Modern stories about an ancient healing art

I now know that during the mid- to late-1800s expansion westward during the construction of the intercontinental railroad system in the U.S., there were Chinese immigrants doing acupuncture and other forms of ancient Chinese medicine, but the first time I heard about it was when Richard Nixon was president and he was planning that famous trip to China that opened the “Bamboo Curtain”.    

It was July 26, 1971. James Reston, the New York Times correspondent who was in China covering the preparations for that presidential trip, had an appendicitis attack that needed emergency surgery, and found himself in a hospital in Peking, now known as Beijing. The surgery went fine, but post-operative pain was severe, and he was treated with acupuncture using distal points (points away from the painful area), and his pain ceased. He wrote about it, and it made page 1 (below the fold) the next day.  

That’s when I heard about acupuncture. Without knowing another thing about it, I decided that was what I wanted to become. An acupuncturist. 

I was 15, living in a place much like Walnut Creek, on a traditional academic track, and that was the end of that. I didn’t have the nerve to travel the hour to New York City’s Chinatown and start picking strangers’ brains for information. There was no internet, and the librarians and teachers didn’t usually encourage adventurous, inquisitive girls to derail from their academic futures. I forgot about that dream pretty quickly. But I had already derailed, as I’d begun learning about and using natural medicines (herbs, vitamins and minerals) and natural foods a few years earlier. 

And yet... here I am in 2012, a California-licensed acupuncturist for 16 years, working in Walnut Creek, California.  

I’d forgotten that dream-wish-plan, but somehow it burrowed its way down into my being, across a decade and a half, and upward into me in my late 20s, when I was trying to figure out my next move in life. Acupuncture! I said to myself. That’s what I wanted to do way back then. And I still do.  

The story of how I made the transition to acupuncture school isn’t what I want to discuss here, although the train trip across this continent was beautiful. However, my experiences since learning acupuncture and using it and other facets of traditional Chinese medicine are very interesting, some even fascinating. I’d like to share some of those experiences with you. I hope you’ll stay and read. And if you like what you read, I hope you’ll come back and read again, as other installments of mine run here in Walnut Creek Patch. 

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In acupuncture college (a master’s of science program), we were trained as general practitioners, learning to use a diagnostic system that helps narrow down the nature of a condition and its location, making treatment of even the most obscure conditions directed and relatively simple. We spent two years learning the basics so we could put it all together in the third year (it was a four-year program restructured to be able to be completed in three years). We learned about a wide range of conditions and how to treat them with acupuncture and herbs. Our attendance in school clinic began in the second trimester of the first year and continued through all three years, and what we saw and treated ran the gamut, as it would in “real life”, following school. So I have treated a very broad range of conditions. 

I've done several treatments on myself and other people in a pinch, when maybe we should have gone to an emergency room for triage, and one where I had gone to the emergency room, but the acupuncture afterwards worked much more effectively. That was the time several years ago when on the last stitch before finishing the project, I stabbed a fingernail with the sewing machine needle while the machine was working. Ouch! I went to the emergency room first, concerned I damaged and detached the tip of the bone, but during the half-hour I spent there, the only thing they could do was give me a tetanus shot and one $28 antibiotic pill, and the bill came to over $1200, which I wouldn’t learn until it came by mail days later. When I got home, I immediately put pins in my hand, arm and ear, and the swelling and bruising went down very quickly, without even leaving a bruise on my fingernail the next day. Altogether that day and the next, I treated it a couple of times, maybe three.

That was unlike this past October, when I almost slammed my finger in the door of a truck, but grazed it instead, scraping the skin at the base of the nail, causing some bleeding and pain. I didn’t have any pins nearby, and, seeing an opportunity to do an unstructured science experiment, decided to wait and see how long it would take to heal without any immediate acupuncture intervention. The black-blue bruise in my fingernail is just about to finish growing out, and it’s almost March. 

