Acupuncture

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on the blog before, but my wife suffers through some pretty severe back pain on a daily basis as a result of an injury when she was in school. One of those discs that is supposed to make your back work is basically gone. Anyway, the pain has gotten worse lately, so we’ve tried in vain to find a chiropractor here in the city. Everyone says there isn’t one. There’s a kind of Chinese equivalent – I forget what it’s called – something about bones. A doctor in Beijing recommended we try one of those. 

So today she went with a girl that comes to our services to an acupuncture specialist. That may sound fairly exotic, but nothing could be more normal here. She first had to go to a hospital and get some x-rays done (which she just brought home with her – alas, there isn’t room on the front of our refrigerator). Then they hiked back over to the acupunctur…ist? Who, upon examination of the x-rays, declared that she could be healed in a month’s worth of procedures. Then she made my wife lie down and, after consulting the multitude of wall charts, stuck her full of needles (some a couple inches into the flesh) for about half an hour. Oh yeah, all this after a previous half hour of applied heated Chinese herbs and electric pulse treatment.  

They say that acupuncture is a big deal for weight loss here (it releases cortisol). Apparently that’s what most of the women were in the clinic today for. Fill them full of needles and they just chill there for an hour or so. But my wife says it’s painless, and it’s a good thing. She’s got to go in everyday for a couple weeks. I myself am particularly curious as to whether or not this really helps the pain, let alone regenerate cartilage. Time will tell.