by Shawn Kirby L.Ac.

Since graduating from acupuncture college and starting my own practice, I’ve done a lot of internal questioning and soul searching, looking for answers to the question that sent me to acupuncture school to begin with – what is healing? More specifically, what is my role, as an acupuncturist, in the healing process?

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When my wife and I first began living together years ago, I discovered that she suffered from frequent bouts of insomnia. It was around this same time that I was considering re-reading a series of books that I had loved growing up, the memoirs of the English veterinarian James Herriot. Upon learning that Malia had never read them, I suggested reading them aloud to her to help her fall asleep at night, allowing me to revisit these wonderful tales again while lulling my new bride to sleep. As I revisited these beloved stories I was mildly surprised to find that it was not from any of the august tomes on Chinese medicine that litter our house (and which can almost always cure me of insomnia), but from Herriot’s warm and entertaining yarns that I feel that I have found the answers to my questions about healing.

In Herriot’s second volume, “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” he describes, in two chapters, an unusual “treatment” that he discovered quite by accident. After having been called to a farm for a lambing, Herriot noticed a ewe that had been penned up in a corner. After a badly performed lambing, done at the hands of the farmer without veterinary assistance, the ewe was in terrible condition. Her vulva and perineum were badly damaged and inflamed and the animal was suffering from terrible stress and pain. There was no doubt in either the farmer's or veterinarian’s mind that she was dying – however, she had been left in this condition to “take her chance.” On the chance that the animal might, through an act of providence, recover spontaneously, the farmer had not put her out of her misery. Instead he was hedging his bets financially with no concern whatsoever to the animal’s suffering.

Herriot, appalled by this, ran to his car while the farmer went for a bucket of water for him to wash in. He grabbed a large hypodermic needle full of narcotic and, returning to the enclosure before the farmer, injected the animal with a lethal dose anesthetic . He left the farm saddened, but justified in doing his job to prevent suffering, in this case against the farmer’s wishes. Several weeks later, he was again called to the farm for another lambing. The farmer, feeling somewhat justified in his actions, pointed the ewe out to Herriot. She had not died from the overdose of anesthetic. Rather, she lay sleeping for 48 hours and woke up well. The farmer said he’d never seen anything like it. “It was almost like she’d been drugged.”

Herriot pondered this at length over the following weeks, marveling at the outcome of his noble indiscretion, when he was confronted with a new case, this time a miniature poodle named Penny. Penny presented with a simple case of gastroenteritis. However, as time wore on, Penny became worse and worse despite continued treatment. The constant vomiting and diarrhea from which the little animal suffered eventually put her at the brink of death. Called from his bed during the small hours, Herriot made his way to Penny’s house to visit the young couple to which she belonged. They felt that Penny was suffering, and asked Herriot to put her to sleep.

Shocked at the sight before him, a very young dog that had been the picture of health just weeks earlier, something in Herriot rebelled at the idea of putting the little dog down. As he knelt beside her, he was suddenly struck by the similarity in attitude between the young dog and the ewe he had seen weeks earlier. Something about the mixture of pain and panic that had filled both animals’ eyes gave him the glimmer of an idea. With the owners' permission, he anesthetized Penny for 48 hours. Perhaps, he thought, if he could just stop the pain and fear for long enough, it would give nature a chance to do its job of healing. Penny awoke weak, but well, two days later. She did not recover due to receiving medicinal therapy - she recovered in the absence of stress brought about by simple anesthesia, which allowed her body the chance to heal itself. Penny lived a long and happy life, delighting her owners to the end of her days.

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What does a doctor do with a patient who has a broken arm? After setting the bone, the doctor places the arm in a cast – which does nothing more than keep the patient from injuring their arm any further and protects it while the body heals itself. And while a gifted surgeon can repair an error in his patient’s anatomy that might cause death, it is the body that recovers from the trauma of the surgery itself and recovers to full health, a task far more complicated than can possibly even be understood, let alone recreated, by even the most erudite scientist.

What are acupuncture needles? What does poking someone with a tiny shard of metal actually “do?” I like to think of it this way. A human being is a non-stop “event,” a happening that, like a river, is never the same twice. You are far more like a river than a “solid object” if such a thing can even be said to exist. Every cell in your body, all the way down into your bones, is completely replaced in the course of seven years. You are not the molecules of water in this stream – you are the ripples on the surface of the water. You are the dance of life itself. It is within this flowing that the acupuncturist practices their art – changing the flow with a few judiciously placed needles in much the same way that a stream might be changed by moving a few stones just beneath the rippling surface of the water. This is the art of acupuncture – to tend to the flowing of the patient’s stream.

Don’t get me wrong. It takes great skill to learn how to move those stones, and to know which stones need to moved. Ours is a profession that offers endless possibility to become better, to grow and to evolve as a practitioner. To quote Shudo Denmai:

“Acupuncture is a profession in which we use a thin piece of wire in an attempt to cure conditions which do not respond to medicines. Without a doubt, this is an extremely challenging profession.”

Ultimately though, it is the body’s ability to self-organize and self-correct that brings about healing. No matter how skilled you are, needling a corpse will yield the same results as needling your couch. We are in the business of tending to life, and there is no limit to the skill we can apply to working with this wondrous energy. But, ultimately, it is the life-force itself that heals. It was Hippocrates that said, “Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease.” For me this statement, more than any other, defines my job.

"All Things Bright and Beautiful" by James Herriot, St. Martin's Griffin (August 1, 2004)

Finding Effective Acupuncture Points" by Shudo Denmai, Eastland Press 2003 pg. 237