Mind, Body, & Spirit
Maintaining A Balance of Health & Wellness

Pinning Down What Ails You

by David Banyas

Walking into the offices of Douglas Kiehl was as relaxing as wading into a hot spring. The air was warm, still and sweet. Instead of the latest song represented through Musak, the peaceful sound of Asian strings played distantly from overhead speakers. The usual, eye-straining fluorescent lighting of ordinary doctor’s offices was thankfully absent and replaced by tasteful incandescence. Serenity, tranquility, and calm cascaded over the whole room and any of us within it. Whatever apprehensions I may have had about my first acupuncture treatment seemed to vanish like an ice cube in a hot drink.

Kiehl is one of about a half dozen doctors in Central PA who are trained and qualified to administer Chinese medicine and acupuncture. He earned his Masters Degree from Penn State, one of his doctorates from the Eastern Oriental Med School in Korea, and the other from the International University for Complementary Medicine. He is even a Professor in the Okazaki School for Japanese arts. All of this education has granted Kiehl an expertise and reputation that is renowned throughout the alternative medicine circles of Pennsylvania and the neighboring states. His wife, Jane (affectionately called “Girl” by Kiehl), who runs the popular holistic store Herbals On York in Carlisle (www.herbalsonyork.com), told a story of an Ohio couple that traveled hundreds of miles on word of mouth about Kiehl. They arrived well after hours, but, as is telling of Kiehl’s personality, he visited them at their hotel room to administer an acupuncture treatment at no extra charge.

Acupuncture is a mere part of the entire Chinese medicinal philosophy. In the approved manner, Chinese prescriptions include a diet of “hot, cold, cool, and warm” foods, an herbal formula that strengthens the body’s reception to treatment, moxibustion, which is a heat application treatment on the acupuncture points with the use of an herb called “Moxa” (Kiehl used mugwort on me), as well as the actual acupuncture needling.

An acupuncture treatment consists of strategically placing pins, each surgically manufactured, sterilized, and individually packaged, along “meridians” that run the full length of the body and affect all of the organs that lie on them. These meridians carry what is called “chi”, or the body’s energy. Like arteries, meridians can get blocked and will result in the decline or failure of fully functioning body processes. They run in pairs traveling up the front of the body and down the back. Tai Chi, the slow and deliberate martial art seen most often performed by one person or a group of people, is a stretching exercise for all of these meridians to promote health.

There are lung meridians, heart meridians, bladder, liver, stomach and kidney meridians, to name a few, strung through the body. The exact placement of the pin along the meridian, the depth at which it is set, and the angle at which it enters the meridian are all very important to the treatment of the ailment. Kiehl says that the biggest problem people have when understanding Chinese medicine is how a treatment is almost never located around the affected area. “The stomach meridian starts under the eye, passes through the abdomen, and terminates in the big toe,” said Kiehl. “Different spots along that line affect health differently.” Acute and chronic diseases like allergies and asthma, emotional distress, head, neck, and back pain, addictions, weight control, sexual dysfunction, and just about anything are successfully treatable through Chinese medicine.

Chinese medicine is 50 times older than our traditional medicine. It is the result of thousands of years of study and careful tradition. Its aim has always been to realign the body with its own natural healing processes without using inorganic substances or unnecessary surgery. “Why get in there if you don’t have to?” asks Kiehl.

After explaining the concepts of the treatment to me and what he was going to do, Kiehl laid me on a padded table in a room with muted ambience. He raised both my pant legs to the knee, measured down with his fingers on the outside of both knees and wrapped me in a sheet to keep me warm. I wondered how he was going to put a pin in through the sheet. “Do they feel okay?” asked Kiehl. The needles, one in either leg where Kiehl says is one of the points that “reset” the general meridian flow, were already in and I felt no pain. He gave me a breathing exercise to do for the next twenty minutes, put headphones with the sound of trickling water and far-off Asian instruments playing, and left the room. I tried to sense the pins and, in my subconscious, did, but only as one can sense an emotion or an opinion. Nothing was physically notable.

That alone might have been enough to amaze a newbie, but the evidence that an ancient and wiser realm lay in Dr. Kiehl’s hands was how I felt afterward. Going in, I was emotionally exhausted and hadn’t had any more than four hours of sleep for three days. On my way out, I felt rested, peaceful, and couldn’t stop smiling for no reason at all. I gushed at everyone about my experience until I consciously found myself obnoxious: a bit like now.

Douglas Kiehl, MD(MA), OMD, R.Ac, can be reached at 243-8500.