# Death Touch - Dim Mak - Real or Fiction?



## DavyKOTWF (Aug 9, 2018)

Is this death touch just another Hollywood BS thing?  (I searched for info on this and didn't find much...sorry if I missed it and reposting an old question)
   I can see if you thrust your straight fingers or knuckles into someone's throat, that that may really mess them up and if done strongly enough, it could destroy their windpipe and kill them.  But is that all of what it is?   No Chi interrupted thing going on, spreading the chi throughout the body?  Again, that would certainly take your breath away or knock it out; 
  Thanks for any opinions, facts, theories, etc


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## Headhunter (Aug 9, 2018)

Of course it's bs.....a strik to the throat is a strike not a death touch


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## Monkey Turned Wolf (Aug 9, 2018)

Yeah Dim Mak is as fake as it gets.


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## Headhunter (Aug 9, 2018)

kempodisciple said:


> Yeah Dim Mak is as fake as it gets.


It's as real as Steven segals workout routine lol


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## jks9199 (Aug 9, 2018)

A strike to the chest at just thecrigjt instant and angle can cause death.  A couple kids a year die from this in baseball and football.  It sends the heart onto arrhythmia or fibrillation.   So, could a slick "martial arts master" seize on a chance hit like that and claim magic death powers ?  Just maybe, huh?

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk


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## Dirty Dog (Aug 9, 2018)

As @jks9199 said, it's possible to induce ventricular tachycardia with an impact at exactly the right (or wrong...) time/location/angle/force. It's also exceedingly rare. Yes, a couple people die from it every year. Out of how many hundreds of thousands (millions?) of impacts? And it absolutely is NOT something you could do intentionally with any degree of consistency, even if you had your victim hooked up to a cardiac monitor.
If you seriously think things like Dim Mak are possible, I suggest you give some consideration to how firm your grasp on reality is.


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## paitingman (Aug 9, 2018)

FICTION.
I believe these tales are remnants of a time before modern medicine.

600 years ago someone maybe died days or hours after a fight. Must have been their opponent's DEATH TOUCH that disrupted their energy.

Who knows how it started... 
but I don't think there's any data to back up any sort of energy strikes or the like


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## pdg (Aug 9, 2018)

paitingman said:


> FICTION.
> I believe these tales are remnants of a time before modern medicine.
> 
> 600 years ago someone maybe died days or hours after a fight. Must have been their opponent's DEATH TOUCH that disrupted their energy.
> ...



I punched someone in sparring.

I hereby claim that one day, he will die.

And so will I, following him punching me.

Delayed death strike innit.


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## Monkey Turned Wolf (Aug 9, 2018)

paitingman said:


> FICTION.
> I believe these tales are remnants of a time before modern medicine.
> 
> 600 years ago someone maybe died days or hours after a fight. Must have been their opponent's DEATH TOUCH that disrupted their energy.
> ...


Theres even a possible relation. You damaged an internal organ, you domt know that happened, they dont know that happened, doctors dont know it happened. Out of nowhere (seemingly) they die overnight, you dont understand internal injuries and assume you disrupted his ki. At the beginning it may have been simple ignorance, not a con.


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## Deleted member 39746 (Aug 9, 2018)

If i got the definiton of di mak rght, it just means using pressure points for attack.   Obviously, its hard to hit a specic point when on adrenline and it might not do anything until the person comes off adreline.


I think the system is just a primitive nerve/body mapping system.  Some  assessments might be right others might be wrong, but what you see associated to it just seems wrong, like being able to make somones heart explode etc.

I also belive chi is a metaphore for inner spirit or something?    I understood it to be your lifeforce or underlyig spirit or something, it is a philsophical/relgious concept rather than a scentific one. (uness it refers to a process)


also if you shove your knuckles into somones windpipe you will most likely crush the windpipe, its not anyting more technical than crushing the windpipe with a blunt object (your fist) 

Corret me if i am wrong on anything, this is just what i got when i breifly looked into the subject.    I think there is some scentific merit in it, but its nothing special its just primitive anatomy.   (im not a beliver of chi being a physical object, before people ask/assume i belive in that)   It also tied into a/their belief system.


