East vs. West: Caught in the middle of an age-old battle.

I find myself caught in the mid­dle of a show­down between East and West. East­ern med­i­cine ver­sus West­ern Med­i­cine. Acupunc­ture against the upstart micro­surgery. Both are claim­ing that they can cure me of all the prob­lems caused by a her­ni­ated disc. I don’t want to be in this bat­tle. I didn’t ask for it. Or did I? Let me explain how I went from plan­ning for the West­ern pro­ce­dure – sur­gi­cal micro­scopic surgery – to con­sid­er­ing the East­ern tra­di­tion of acupunc­ture and acupressure.

A Strange Encounter

My wife dropped me off yes­ter­day at our local Whole Foods. I needed to stock up on the odd prod­ucts that come with my strange, new ‘free diet’ (free of this, free of that, and that, too). As I was wheel­ing out my cart, a young man with a clip­board approached me. He imme­di­ately blurted out that he was an acupunc­ture stu­dent of a third-generation acupunc­tur­ist whose fam­ily had prac­ticed in Bei­jing, and that this acupunc­tur­ist had reached the top ech­e­lons of cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. “There is no one bet­ter,” he enthu­si­as­ti­cally shared. He went on to say he had suf­fered from a slipped disc and this guy had fixed it in one ses­sion. Real­iz­ing he might have just promised too much, he hastily added that his was prob­a­bly a unique case. It would would likely take more ses­sions for most.

Worn down by months of pain and suf­fer­ing, and des­per­ate for any­thing that could make me feel human again, I let him continue.

Worn down by months of pain and suf­fer­ing, and des­per­ate for any­thing that could make me feel human again, I let him con­tinue. “I’m ask­ing peo­ple to fill out this stress sur­vey,” he explained, show­ing me the papers on his clip­board. As part of the study, you will get .…” I stopped him and said I needed to put the gro­ceries in the car, but could come back. My wife and chil­dren were wait­ing for me. He com­plied and let me go. I got my ‘out’.

As I gin­gerly made my way through the park­ing lot towards our car, limp­ing and gri­mac­ing with every step, I replayed in my mind what they guy had just said. While a slipped disc is more than a tight mus­cle, I thought it prob­a­bly still only required some adjust­ment, unlike my con­di­tion. You can’t just push the disc mat­ter back into place, after all. Besides, I had gone to my own acupunc­tur­ist three times already and my back didn’t really feel that much bet­ter (it was my new diet that I had ben­e­fited from the most). Fur­ther­more, my acupunc­tur­ist decided to sus­pend treat­ment until after my surgery, in so doing con­don­ing the pro­ce­dure and even relin­quish­ing her role to a sup­port­ive one.

Yet some­thing in me said I shouldn’t make a deci­sion to forgo an East­ern solu­tion with­out learn­ing a lit­tle more about this acupunc­tur­ist who was sup­posed to be bet­ter than most oth­ers. Maybe the prob­lem was that my acupunc­tur­ist was at a lower level of abil­ity than this guy was at. He was from a long line of Chi­nese acupunc­tur­ists, after all.

Uncer­tainty Reigns Again

Until that moment I hadn’t known there was still a part of me that was ques­tion­ing whether surgery was indeed the right answer for me. The real­iza­tion scared me. It opened the door for uncer­tainty to stride back in and fill my life, some­thing I had so eagerly rid myself of a few weeks ear­lier. I had come to real­ize that pain accom­pa­nied by no hope is far worse than pain with a finite end in sight. I decided to go back to learn some more about this new acupunc­tur­ist. Maybe I could even score some free treat­ment. I told my wife that I wanted to go back and talk to a guy about acupunc­ture and asked her to wait two min­utes, then drive up to the front of the store.

I shuf­fled back and once again approached the man. With a smile and deter­mi­na­tion he approached me once again, start­ing his speech from the top. This moment of déja vù seemed to con­firm a fear that I had, that he’s noth­ing more than a snake-oil sales­man. As I got closer, he rec­og­nized me and stopped him­self just before let­ting line two of his spiel exit his mouth. “Hey, you’re the guy who I already talked to,” he said instead. With a big smile he intro­duced him­self as Jim.

