"Love is a harsh and dreadful thing to ask of us, but it is the only answer."--Dorothy Day

6.01.2006

On Pins and Needles....

I have officially been headache free for over 24 hours! "What/who is responsible for this miracle?" you ask. Oh, it is the greatest thing of all things. It is acupuncture.

Having gone and spent a good deal of money on my ENT (who is wonderful and looks like a Knight Rider era David Hasselhoff), and being told that it was not my sinuses, yet again, (though I know it is), I decided to leave behind Western Medicine. My friend gave me the name of an acupuncturist and the woman was very kind and sympathic, which is really all I was looking for (after Dr. Hasselhoff kinda laughed in my face...still wonderful though). I went last Friday and was stuck with about 20 pins from head to toe, a very strange experience all together. Her full assessment: my headache is due to stagnation of my qi and perfectly follows the lines of the gallbladder channel (but having nothing to do with the actual gallbladder). It sounds a little mumbo-jumbo-y, but let me just say, it works. Friday's treatment didn't last so long and I had a bad headache weekend, but I went again on Wednesday morning and am freed. And as a side-effect of the treatment, I got to be high pretty much all day yesterday. It was great fun, if not a little distracting.

1 comment:

JTB said...

I had a friend in China who would go to doctor friend there whenever she had la du zi (literally "spicy stomach", or, diarrhea) and he would fix her up by putting needles in her knees. I never understood it, and being blessed with a stomach of steel myself, never needed it, but she swore by it.

I also learned from this doctor friend that acupuncture needles do NOT cause "pain." In Chinese they have a whole different word to denote the sensation of acupuncture needles: "zhang." It is not pain, because it is zhang. It's a whole different thing. When asked for an English equivalent, he had no answer, so we decided that zhang would henceforth be defined as "the feeling formerly known as pain." (Which was really funny then, since that was back when Prince had decided to be the guy with the unpronounceable symbol for a name and was being referred to as "the artist formerly known as...")

Glad you're better, and who needs to understand why it works, as long as it works? I'm a total pragmatist in this respect.