When I was in my early 20s, in college, I started suffering from a strange kind of illness. It wasn’t easy to diagnose or treat, so I started exploring alternative treatment methods. This is how I had my first experience with acupuncture.
In the acupuncture office, I encountered an elderly Chinese man who asked me some basic questions, looked at my tongue and took my pulse, and then had me relax in a chair while he did the acupuncture treatment. After about 20 minutes, the needles came out and he gave me some herbal pills to take and sent me on my way.
I came back once a week for maybe 6 weeks or so. After the first two treatments, I felt a switch inside me, like the disease process had reversed itself, and rather than getting worse I was suddenly getting better. The effect was immediate and dramatic. Rather than sunk into despair that nobody could help me with my illness, I was optimistic. I knew that I was on the path to healing.
Since that time, whenever I faced a recurrence of this illness, or other problems, I used Chinese medicine to cure it. I found some books on Traditional Chinese dietary therapies and herbal therapies, and used food and plants to build health. After some time, I reached the limits of self-study and decided that I wanted to go to school to learn this medicine and become a practitioner.
Most people I know who have become acupuncturists have a similar story – they encountered this medicine as patients and eventually grew intrigued and decided to make a serious study of it. One interesting example of this is Dan Bensky, one of the first Western scholars to study Chinese medicine, who has done important translations and editions of the Chinese Herbal Medicine textbooks. Dan was interviewed recently on a podcast and told the story of how he first got involved in Chinese medicine. He had studied Chinese language and culture in college and traveled to Asia to continue his studies. While there, he became very ill with a fever. After seeing Western doctors and taking antibiotics, there was no change in his symptoms. On the advice of a local friend, he went to see a traditional healer. He describes being extremely skeptical of this so-called ‘doctor’, whose office was messy and disorganized, and who gave him a bag of what looked like yard waste and insect skeletons, and told him to boil this up into a tea and drink it. However reluctantly, he gave it a try. Then, within a few days, his fever was completely cured.
Dan was very shocked by this, and became so curious that he switched his focus and began looking for someone to teach him Traditional Chinese medicine. This was considered such a strange request that many people assumed he was in fact a CIA agent with a very poorly conceived cover story! Eventually he found teachers and spent many years learning the foundations of this medicine and finding ways to convey it to students in the West. Dan went on to found the Seattle Institute of Oriental Medicine, which is where I studied and got my acupuncture degree.
If you’re curious about the podcast I reference above, here is the link to the Dan Bensky episode:
https://qiological.com/being-helpful/