“What are you ask­ing for?,” I queried, point­ing to his clip­board. Jim placed the board in my left hand and a pen in the right. “We’re ask­ing peo­ple to fill out this ques­tion­naire,” he said, tap­ping the mid­dle of the page where there were a num­ber of check boxes next to descrip­tions of var­i­ous ail­ments, like ‘intesti­nal dis­com­fort.’ Being a fan of check boxes, I began to scan the list until I found ‘lower back pain,’ and quickly placed an ‘X’ in the box next to it.

That’s when things got a lit­tle weird. Jim grabbed my shoul­ders, posi­tioned his head directly in front of my eyes, and with an even more dra­matic tone, nearly yelled, “You HAVE to go see Dr. Ben. Seri­ously, right now! You don’t need surgery.”

“Hey, that’s what I had, the rea­son I first went to see Dr. Ben in the first place,” Jim exclaimed rather enthu­si­as­ti­cally. “Yeah?” I asked, look­ing him in the eye. “I’ve got a her­ni­ated disc of 11 milime­ters at my L5 and S1 and I’m going to have surgery on Tues­day,” I said rather matter-of-factly. That’s when things got a lit­tle weird. Jim grabbed my shoul­ders, posi­tioned his head directly in front of my eyes, and with an even more dra­matic tone, nearly yelled, “You HAVE to go see Dr. Ben. Seri­ously, right now. You don’t need surgery. Go now, he’s just one exit south.”

Jim’s eyes were now wide and close enough for me to per­form a com­plete eye exam­i­na­tion with­out equip­ment. So that’s what I did. I looked into his eyes and noticed there was some­thing a lit­tle “off” with them. They looked kind of glassy, glossed over. Yet at the same time, quite sparkling and even mes­mer­iz­ing. Quickly rul­ing out that he was an  alien, I landed on a more ter­res­trial, yet just as dis­turb­ing, pro­file: a hip­ster drug­gie. Once the ‘drug­gie per­son’ part of my brain was acti­vated, it began a rou­tine full-body scan, search­ing Jim to see if there were any other data that matched up with this pro­file. Messy hair? Check. Vin­tage cloth­ing? Check. Eas­ily excitable and erratic behav­ior? A big check.

Jim’s voice pulled me back to the moment. He repeated that Dr. Ben could fix me. He phys­i­cally released me, yet kept his men­tal grip on me while he reached into his pocket. He pulled out a busi­ness card and handed it to me, giv­ing me ver­bal direc­tions to Dr. Ben’s office at the same time. He explained that Dr. Ben was only in the nearby office on Tues­days and Thurs­days (it was Thurs­day evening at the time), so I had to go now. He added that his other office was in San Fran­cisco, in the Sun­set Dis­trict. Sun­set you say? That’s a good sign, as it’s densely pop­u­lated with Asian-Americans. I fig­ured that if Dr. Ben could make it in the Sun­set, among Chi­nese and other Asian mem­bers of the com­mu­nity, he’d be more likely to be the real deal. They would have smelled out an impos­tor quickly if he didn’t know his stuff.

I took the busi­ness card and told Jim I’d think about it. Of course, this was not a suf­fi­cient response for Jim. Want­ing to avoid another round of hyp­no­sis, I con­vinced Jim that I would pay the good doc­tor a visit after I took my fam­ily home. Hop­ping into the car, my wife asked what all of that had been about, not­ing that the man had his hands on my shoul­ders at one point. I explained what hap­pened, then changed the sub­ject. My mind, how­ever, was tog­gling between replay­ing what Jim had said, that I didn’t need surgery, and future sce­nar­ios. The first sce­nario was of a healthy me hav­ing avoided surgery entirely. The sec­ond sce­nario was darker. I saw myself with a bad back still, after surgery, telling myself that I had turned down the oppor­tu­nity to get well with­out surgery. Of course, a third sce­nario exists, where I am feel­ing great, run­ning through the for­est, hav­ing had surgery and expe­ri­enc­ing no regrets at all. And then there’s the fourth sce­nario, that acupunc­ture doesn’t work at all and I have wasted more money and time that I don’t have. Yet my mind was obsess­ing over the first two scenarios.

Who is this Guy?

