Why skin stimulation? In many religions people practice intense skin stimulation to reach a heightened state of spirit. They wear rude-fabric clothes and prickly necklaces, they pray kneeling on dry peas or grains, they lash themselves with whips. * Yogis walk upon burning charcoals and lie down on a bed of nails. . * Julius Caesar would command to pinch his skin to relieve his neuralgia. An ancient Roman physician Pliny used skin stimulation for treating asthmatic patients. Ancients Greeks elaborated special rules for rubbing their patients' and athletes' skin for curing diseases and improving performance. . * The American physician Dr. Zalmanov used skin stimulation with hot water (he called the method capillarotherapy) for a wide range of diseases including those resistant to conventional treatments. . * The Swedish doctor Paavo Airola advises dry brush massage of the entire body for many ailments and as a general disease-preventive measure. . * The Russian folk healer and philosopher Porphyry Ivanov cured practically everything, including mental retardation, with skin stimulation by cold water. . * Recently a teenager magazine published a bad news about a new invention for getting high: teens cut their skin with knives. . The skin-health relationship may be more than that. Different skin areas are not equal in this respect. The ancient Chinese knew this for more than 4,500 or even 5,000 years, the date of the earliest written document on acupuncture, which the tradition believes to belong to the Emperor Huang Ti. They learned how to diagnose illnesses and how to treat the internal organs and body functions through their matching points on the skin. These special areas and points of increased sensitivity and reactivity on the skin can be affected by a number of techniques known as acupuncture, Jin Shin Do, Shiatsu, zone therapy, reflexology etc. In Russia, all these techniques have a common name: "Reflexo-therapy", from the word REFLEX. This means an action is followed by a certain response, like sending a ray of a flashlight onto a bathtub water surface and watching the light spot REFLECTED onto a ceiling. This is exactly how it happens in all these techniques: a healer affects a skin point and triggers a REFLECTIVE physiological reaction affecting an internal organ.