Gore alert: In my second year in acupuncture school, I was working in a restaurant cutting winter squash, and cut off the tip of my pinky (cooking with hard rock blasting at loud volumes can be distracting -- believe me, that music was not my choice at that moment..). I guess I wanted to save my employer the cost of a hospital visit, and just reattached the tip of my pinky myself, being careful to match up the fingerprint lines -- I guess shock makes me lucid -- and wrapped it. I had acupuncture pins in my purse and put one -- yes, just one -- pin in a point above my hand, and what had gradually but quickly become excruciating pain, bleeding and throbbing stopped almost immediately. I treated it numerous times until the tip reintegrated itself. Yes, if I had the chance to go back in time, I’d go to the emergency room. But my finger eventually healed incredibly well, just using acupuncture and therapeutic heat. 

I’ve also had complete and rapid recovery for scalds - twice while cooking last year, I burned the dorsum of my hand very severely with steam (the lid of a pressure cooker I’d had for several years which had worked perfectly fine, whose mechanism suddenly needed repair...). So I did three treatments in two days as well as slathering it with a traditional Chinese medicine burn ointment. Immediately following scalding it, I had watched it swell and bubble and turn red, morphing into one of those terrible burns before my eyes, and at the end of the next day, the skin looked perfectly normal and I had absolutely no pain. There's no evidence of it in the skin there. This makes me wonder why there isn’t acupuncture in burn units everywhere. 

But enough about me and my (mis)adventures. Other people have their stories too.

An acquaintance-patient who’d had respiratory, allergic, and immune issues since she was born a premature baby in the ‘50s, insisted on coming to me – refusing to go to a hospital, though I strongly suggested it several times – when she accidentally ate a tiny piece of walnut in a homemade cookie and had a severe allergic reaction to it. The treatment I did on her worked in a short time, but also turned out to be pivotal, benefitting more than her trachea in the walnut emergency. Not only did her trachea open, but her immunity improved, and she never had another such reaction again.  

Another patient, a woman in her 60s, came in with COPD and emphysema, and 8 months later after coming regularly for acupuncture, had superior oxygen saturation in a test at her pulmonologist's office. She was taken off all her medications.

One woman in her 70s had had a stroke three years (according to her daughter; her caretaker said it was five years) before she came to me. She limped, dragging herself slowly with a walker, had lots of pain and was clearly demoralized, could barely speak more than a very slowly uttered yes or no, and her right hand and arm were curled under. In school we were told that after 6 months after a stroke, we can get very little improvement if any. So I thought I had nothing to lose, and could just try what I thought could work. That night, she was talking! Little by little, treatment by treatment, her pain diminished, her mobility increased, she was more energetic and happy, and became much more social at the senior center. I was so pleased. Unfortunately, she stopped coming before her hand was completely better, but even then, she was vastly improved from how she’d been for three years after her stroke.

And, of course, there are the acupuncture facelifts I’ve been doing for almost two decades, since experimenting on myself in my second year of acupuncture school. I still do them on myself, and they definitely contribute to my looking much younger than I am. In treating other people, this has been the most extreme case so far, the woman in her mid-60s whose skin around her eyes and cheeks looked a little like a tic-tac-toe board -- lots of lines and squares. And though she’d been a dancer all her life and her overall muscle tone was incredible, the skin on her face was on the loose side. As I recall, I did a full series on her (12 treatments) in an appropriate period of time (I think it was twice or three times a week over six weeks), and her skin tightened up, with the vast majority of  the lines smoothing out and almost disappearing. Now, in someone like that, I’d recommend more than one series and certainly regular periodic follow-ups so we could really clear away the lines, but it wasn’t that important to her, and she moved on in her life and that didn’t happen. When I did run into her at Whole Foods a few years later, her skin still looked tight and smooth, and the squares hadn’t ever returned.

 Oh, I’ve run out of space. I look forward to sharing more very interesting stories with you soon. There are so many more incredible stories.