As soon as I got home I did a search on the inter­net for Dr. Ben. I found one men­tion of him. It was a pos­i­tive review that a sup­posed patient of his had posted. It said some­thing about Dr. Ben being able to tell what was wrong with her after tak­ing one look at her tongue. Well, I don’t need any­one to look at me to know what’s wrong with me, I fig­ured. The MRIs clearly showed ‘disc goo’ extruded out of my disc, push­ing up and deform­ing my nerve col­umn. Just then my phone rang. It was Jim. Damn it. I had writ­ten my cor­rect phone num­ber down on the stress sur­vey he gave me.

…there was another pro­file that my brain scan of Jim had found a match for: hip­ster who had his life changed by a mas­ter healer.

Jim was now back at Dr. Ben’s office and wanted to con­firm that Dr. Ben could see me that evening. From the tone of his voice and speed of speech, I real­ized the level of excite­ment he demon­strated in front of Whole Foods was no show – this guy was one really hyped up dude. Was it because of drugs? Per­haps. But there was another pro­file that my brain scan of Jim had found a match for: hip­ster who had his life changed by a mas­ter healer. It was because of this sec­ond pro­file that I stayed on the line when Jim handed the phone to Dr. Ben (and because I have a soft spot in my heart for hip­sters of any kind – there’s a part of me who is hip­ster, or at least wants to be).

Dr. Ben sounded real enough on the phone, with the req­ui­site bro­ken Chinese-English speech and accent. I began explain­ing my sit­u­a­tion to Dr. Ben when the line dropped (I know Sprint laughs each time they do this to me). Jim called back and said that Dr. Ben’s Eng­lish wasn’t very good and implored me to come in right away. I men­tioned my less-than-satisfying inter­net search results. He said they were work­ing on a web­site but it wasn’t up yet. I told him that I would try and come in.

I did some more read­ing online about the odds that acupunc­ture could not only relieve the pain from a her­ni­ated disc, but could also resolve the under­ly­ing issue. After all, the pain is caused by a phys­i­o­log­i­cal prob­lem. Until that’s resolved, I will not be well. I saw again that acupunc­ture is even listed on the Mayo Clinic’s web­site, one of the most well respected West­ern med­i­cine resources and insti­tu­tions, I decided to give East­ern med­i­cine one more chance. I fig­ured it couldn’t hurt to at least see Dr. Ben. I made the 12 mile trip South, for­tu­nately avoid­ing traffic.

Speak­ing with Yoda

As I drove into the park­ing lot of the build­ing where Jim had said Dr. Ben’s office was, I saw a big, shiny “Open” sign in the win­dow that also had white let­ter­ing spelling out Acupunc­ture on it. The treat­ment and sig­nage looked more appro­pri­ate for a nail salon than one of the world’s best heal­ers, as Dr. Ben had been billed as. When I walked into the upstairs office, Dr. Ben was in the front room. He seemed to know who I was imme­di­ately. He wore black slacks and a black dress polo. He strode over to me, shook my hand, and motioned for me to sit down in one of the fold­ing chairs in the wait­ing room. The office was quite plain and sim­ple, look­ing a bit out dated. A vari­ety of US mag­a­zines were dis­played along with oth­ers that I guessed were in Chinese.

Dr. Bob looked me in the eyes and asked what my prob­lem was. I was relieved to see that Dr. Ben’s eyes appeared nor­mal. I explained to him that I had an 11 mil­lime­ter disc extru­sion from a her­ni­ated disc between my L5/S1. He seemed to under­stand. He nod­ded and motioned to his lower back, as if empath­i­cally feel­ing a bit of my pain there. “I can fix you,” he said right away. Whoa, I’m not done explain­ing all of my pain, how long this has been going on, the epidural steroid shots I have received, and you’re con­fi­dent enough to say you can fix me? This didn’t seem right. I con­tin­ued, ignor­ing what he had just said. When I explained that I orig­i­nally expe­ri­enced a her­ni­ated disc way back in 2002 and had received three cor­ti­sone shots, he pulled his head back, twist­ing his face into a posi­tion usu­ally reserved for reac­tions to sour milk. “Oh, you don’t want any more of those,” he said. “Bad for you, they are.” The con­vic­tion in his voice along with a Chinese-American accent made him sound a lot like Yoda.

