Pointed techniques: an experience of acupuncture and western medicine [Perspective]

Image: PD

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in the Perspectives Series are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of 2 Minute Medicine.

Natalie Vokes

As part of a fourth-year elective on rural medicine, I recently spent the day with a fellow medical student in a holistic medicine center. Lisa, the center’s owner, is a muscular and energetic woman in her mid-40s, an earthy woman who exudes a wholesome physicality that makes you feel like you should exercise more. In the ten years since she opened her business, it has expanded into a brand-new, window-filled building along a major thoroughfare, and offers multiple different treatment modalities including physical therapy, chiropracty, and acupuncture.

Prior to my visit to Lisa’s center, my experience of complementary medicine and physical therapy was limited to the words themselves. During our day at the clinic, we watched the chiropractor, a tall Alabaman who had briefly played college football, crack backs, shoulders and several necks. We saw patients lie with their legs against the wall and heating pads across their backs, and helped make a toe brace out of tape and a cardboard roll. We met 13 year-olds with knee injuries and women in their 90s with intractable back pain.

Many of the patients told us the same story. They developed pain that would not go away. They went to their primary care doctor who tried a number of different treatments, all unsuccessful, often with side effects. They went on to a specialist who also offered treatments which were either extremely invasive or unhelpful, or both. Finally, in desperation, they sought out other therapies: acupuncture, chiropracty, massage, meditation, and so on. Within weeks, they felt better.

This is the modern narrative of complementary medicine. This narrative has helped businesses like Lisa’s become successful; it also galvanized the creation of a NIH institute devoted to investigating these therapies, and forced often skeptical insurers and practitioners of Western medicine to acknowledge that these therapies often help their patients, even if they ascribe the benefit to placebo.

Like most people, I am not always comfortable in my body. My specific problem is tension headaches. I get them frequently and I get them bad. I’ve never raised this with my doctor because I know that she has nothing to offer aside from Advil and advice to relax. Yet I’ve also secretly harbored the hope that something else could help me. So at the end of the day, I asked Jenny the acupuncturist if she would give me acupuncture.

Jenny works in a small basement room. It contains a soft table, a small fountain, and a space heater. The room was wonderfully warm and dim. I took off my shoes and socks and lay down on the table. She felt my wrists for my pulses. “Do you have any liver problems? Do you take any medications?”

“No,” I answered, “just an occasional Advil for headaches. I don’t have any liver problems that I know of.”

“Your liver pulse is weak,” she told me, frowning slightly. She felt further along my wrist. “Your heart and your small intestines go together, and they feel good.” She felt my other wrist. “Your lungs and large intestine also feel good. But your liver pulse really doesn’t feel right. Could the Advil be affecting your liver?”

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