for some kind of "scientific" explanation when I was asked to give a presentation on the Applicator. You see, being an enthusiast, I showed the Applicator off, talked about it, cured head- and backaches with it. But the scientific explanation (finally!) needed a scientific approach. I went to the library and began the search. That was years ago now. Since then I started my own private practice as a health consultant, and found Americans who believed in the method. We tried to order some Applicators from Russia but failed, so we had no choice but to develop and start producing the device in the US (we named it "Panacea" in Valeri Punin’s honor) but this is another story. Now I feel I can put forward some hypotheses I consider well developed. There are basically two, and one of them is not exactly mine, but both are related to problems I came in contact with back in Moscow. First of all, the prototype was made out of vacuum resin with a large number of office pins in it. The hope was to find the acupuncture points with some of the pins, like shooting a penny with a large number of pellets. The ideal was that the many pins not on target would not harm whatever good the right pins might do. It is possible to say that these hopes came true, since Mr. Kuznetsov healed himself then thousands of other suffering people who