I reiterate, i dont believe it to be anything special or that you could make somones heart explode by just using chi or disrupting their chi nor ater finge spearing them in one spot etc etc etc.

edit:  I dont know how much of this is modern tampering of a old system or fake history etc.   So this concept could have been modernised at some point to fit with nerve maps


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## DavyKOTWF (Aug 9, 2018)

Rat said it well.  I guess where there's smoke, there's often a bit of smoke.  Many things about 'death touch' may be glorified and glamorized and embellished.  But there can be some truth there too.  I tried going to an acupuncture guy...100% Chinese; for my lower Degen. discs issues.  Paid the man $300 for something like 8 treatments.  He stuck pins in me every week.  Lit a match or candle in some glass jar and let those suck on my back for 20 minutes.    By the last session, he asked if I had any relief.  I said, "honestly, no". (but it sure was big relief to get those dang jars off my back)  He took the pins out and walked out, supposing correctly that I wouldn't be back.  Dang if he didn't leave 2 pins still in me.  I got my Brown Belt that day, taking those last two pins out.  No big deal.  The pins were supposed to help get the Chi back and flowing well.  Might work for some, but it didn't for me.  I'm back to the secret Red Boat Opera Ben Gay technique along with bridging, some yoga dog down pose and other exercises.


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## Martial D (Aug 9, 2018)

Of course it's true. I saw it in a documentary called Bloodsport.


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## paitingman (Aug 9, 2018)

kempodisciple said:


> Theres even a possible relation. You damaged an internal organ, you domt know that happened, they dont know that happened, doctors dont know it happened. Out of nowhere (seemingly) they die overnight, you dont understand internal injuries and assume you disrupted his ki. At the beginning it may have been simple ignorance, not a con.


that's what I was getting at with the lack of modern medicine thing


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## Poppity (Aug 10, 2018)

From what I have read it seems Traditional Chinese medicine did not recognise the different functions of separate organs but instead considered them to be reservoirs of Qi or life essence which would ebb and flow within them.  It was not until the mid-1800s that the western approach to medicine began to become established in China with it's scientific method of testing hypothesis.  It would support the views above that when people died from internal organs being damaged it was put down to disrupting the Qi.


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## marques (Aug 10, 2018)

Snark said:


> It was not until the mid-1800s that the western approach to medicine began to become established in China with it's scientific method of testing hypothesis.


Chinese medicine is testing hypothesis for millennia. Some Chinese emperor(s) have died _trying_ heavy metals. More recently, I have tried needles on a few people, including myself, and I have seen it clearly helping more often than not. Of course it does not solve everything to everyone; it is an option sometimes. In China, both approaches are used in hospitals.

It may not be scientific as we understand it; but is being tested for long time. Even tested in a scientific approach, recently. The issue is applying double-blind experiments on acupuncture...


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## marques (Aug 10, 2018)

Snark said:


> From what I have read it seems Traditional Chinese medicine did not recognise the different functions of separate organs but instead considered them to be reservoirs of Qi or life essence which would ebb and flow within them.


In Chinese medicine, due to its history, an organ is more about physiological functions, than an anatomical part. They don’t split organs and functions as I learned at school.

‘Kidney’ in Chinese medicine includes supearenals and has more functions than the obvious ones. (Brain, as an organ, in TCM was ignored for centuries! Yeh, it’s not simple to an occidental brain...)


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## Marnetmar (Aug 10, 2018)

Chinese medicine has been around for a pretty long time. If Dim Mak were real, you'd think someone else would've figured it out by now.


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## now disabled (Aug 10, 2018)

Rat said:


> Obviously, its hard to hit a specic point when on adrenline and it might not do anything until the person comes off adreline.




