I still get surprised on a weekly basis by how amazing (acupuncture) is, even though I’ve been doing it for fifteen years. When someone tells you they’ve started painting again, or reading, or they’ve just had the best night’s sleep of their life, or they just feel more connected to their family, or the environment… if they’ve rediscovered joy… that makes it really worthwhile. I’ve seen quite a few really cool things that tell you how effective this medicine can be. I once was in a village in Cambodia where they had zero healthcare, and I remember a 43 year old lady who couldn’t use her arm as a result of a stroke ––she’d lost her job, her house, her husband had left and she was sleeping on a friend’s sofa, because she couldn’t access the health care she needed. I treated her every day for 10, 11 days, and every day she would get more movement in her arm. With acupuncture, you can reconnect the necessary neurological pathways, and by the end of it, she had 60% of her movement back. You don’t often get to treat someone that intensively, daily, in a normal clinical environment, but I got to see how it’s hugely effective in such a short time. Another time, I was treating kids at an orphanage in Thailand, and there was a girl who had been burping every fifteen seconds for about a year. The orphanage was feeding the kids chilli flakes on every meal, and she’d become really inflamed because of it. We worked on some points to help with regurgitation and to turn down all the heat, and when she came back to see me, she was grinning ear-to-ear and not burping once. It’s really incredible.