Poking Away the Pain by Shamona Harnett

Shim Goldberg spent a year searching for a way to banish his pain.
After taking a hard bang to the arm, the Winnipeg auto salesman suffered from shrp and agonizing twinges that shot from his elbow all the way down to his fingers. The diagnosis? An injured tendon and ligaments. The cure? None. Medical professionals told him he would have to put up with his injury and hope it would heal itself.
The paid was excruciating. I couldn't imagine living with that," says Goldberg. "It sapped all the strength out of me. It was just constant. I couldn't even sleep."
His life began to turn around last fall when Goldberg spotted a sign for Nan's Acupuncture Therapy Centre.
"I was driving down the street not feeling too well. And the sign caught my eye.
"It was like a sign from God. I just had to go in," he says. "I thought this is the place, this is the time."
Over the next hour, Nan Mah, a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, inserted several hair-thin needles int specific pressurepoints on his body. She combined this acupuncture with cupping (when a vacuum cup is placed on soft tissue) and Chinese massage.
By the third treatment, Goldberg said his pain was dissipating. By the fourth or fifth session, he regained use of his arm. He also acquired a new respect for alternative medicine- and for Mah.
[Mah] has got the magic in her," says Goldberg, adding he would have never given alternative medicine a second thought before his injury., " She gives people hope. It's obvious she knows something that lots of conventional doctors don't know.
Mah has practiced traditional Chinese medicine for 18 yeyars, and says she has successfully used acupuncture to treat conditions ranging from overeating and menopause to sciatica and migraine headaches."People are tired of taking Tylenol 3s for their pain," says Mah, adding may new patients limp into her clinic on prescription painkillers.
Three decades ago, most Western doctors shrugged off acupuncture as hocus-pocus. They argue that using needles to redirect the flow of an invisible healing force- classical Chinese acupuncture philosophy- was unscientific fluff. Read More about acupuncture for pain relief.