I would not entirely agree there as some techs do not require striking the point but merely applying pressure there and if you don't get it right the tech don't really work ...the one I can point to is Yonkkyo if you don't get the pressure point it does not have the same effect but again that just an Aikido standpoint and only my opinion


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## Deleted member 39746 (Aug 10, 2018)

now disabled said:


> I would not entirely agree there as some techs do not require striking the point but merely applying pressure there and if you don't get it right the tech don't really work ...the one I can point to is Yonkkyo if you don't get the pressure point it does not have the same effect but again that just an Aikido standpoint and only my opinion



Its a hit and miss thing at the very least.


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## now disabled (Aug 10, 2018)

Rat said:


> Its a hit and miss thing at the very least.




nope lol ya train so you don;t miss lol


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## JR 137 (Aug 10, 2018)

kempodisciple said:


> Theres even a possible relation. You damaged an internal organ, you domt know that happened, they dont know that happened, doctors dont know it happened. Out of nowhere (seemingly) they die overnight, you dont understand internal injuries and assume you disrupted his ki. At the beginning it may have been simple ignorance, not a con.


My thoughts exactly.  Way back when, they didn’t know what we know today.  They didn’t have imaging and diagnostic equipment.  Someone fought, got hit, walked away, and died a day or even a few months later.  The one who didn’t die could claim it was a delayed death touch, and there was no proof it wasn’t.  Some people claiming it may have been charlatans, but I’m sure others believed they did use the death touch.

Working in sports medicine, I’ve seen several athletes get hit with what would’ve been a delayed death touch way back when.  I’ve seen a few ruptured spleens.  Only one of them believed me when I told them I suspected a ruptured spleen.  One guy argued with me and said I was an idiot because his shoulder hurt, not his abdomen (Kehr’s Sign).  I put him in an ambulance with a coach, and when I got to the hospital after the game, they were prepping him to remove his spleen.  An ancient Chinese fighter would’ve went home, went to sleep and not woken up.  Delayed death touch.  I’m sure it still happens.

I had a football player who took a very hard helmet to helmet hit.  My boss at the time and I checked him for a concussion.  He had no objective signs of one, and he said he didn’t have any subjective signs (headache, nausea, etc.).*  He walked away and we noticed he was dragging his foot a little bit.  I went with him in the ambulance.  He had a subdural hematoma (bleeding in the brain).  Had we not made the decision to get him looked at, he would’ve most likely went to sleep on the bus ride home and died in his sleep.  Delayed death touch.

*We asked him if he lied to us about not having a headache several times after everything was said and done.  He’s always said he didn’t have a headache nor anything else.  The only symptoms he had were the dropped foot and some numbness on the back of his thigh.  He had no reason to lie after it was over - he spent about a month in the hospital, and his career was over.  One of the truly most bizarre head injuries I’ve ever seen.

Stuff like this happens.  We can figure out the cause of death now, and we can prevent a lot of it.  During the old days when they had no scientific explanations nor any way of coming up with the actual explanation, Dim Mak would seem pretty logical.  No different than thinking the Earth was flat, the Earth was the center of the universe, etc.  Those things seem pretty logical until someone proves them wrong scientifically.


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## KPM (Aug 11, 2018)

And.....theoretically speaking.....the "delayed death touch" evolved to the point that one was taught specific acupuncture points to strike, at a specific angle, and at a specific time of the day.  The reliability of pulling off something like that in the heat of real fight seems very very low to me.  So some have claimed it was an "assasin's art" and that the victim should not realize he had been struck.  But then that contradicts all the claims of people that get in a fight and say "Just wait!  I used the death touch and you will suffer later!" or that claim a death after the fact was due to a death touch during the fight.  Much much more likely to be the result of injuries like JR described above!


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## Danny T (Aug 11, 2018)

Dim Mak?
Oh it’s real and it’s fiction.
Dim Mak is real fiction.


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