What follows is my Albuquerque Tribune column published today, Thursday, May 26, 2005:
SORE WINNER
My left arm gave me conniptions until I spurned a doc’s knife and found another healer.
By Arthur Alpert
Growing up Jewish, I learned – no, I knew - that doctors were gods and their medicine, beyond question. No more – in regaining my left arm, I have just lost that faith.
Two years ago, you see, the shoulder rebelled, perhaps because of decades of pitching softball. Whatever the cause, I suffered intermittent world-class pain. Even fitting my arm into the sleeve of a sport jacket made wince and I couldn’t wield the back brush in the tub.
A medical doctor helpfully ruled out rotator cuff. MRI was next, but the surgeon who scanned the pictures furrowed his brow and said he’d just need to "get in there."
As the operation neared, I worried. Natural-born cowardice, yes, but also because they said no local anesthesia. Gulp! They would deaden all of me.
Still, I wanted the pain gone.
With two days to go, I revisited the surgeon. Will I regain normal function? Not certain. Recuperation? Three months in a sling, minimally. Hmm. No guarantees. Dependency, too. I called it off.
Ever since, I’ve babied the arm, learning to don a blazer gingerly and to use my right to pick up the pitcher of apple juice and clean the mirror after shaving.
But I’m getting older and if I don’t use my body I’ll lose it. I need exercise. Unfortunately, I hate exercise. I love competition though. I could enjoy racquetball or basketball (only incidentally aerobic) if I had my arm back.
Enter buddy Mike Santullo of talk radio fame. St. Mike, as I’ll henceforth address him, sends me to his acupuncturist-chiropractor.
I find Dr. Der-Shyun Liu in a drab former residence on San Mateo near Constitution. His Taiwanese accent is thick but he’s friendly, smiles a lot, so I follow him into a dark room featuring electronic gadgets and wall charts. Lab décor by Boris Karloff?
Standing behind me, Dr. Liu wields a flame. Suddenly, my shoulder is wearing seven glasses suctioned on.
"First, we will get rid of the pain," he says. Well, somebody’s confident.
When he removes the beer steins my shoulder is warm. He next employs electrified acupuncture. Having inserted needles into my shoulder, Dr. Liu ties them to a machine so they rotate in a "massage." Twenty minutes later, he hands me the needles. "Souvenir." Finally, briefly, he uses ultrasound on the joint.
I stand and move my arm. Up, down, backward. There’s no pain. No pain!
Dr. Liu tells me to test the shoulder by playing ball. What? Play, he insists. If it hurts, he says, "you will tell me where and I’ll fix it."
I hit the gym. Accustomed to favoring the arm, I’m afraid but eventually shoot baskets. My ego writhes in pain – I cannot make a shot - but the shoulder holds up.
I’ve since had three identical treatments and shot around twice more. The arm’s weak but not painful. Dr. Liu says he reduced the inflammation of bursitis and tendonitis, sending blood and oxygen to the shoulder.
So why did I dilly-dally so long? That childhood reverence for Western medicine blinded me.
And why did my caring, skilled MDs think "knife" first? I guess their vision, too, is narrow.
Not Dr. Liu, not judging from the anatomical charts on his office walls – both Chinese and Western. He has a wide-angled lens.
Alpert is a semi-retired journalist in Albuquerque. Email him at: ArthurAlpert@swcp.com. His column runs the fourth Thursday of the month.