Chapter Nine: Pins and Needles

After a lull in the project of late due to several circumstances, I was eager to get back into the swing of things as soon as I could find a new skill. And yet, when offered a lesson in acupuncture I was more than a little hesitant. I'm hardly needle-phobic, but the idea of pushing sharp pin after sharp pin into someone's body in order to relieve pain seemed completely paradoxical. With a series of cancelled offers behind me though, I wasn't in a position to turn anyone down, and so on a cold Friday morning I found myself in Borehamwood, permitting a small Chinese woman to stab me in the back twelve times.
I had been contacted by Dr. Sue Liu a week or two before our meeting, and from her website had discovered that she, with 27 years of experience, was more than qualified to give me a lesson. After meeting her on the high street, I was taken to her office - a small, unfussy room - and got talking about the intricacies of using people as human pin-cushions.
Acupuncture is of course more than a sporadic poke of a paying customer, a therapy with uncertain origins and debatable results. Theoretically, stimulating any number of the several hundred pressure points over the body can relieve tension, alleviate stress, or even cure addictions, with a point near one's ear lobe supposedly influencing one's desire to smoke. Pins are used for the best effect, but with children a simple pinch will achieve a similar result since acupuncture probably isn't perceived as a good excuse for child abuse.

The inimitable Dr. Sue, acupuncture expert.

Sitting in Dr. Sue's office, I was talked through the logistics of the therapy, which had taken her more than two decades to perfect. For acupuncture is all about the combination of pure effort - learning the hundreds of points and the expertise - and an awareness of the individual. Each one of Dr. Sue's clients require different help, have different pains, possess differing degrees of skin thickness (apparently you don't want to go too deep into the tissue). With such complicated considerations, I knew I wasn't going to be leaving an expert, but I was eager to get more of a taste of what the craft was about.
Of course, letting me perform acupuncture on a complete stranger was never going to be on the cards, so once I had been talked through the logistics of the craft I offered myself as a guinea pig. After checking my blood pressure and having filled in the obligatory medical form, I lay on her table and tried to relax as she kneaded my back to find the areas of most tension. Deciding that my my neck and lower back were the places requiring the most work, she got to work. Face down on the table, I could hear the ominous preparation of the as she ripped open the individually packaged needles. Starting on my neck, I felt a sudden sharp pain, and then another, and then another. Twelve needles later and I could only imagine what my back looked like, although the sight of it would probably have made me throw up through the hole in which my face was placed. Once the needles were all in though, I was able to relax and imagine the benefits of the exercise. After a prolonged silence - I have no idea how long I lay there, I may have even fallen asleep at one point - Dr. Sue pulled the needles out (see right. That's my blood. She could clone me if she so wishes) and treated me to some other of her specialities, like tuina and cupping, a process involving spherical glass jars used to remove tension from tissue. Following her impressive tour de force of therapy, the session was complete, and I begrudgingly got up, feeling relaxed and refreshed.
Depending on the case, acupuncture therapy can be used from a single session to several a year, and so an aching back is going to take more than one quick meeting. It has to be said, though, that I awoke the next morning feeling as fit as a fiddle but, as usual, with nowhere to go. My lesson in acupuncture had been a reeducation in the pleasure-pain principal, and while it's clearly not for everyone due to widespread natural aversion to needles and alternative therapies, it's undoubtedly not without merit. So if the winter has brought out the old woman in you and you're aches and pains are becoming intolerable, I recommend you give a thought to my new welfare advisor, Dr. Sue.