Vero Beach’s Dr. Christine Nielson is taking a road less traveled. The University of Florida College of Medicine graduate, board certified in family medicine and geriatric medicine as well as hospice and palliative care medicine, has traded-in her stethoscope for a set of acupuncture needles at her Indian River Acupuncture office and she says she couldn’t be happier.
Prior to 1972 most Americans had never even heard of this ancient Chinese medical practice but during President Nixon’s groundbreaking trip to China that year, New York Times journalist James Reston had an emergency appendectomy while traveling with the President. He was treated for his post-operative pain by Chinese doctors using this 3,000 year-old technique of inserting hyper-thin needles along various “paths” or meridians on his body. When Reston returned to the U.S. he wrote glowingly about acupuncture’s pain relieving qualities.
Today more than 3.1 million Americans are being treated with acupuncture from here on the Treasure Coast all the way to the west coast and all points in between for pain, movement problems, depression, hypertension and a host of other maladies.
According to the Johns Hopkins Medical Center there are about 3,500 medical doctors and 11,000 to 12,000 non-doctor acupuncturists employing this ancient medical art throughout the country. Vero Beach alone has more than a dozen licensed, practicing acupuncturists according to Kate Hoffmann, acupuncture physician at Vero Acupuncture.
For many westerners, understanding exactly how, why or even if acupuncture works can be difficult. Ancient Chinese texts on the subject describe the human body in terms of two opposing forces: yin and yang. The theory, put simply, is that when these forces are in balance, the body is healthy.
Then it gets trickier.
Energy, which Chinese scribes of 200 BCE recorded as “qi” (pronounced “chee”), supposedly flows along specific pathways in the body called meridians. That energy flow, they believed, kept the yin and yang forces balanced. However, if that flow got blocked, like water getting stuck behind a dam, the disruption would lead to pain, lack of function or disease. The overall general theory behind acupuncture is that needles, pressure, heat and/or herbal mixtures placed on or in certain parts of the body can release blocked qi and stimulate the body’s natural healing responses.
Even Hoffmann freely admits that’s a difficult concept for the modern western mind to grasp. Unlike the human body’s circulatory or nervous systems, no one has yet been able to map out or to produce any kind of physical evidence that these pathways or meridians exist. However, she quickly adds, “when you have something that’s been working for 3,000 years, just to say there is nothing to it because you can’t see it is just ridiculous.”
At first, modern western medicine wasn’t too keen on accepting what it couldn’t see. In fact, in 1975, the most prominent figure in the history of acupuncture in the U.S., Dr. Miriam Lee, was actually jailed for performing acupuncture in California three years after Reston’s glowing articles. Lee, who had escaped the communist takeover of Mainland China in 1949, immigrated to California in 1966 and began practicing her art but was then charged with “practicing medicine without a license,” even though California, at the time, did not recognize acupuncture as “medicine.”
After much legal wrangling and thousands of petitions signed by Lee’s supporters, the California legislature changed the law and made acupuncture a “legal medical practice” and Dr. Lee was freed.
Fast-forward 22 more years and in 1997 the National Institutes of Health formally recognized acupuncture as a “mainstream medical healing option.”
Today an entirely new wave of Americans is turning to acupuncture: U.S. war veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. As the Washington Post reported earlier this year, hundreds of veterans from across the country have headed to the Veterans Administration hospital in Richmond, VA where alternative treatment options, including acupuncture, are being used on a trial basis for chronic pain, panic attacks, traumatic injuries and other ailments.
Participating veterans said they were fed up with taking the heavy-duty painkillers other VA hospitals had prescribed for them and they were willing to try something completely different. Indeed, even the Pentagon’s own doctors admit that the use of painkillers such as hydrocodone and oxycodone have probably contributed to job loss, family strife, homelessness and even suicide among veterans. Acupuncture may not be the answer to every veteran’s problem, but at least it doesn’t have the side effects associated with those prescription drugs.
It is in the area of pain relief that acupuncture has its best and most well documented track record. The University of California San Diego, for instance, now says that in case-controlled clinical studies, acupuncture has been an effective treatment for a variety of pain including recurring headaches, lower back pain, neck pain, rheumatoid arthritis, sciatica and tennis elbow.
Here in Vero, Dr, Neilson says, “Probably 80 percent of the patients I see I’m treating for pain,” adding that, “I see more elderly patients because geriatrics is my specialty.” She also says she does not attempt to treat “actual mental illness or actual depression or bipolar conditions” with acupuncture. “It works well on simple depressed moods and for patients seeking relief from anxiety,” according to Neilson, but mental illness she says is best left to doctors who specialize in that.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, being “stuck” with acupuncture needles does not cause any pain at all in most patients. That may be because the points of the needles used in acupuncture, according to Dr. Neilson, “are 50 times smaller than the needles used to give flu shots.”
A large portion of American Medical Association members still have doubts about the efficacy of acupuncture, but many others have embraced it with open arms as one more tool to provide relief to their patients. Hoffmann, for example, says she treats “several” local medical doctors and that they have no qualms about referring patients to her.
Here in Florida, as with most states, there are now strict laws governing acupuncture providers, not the least of which is the mandated use of sterile, disposable needles to eliminate any possibility of spreading viruses such as Hepatitis C or HIV.
Hoffman swaps each point she treats with antiseptic before inserting one of her slender, sterile needles.
The overwhelming majority of today’s acupuncturists embrace state regulations. However, like any other service consumers buy, “caveat emptor” or “buyer beware” is a good thing to remember. In the unlikely event you notice an unclean workspace or needles that aren’t pre-packaged and sealed in an acupuncture office, get up and leave. Dr. Christine Neilson, Kate Hoffman and other highly-trained acupuncturists are available to treat you safely and, in many cased, effectively with their 3,000-year-old techniques.
Dr. Christine Neilson currently practices at Indian River Acupuncture at 1345 36th Street, Vero Beach. Her phone number is 772-564-8383. Kate Hoffmann operates from Vero Acupuncture at 3740 20th street. Her number is 772-766-4418.