After 23 years in practice, I remember faces more than treatments. I remember how often someone came in for a sore back or a stubborn headache and, somewhere in the quiet of the treatment room, said something they had not planned to say; something with little to do with the complaint that brought them in and everything to do with why they were really there.
I think of a veteran I treated years ago. He came in limping, complaining of a bad back that just would not quit; years of hard carrying, he said. His pulse was rapid, a little wiry. We talked through the usual things: sleep, diet, the morning ache. Needles went into the ears, abdomen and a few distal points on the legs, and the room went quiet. Then, his eyes still closed, he said, “It’s not really the back. Not anymore.”
For the next 20 minutes he told me about a man he had served with overseas, long ago, and could not save; a grief he had carried alone for years, lodged in his body like shrapnel. When the needles came out, his shoulders had dropped. The limp was still there, but something heavier had shifted. He looked at me with wet eyes and said, “I think I can breathe again.” The needles had not removed the memory. They had made room for it to be witnessed.
It happened that way more times than I can count, with people who had come in for something else entirely: a knee, a migraine, an ache they could not place. The complaint was the door; what walked through it, once the room went quiet, was the thing they had carried alone. The words were always different. The relief that followed was always the same. None of this made the body’s pain less real; easing it was honest, sufficient work, and for many that was the whole of what they needed.
I used to think the treatment began when I chose the points and herbs. Eventually I came to believe it began the moment another person felt safe enough to tell the truth. The needles and herbs did real work, but they were rarely the thing that mattered most.
Every practitioner who stays long enough reaches the same recognition: We are not, in the end, only in the business of points and herbal prescriptions. We practice a medicine of attention. In a problem-coded world, an unhurried hour in which a person is truly listened to can be the most therapeutic thing they meet all week.
Over the years I came to think that our task is less to impose healing than to clear what stands in its way. The needle is an invitation. The herb is an invitation. So is the unhurried question. We are not the source of the healing; we are its witnesses and, now and then, its catalysts.
That lesson did not stay in the clinic. When I retired from practice, I did not retire from the work; I only changed rooms. I coach now, young athletes, and I keep company with the dying as a hospice volunteer. Acupuncture, coaching, the bedside: I have come to see them as three dialects of one language, each a way of helping a person reconnect with their own vitality at the moment they most need it.
I am writing this at a hard hour for our profession. Schools are closing. Graduates carry debt the field struggles to justify. We are still fighting, decades on, to be recognized, reimbursed, and integrated, and the fight is wearing. A younger practitioner could be forgiven for wondering whether they chose a vanishing path. I won’t pretend those pressures aren’t real or that good people aren’t being hurt by them.
But I want to say something to the colleague who is tired and unsure, because I wish someone had said it plainly to me. We are defending one of the last places in healthcare where a person is met as a whole human being. And that work, once it is in you, does not stop at the edge of the clinic. It follows you all the way to the end.
I know this because of where it has led me. In hospice, I sit with people in their final hours; often past speaking, past hearing in any ordinary way. There is no pulse worth reading then, no point to choose, no herb to prescribe. There is nothing left to fix at all – only the willingness to be present. And so I lean close to their ear and whisper the one truth no treatment of mine ever could: Everything is OK. You can go now.
That is the medicine with everything stripped away: no needles, no herbs, no theory, no name for the technique. Only one person, staying with another, to the end. It was the medicine when I began, with a needle in my hand. It is the medicine now, when I hold nothing at all.
So, when I hear it said that our profession may be fading, I understand the worry, but I cannot share it. The schools may shrink, the very name may not outlast us. But people will go on suffering in ways no treatment fully reaches, and they will go on needing someone willing to sit close and stay until they are no longer alone in it. That need has outlived every system that ever tried to replace it. It will outlive our fear of disappearing, too.
That is the work. It is reason enough to keep showing up. It always was.
Fertility acupuncture sometimes gets presented as a narrow protocol: a handful of reproductive points applied uniformly across patients. What this case reinforced for me: The most powerful work happens when we read the whole picture. The hormone data, the constitutional tendency, the sleep, the digestion, and the menstrual pattern, so we can treat the environment the ovaries live inside.
Mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) affects more than 15% of the U.S. population but evades most practitioners’ radar. Just five years ago, it wasn’t even on my radar, despite already having 20 years of experience as a clinician at that time. The more I dug (similar to leaky gut and post-COVID syndrome), the more I found my patients were suffering from this disorder.
The motivation behind our practice of medicine is important, impacting not just our experience but also the experiences of those we treat. It is perhaps for this reason that the aspiration to help not just some, but all beings heal, has historically been an important part of the medical tradition. To explain this, we need to consider how medicine is interwoven with other social domains.