Sticking to an Ancient Art of Easing Pain : Acupuncture Students Practice Healing Methods

Lang Duong lay still as a board while the young lab-coated student stuck several needles into her face. Staring impassively at the ceiling, she explains through an interpreter what had brought her to this place.

“My face was paralyzed,” Duong, 43, says. “I couldn’t eat.”

Robert Lupson, 59, came after years of frustration in dealing with lupus, a disease of the immune system.

And 11-year-old Jonathan Davis ended up here after spending much of his life in hospitals being treated for asthma.

“We tried everything else and it didn’t help,” says his mother, Bonnie, 34.

The three are among the dozens of patients treated each week at South Baylo University, Orange County’s only certified school for acupuncturists. Here, much like would-be barbers in a barber college, students practice their skills in obliging volunteers who pay token fees for the privilege. There’s one minor difference: This “barber college” portions out punctures.

“You have to make sure that they take all the needles out,” quipped Jonathan, lying on his stomach with six pins protruding from his back and two from his hands. “Once they left one in and I found it in the car.” He did not get injured.

But such oversights are rare, Baylo administrators insist.

Licensed by the state of California to teach the ancient Chinese healing art of acupuncture, the university offers an intensive program overseen by a staff of experienced acupuncturists, many of whom are also trained in Western medicine.

Dr. San Hong Hwang, the university’s dean, practiced medicine in Taiwan until the late-1970s. And Dr. Yu You, the school’s clinical supervisor, served as the chief cardiologist at a hospital in Shanghai, China, before coming to the United States in 1985.

“She’s the only doctor I trust,” Jonathan said of You. “She just throws (those needles) in.”

Founded 15 years ago in Los Angeles, the university is the brainchild of David J. Park, a Korean-born economics professor who began dabbling in Oriental philosophy during the 1960s. Originally the school taught only political economy and management.

But in the early 1980s, Park--who lives in Orange and teaches at Cal Poly Pomona--made an important discovery: namely, he says, that “you can’t separate Oriental philosophy from Oriental medicine. Oriental medicine is the best expression of Oriental philosophy.”

So in 1982, the main campus moved to Garden Grove and began focusing on acupuncture and herbs.

Inheritors of a practice that traces its roots back more than 2,500 years in China, acupuncturists view the body as a bioelectric system with 14 meridians, or energy channels, running through it.

Pain and illness, they believe, is caused by disruptions of the energy flow along those meridians, which contain 361 acupuncture points. By using needles to stimulate those points along the channels, acupuncturists maintain, they can balance a person’s energy flow and thus restore good health.

Conditions that can be helped through acupuncture, according to You, include back, shoulder and knee pains, headaches, multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue syndrome, stress and, occasionally even AIDS.

About 75% of the patients receiving acupuncture recover completely from their symptoms, You says, while most others are helped in some way. About 5%, she says, do not respond at all.

Western doctors have generally pooh-poohed such claims.

Yet recent research suggests that acupuncture may indeed block pain, especially for patients with chronic back problems, arthritis and rheumatism. Some Western researchers have attempted to explain the phenomenon by theorizing that the needles trigger the release of endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers.

Whatever the case, South Baylo University today boasts a student body of 250--about 60% of them Asian--most of whom take at least three years and spend up to $20,000 to complete the 220 units required for a master’s degree in Oriental medicine. To become licensed acupuncturists, they then must pass an examination administered by the state.

“I’m very satisfied with the program,” said Patricia Jackson, 34, a native of Peru who visited acupuncture schools all over the world before enrolling at Baylo. “This is the closest we have to what’s happening in (China).”

Among the requirements for graduation from the university--located in a 15,000-square-foot former elementary school leased from the Garden Grove Unified School District at the corner of Magnolia Street and Chapman Avenue--are courses in biology, chemistry, pathology, physics, psychology, physiology, pharmacology, endocrinology and Western diagnosis, as well as herbs, nutrition and, of course, acupuncture.

At the heart of the program is the experience gained by the students while working at the university’s bustling 10-room clinic, where the waiting room is crammed with at least 15 patients a day clamoring in a smorgasbord of languages to be stuck with needles under the close supervision of You.

They come for a variety of reasons.

Most say they are fed up with Western doctors who, in many cases, have been unable to significantly relieve them of long-suffered ailments. Many say they can’t afford the $50 to $80 fees charged by licensed acupuncturists for sessions that, while partially covered by MediCal, are not paid for by most private insurance plans. (At Baylo University, sessions cost $15 each, plus the cost of the needles.)

And many longtime patients say that, after overcoming their initial fear of the unknown, the treatments have dramatically improved their conditions.

Duong, the woman with the paralyzed face, says that three months of acupuncture have enabled her to start eating again and regain some control of her facial muscles. “It’s a lot better now,” she said. “This is a good place.”

Lupson, a patient since 1989, says he is now able to lead a relatively normal life despite his lupus. “My kidneys have improved, my breathing has improved, my lungs are better than when I was diagnosed and I haven’t been in the hospital (for a very long time),” said Lupson, who, in addition to the weekly acupuncture treatments, takes 21 herbs a day. “I feel a thousand percent better. This place has saved my life.”

And Jonathan, whose asthma attacks used to land him in the hospital about once a month, says he hasn’t been admitted for three years now because of the acupuncture treatments. “If it weren’t for this place, we’d be in bad shape,” his mother, Bonnie, says. “He can even keep animals now.”

So how does an 11-year-old deal with being regularly transformed into a human pincushion?

“The first time I was really scared,” Jonathan admits. “But I got used to it the second day.”