When I explained that I orig­i­nally expe­ri­enced a her­ni­ated disc way back in 2002 and had received three cor­ti­sone shots, he pulled his head back, twist­ing his face into a posi­tion usu­ally reserved for reac­tions to sour milk.

Dr. Ben explained that he would do acu­pres­sure in addi­tion to acupunc­ture. Wav­ing his hand towards the door, as if dis­re­gard­ing the entire West­ern world, he said, “not like mas­sage out there. Real, deep pres­sure mas­sage.” He used his hand to demon­strate the type of mas­sage he was talk­ing about. His thumb pushed hard against invis­i­ble flesh. “Hard, like this.” It made sense that a sooth­ing mas­sage would do noth­ing to help me over the long term. I had already tried that. I said I under­stood, but wanted to know phys­i­o­log­i­cally what would hap­pen to resolve my her­ni­a­tion. He said he would push the disc back into its proper place.

This sur­prised me. Tra­di­tional, West­ern med­i­cine says that the disc mat­ter, once out, would need to be absorbed by the body. It couldn’t go back into the mid­dle of the disc. It was now seen as a for­eign object to my body and treated as such. When I shared these thoughts, Dr. Bob agreed that some of the extruded disc would be absorbed by the body, but rein­forced his con­vic­tion that some of the disc could be pushed back in. He used his thumb once more to demon­strate. I flinched. It looked and sounded rather painful. I wasn’t entirely con­vinced that the disc could be pushed back into place, nor that he really knew how big of a her­ni­a­tion I had.

When I asked how long he thought he would need to be able to heal me, he responded, “8–10 ses­sions.” With twice a week, that would mean another month. A month that I don’t have. If this had been a month ago I would have jumped at the oppor­tu­nity. I could have given Dr. Ben a month and if I was all bet­ter, be able to can­cel surgery. Unfor­tu­nately, though, I’m out of time. Surgery is this Tues­day. And I have to get healed so I can go back to work. I can’t risk hold­ing off surgery for another month in order to try an East­ern solu­tion that I have no guar­an­tee would work. Yet in my mind I was still play­ing out the future sce­nario, the one where I am in pain from the surgery and am beat­ing myself up for hav­ing the oppor­tu­nity to avoid it and go with a more holis­tic, East­ern process, and turned it down. I decided to give Dr. Ben one ses­sion. If what I expe­ri­enced was dra­matic, I would con­sider hold­ing off on surgery.

WHAT? Was I really con­sid­er­ing not hav­ing surgery on Tues­day? Why did I have to stop and talk to some­one out­side of Whole Foods? I had already gone through a month of com­plete uncer­tainty and it had been one of the worst in my life. Sim­ply mak­ing the deci­sion with my back doc­tor to have the surgery and secur­ing an exact surgery date seemed to help me feel bet­ter. Now, in one con­ver­sa­tion, all of the light at the end of the tun­nel seemed to fade. If this route was a good one, I rea­soned, shouldn’t I be feel­ing bet­ter, not worse?!

A Dif­fer­ent Kind of Pressure

I went into the room that Dr. Ben had showed me. While he went to fin­ish with another patient, I undressed down to my whitey tight­ies. I lay face down on the mas­sage table as he had instructed me what to do. It was rather warm in the room so I felt fine lying there almost naked, though a lit­tle exposed. Dr. Ben returned to the room and pulled my undies down fur­ther, leav­ing most of my bum out in the open. He wiped the merid­ian of my back with some­thing wet and then pro­ceeded to prod, poke, and push around my back, butt, and legs. With each new area of my body he would ask if it hurt. “Ok, I know what to do,” Dr. Ben sud­denly said, stop­ping the inspec­tion as fast as he had started it. “I am now going to do acupunc­ture,” he pro­claimed, announc­ing it as if there were stu­dents watch­ing the mas­ter work.

