In With the Needle, Out With the Pain : Medicine: Skeptics may call acupuncture a lot of hooey, but the 3,000-year-old form of Chinese medicine is gaining wider acceptance.

Acupuncturist Peter G. Marinakis has a lot to say about “balanced energy,” “quality of life” and “regaining control” of health care--not typical talk from someone treating allergies, headaches and tendinitis.

Needles in the foot to ease pain in the head? Kidneys and bladders controlling mental clarity? Life energy coursing through the body like rivers through the earth?

To patients out of tune with what some call the up-and-coming alternative medicine of the ‘90s, it might sound like a lot of hooey.

But Marinakis, president of the American Assn. of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, says that the 3,000-year-old form of Chinese medicine is gaining popularity and wider acceptance.

A recent Time-CNN poll found that about 30% of people questioned have tried some form of unconventional therapy, half of them within the past year.

Patients’ new reliance on alternative medicine to prevent illness and maintain health reflects a growing dissatisfaction with conventional medicine’s treatment of the disease, as opposed to its source, Marinakis says.

A practitioner at the Acupuncture Center of Annapolis and the Center for Traditional Acupuncture in Columbia, Md., Marinakis would like federal health legislation to recognize acupuncture as viable medicine--in conjunction with traditional medicine. Such legislation, he said, would allow acupuncture to be covered by federal health insurance programs.

Marinakis says that acupuncture works where traditional medicine fails, treating the patient as a whole person, rather than as a sore shoulder or hip.

Although prescriptions of pills or surgery work well for acute diseases, “70% of the ills have psychosomatic origins,” Marinakis says. “There’s not a whole lot physicians can do until the disease is manifested.”

Acupuncture can relieve the pain of age- and lifestyle-related diseases like arthritis, lower-back pain, high blood pressure, coronary-artery disease and ulcers and also can help chemotherapy, AIDS or HIV patients feel more comfortable, he says.

The former psychotherapist says that it is hard to describe exactly what patients go through during one of his $50 sessions. He uses sterilized hair-thin needles to stimulate points along the body, through which healthful qi energy flows. The energy flows through 12 main channels, or meridians, connected to specific organs and body functions.

“When the qi in the body is full and moving properly, health is promoted,” says Ann Marinakis, his wife and the director of the Annapolis center. “When the qi is blocked, stagnant or moving in a disharmonious way, illness can begin. Even everyday stresses like deadlines and disappointments can disrupt the harmonious movement of qi .”

“It’s difficult to describe how you feel,” says Peter Marinakis, who undergoes the treatments himself.

“People’s disease is caused by everything that goes on around us,” he says. “We try to give people a way to seek their own balance. It’s not simply that we put needles in and a transformation takes place. People are willing to tolerate the destructive nature around them much less.”