A Tribute to the Life of Marco Romoli (1947–2017)

Marco Romoli, one of the best known ear acupuncturists, died in January 2017. Here, we remember his life and his professional devotion to the advancement of auriculotherapy.

Florentine by birth, Dr. Romoli graduated from the University of Florence, School of Medicine and Surgery, in 1973. Thereafter, he entered the School of Radiology, but during his first year of residency, Dr. Romoli realized that radiology did not hold significant interest for him. Dr. Romoli then went to Japan where he spent one year studying acupuncture with Yoshio Manaka, MD, of the Kitazato Research Institute in Tokyo. In the 1970s and 1980s, Dr. Manaka was researching acupuncture and moxibustion, in addition to mechanisms affected by ear acupuncture using animal models.

Upon returning to Europe in 1976, Dr. Romoli went to Vienna to the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Acupuncture, which was founded 23 years earlier. The research team at the Institute included Johannes Bischko and was at the forefront of research on acupuncture. At the time, acupuncture had been legalized and was practiced only by medical doctors. Austrian scientists at the Institute studied acupoint characteristics from various angles, including histological construction, ability to alter stomach motility, and increase the number of erythrocytes, as well as neural and humoral mechanisms.

Since early 1972, Dr. Bischko and his associates at the Institute had been performing tonsillectomies, tooth extractions, thyroidectomies, pacemaker implantations, Cesarean sections, hernia repairs, appendectomies, heart surgery, and other types of operations using acupuncture as part of analgesia. This time was an extraordinary period for auriculotherapy discoveries.

The basic idea of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute was to bring together specialists to address specific clinical problems.

Marco Romoli was a pupil of Johannes Bischko before he joined the International Group Groupe Lyonnais d'Etudes Médicales (GLEM). In addition to his training at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute, Dr. Romoli also studied orthopedic manual medicine with Robert Maigne in Paris.

The University of Turin Faculty of Medicine-Surgery held its first acupuncture course, taught by Alberto Quaglia Senta, in 1970. In June 1974, a joint meeting of the Italian–French–Austrian Societies of Acupuncture was held. Acupuncture was in its heyday, and many Italian acupuncturists cooperated with those in France, Austria, and other European countries to pioneer discoveries in auricular acupuncture. Dr. Romoli attended all main conferences and congresses concerning auriculotherapy that were held across the world.

Up until his death, Dr. Romoli taught auriculotherapy at the School of the Association of the Medical Acupuncturists of Bologna (AMAB) in Bologna. He also taught “Acupuncture and Chinese Traditional Medicine—Integration with the Western Medicine” as part of the Medicine and Surgery faculty of the University in Florence and was an advisor for the Italian Federation of the Societies of Acupuncture (FISA). He published his first research papers in the 1980s and his most significant works on clinical applications of auriculotherapy in the 1990s. During the last 12 years of his life, he edited numerous books on auriculotherapy.^1–4

In 2010, he wrote in the preface of his book Auricular Acupuncture Diagnosis ³ :

In my opinion the auricular acupuncture is one of the most fascinating discoveries in last fifty years. My intention is to provide physicians and therapists with an innovative diagnostic model, giving them the possibility of a fuller understanding of their patients. Given the increased interest in ear acupuncture over the past fifty years, it is my hope that this book will encourage readers throughout the world to add their personal experience to this constantly developing field.

Dr. Romoli dedicated this book to his mentors Yoshio Manaka and Johannes Bischko.

Dr. Romoli was an elected member of the scientific secretariat of the ninth International Symposium of AUTH that was held in Singapore in August 2017. Regrettably, due to his death months before, this meeting did not benefit from his expertise and insight on auriculotherapy.

Dr. Romoli's wife Laura recently donated his library to the research and therapy Centre of AMAB in Bologna, Via Antonio Canova, 13 (Italy). This donation includes books in Italian, French, English, German, Russian, and Japanese that focus on acupuncture and auriculotherapy, as well as a large amount of clinical material. Through this donation, scientists and researchers can access books and writing by Dr. Romoli at the AMAB headquarters.

The body of work by Dr. Romoli is listed below.