I paid atten­tion to how every prick of the nee­dles felt. I was quite curi­ous to know if it would be dif­fer­ent to what I had expe­ri­enced dur­ing my reg­u­lar acupunc­ture rou­tines. After he left the room, leav­ing me rest­ing with nee­dles in my back and left leg, I began to feel sore mus­cles sur­round­ing the nee­dles. That was a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Jim had said, “There are acupunc­tur­ists, and then there is Dr. Ben.” Maybe he was dif­fer­ent. After about 20 min­utes Dr. Ben returned and effi­ciently plucked out all of the nee­dles. “Now time for acu­pres­sure.” I noticed that there was a cool breeze and then heard peo­ple in the wait­ing room. He had left the door open, giv­ing a view of my ass to the major­ity of the office. Oh well.

I felt like I was the log in the sand that I had pushed back and forth at the beach while my chil­dren tried to stay on top of it.

What hap­pened next was like noth­ing I had ever expe­ri­enced. Dr. Ben’s thumbs pushed into my back firmly, like he had pre­vi­ously demon­strated, yet he also rocked me back and forth with a decent amount of force. I felt like I was the log in the sand that I had pushed back and forth at the beach while my chil­dren tried to stay on top of it. There was a cer­tain rhythm to what Dr. Ben was doing, too. I found myself hum­ming to the beat of my body rock­ing. Six times back and forth with one of his thumbs push­ing on my L5 and the other thumb up between my shoul­der blades. Then six times back and forth with his top thumbs on dif­fer­ent areas of my spine. He con­tin­ued rock­ing me and push­ing hard on my spine. It began to feel pretty good. The motion seemed to be wak­ing my whole back up from a three-month slum­ber. After a series of other mas­sages and applied pres­sure up and down my legs, it was all over. “See, I’m spe­cial,” Dr. Ben said.

No More Deci­sions, Please

That night I didn’t sleep very well and woke up quite early. My mind hadn’t set­tled all night. Could Dr. Ben solve all of my back issues non-surgically?” I con­tin­ued to won­der. While the dis­cec­tomy that I am slated to receive Tues­day is rather rou­tine pro­ce­dure – it’s an out­pa­tient one, with only a small inci­sion point for a catheter nec­es­sary – it’s still surgery. There’s a small (quite small) chance that my nerve will be affected and my left leg will be numb for three months. There’s also a chance of infec­tion, as with any sur­gi­cal endeavor. Yet, UCSF, where the surgery will be per­formed, is renowned for their cutting-edge (pun intended) research and oper­a­tions. I would have the best that man and tech­nol­ogy could offer. On the other side of the ring, East­ern med­i­cine was claim­ing there was a bet­ter way. Even as I sit here, I feel like I’m dis­obey­ing Yoda. And part of me is say­ing, “Dude, you just don’t do that!”

I don’t like find­ing myself hav­ing to decide between East­ern and West­ern med­i­cine; between ancient wis­dom and mod­ern sci­ence. I’m frus­trated because I don’t I have the lib­erty of time to give acupunc­ture a try. I just can’t afford to gam­ble. There is too much at stake. I can’t risk wast­ing time, money, and the well being of those around me. And I don’t think I can take more days of pain. While Dr. Ben and Jim were con­vinced that East­ern meth­ods would work, there’s still no guar­an­tee they would for me. Chances are that once Dr. Ben gets into it, he would real­ize that my her­ni­a­tion is indeed a large one and that it would take longer than he orig­i­nally thought to fix me. If both sides could offer the exact same odds, I’d go the non-surgical acupunc­ture and acu­pres­sure route. I don’t like to have surgery per­formed on me or go under full anesthesia.

Even as I sit here, I feel like I’m dis­obey­ing Yoda. And part of me is say­ing, “Dude, you just don’t do that!”

I guess we’re just going to have to wait for another day to see how the bat­tle between East­ern and West­ern med­i­cine plays out. My guess is that when there’s indeed a bat­tle between East­ern and West­ern med­i­cine, the patient is the one who really loses. I think we’re bet­ter off when there is coop­er­a­tion and a part­ner­ship between both sides. I sure hope that I don’t end up in the mid­dle again, hav­ing to make a decision.

What would you do?

Have you had any pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences with East­ern or West­ern med­i­cine, or both?
What would you advise me and oth­ers in sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tions to do?

Please leave a com­ment and share your sto­ries with oth­ers. Thanks in advance.