My foot twitched nervously as I sat alone in the quiet waiting room. I was nestled between a sage-colored wall and a stack of tattered health magazines. I watched the ladies behind the reception counter whisper to one another and I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t anxious. But I was. Needles were fine when they were used for vaccinations or blood tests, but seemingly arbitrarily jabbing them into my flesh? I wasn’t buying it. Just when I was about to bolt, Dr. Khosh walked out to greet me. He shook my hand and smiled warmly.

“Don’t be nervous,” he said, and led me back to his office.

Alternative medicine is the use of unconventional techniques to alleviate discomfort and illness, without disrupting the body’s natural flow of energy. This means swapping cough syrup for herbs and anti-anxiety drugs for meditation.

Alternative medicine consists of ancient healing processes that have been in practice for thousands of years. It is considered any practice that deviates from orthodox medical treatments, such as prescription drugs and surgery, and can be used to replace or used alongside standard medical care. Alternative medical practices include acupuncture, acupressure, chiropractic, herbal medicine, meditation and yoga.

Seeing the whole picture

Shanna Nguyen always felt like something was missing from her pre-medicine studies at KU.

“I didn’t want to be a conventional doctor and I didn’t want to do conventional practices,” the Kansas alumna says. “I constantly asked my professors, ‘What are my alternatives? What can I do in the 21st century to better the health care system?’”

After graduation, she skipped medical school and looked into other options. While she was a student at KU in the mid-’90s, alternative medicine was considered an afterthought to traditional medicine, but she found a niche in alternative medicine education on the East Coast. She now attends the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut for a master’s degree in acupuncture. Her concern with the health care and insurance industries led her to believe the general public was being deprived of proper medical care. She says modern medicine forces patients to adhere to an “industrial complex” that uses invasive procedures and unnecessary chemicals that don’t treat the body as one interdependent entity.

Alternative medicine focuses on holistic healing. According to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, the body is made up of 14 meridians, along which qi (pronounced “chi”) flows. Qi is vital energy that is essential for living a healthy life. If there is pain or a blockage in the body, the qi flow is disrupted. Alternative medicine works to keep qi flowing freely along patients’ meridians at all times.

* * *

“May I see your tongue?”

Dr. Khosh furrowed his brow as he stared at my mouth.

“You have a qi spleen deficiency,” he said.

He told me I had severe discolorations on the back of my tongue, which led him to say that the qi flowing through my spleen was blocked. Dr. Khosh explained to me that the human body is a huge jigsaw puzzle and all the pieces have to fit together perfectly in order for it to work to its full potential. If one piece is missing or broken, the puzzle isn’t complete.

* * *

Kristie Martin can tell you if you’re congested, if you’re wearing the wrong size of shoe, or if you’re having digestive problems just by glancing at the bottom of your foot.

Martin is a licensed reflexologist and the owner of A Quiet Sole Reflexology in Overland Park. Reflexology is the practice of applying pressure to various parts of the feet or hands that stimulate correlating organs. She says reflexology shouldn’t be confused with a simple foot or hand massage. The bottoms of the feet and palms of the hands act as roadmaps for the rest of the body, and by stimulating those areas of the feet and hands, energy can flow more easily to other parts of the body. While acupuncture clears qi by stimulating meridians with needle pressure, reflexology clears qi by stimulating pressure points on the feet and hands.

“As cliché as it sounds, the soles are the windows to the soul,” she says. “If a client doesn’t tell me something about their health, I’ll find it on their feet.”

Martin sees clients with a range of health concerns and oftentimes works with people undergoing cancer treatments. She currently has a client in the midst of chemotherapy for leukemia, and regular reflexology sessions help relieve pain from her patient’s chemotherapy side effects, such as nausea, fatigue and muscle pain. In fact, the First International Symposium on Reflexology and Cancer was held last October, and reflexologists from around the world discussed reflexology’s effect in aiding cancer treatment symptoms.

“I know I can’t cure her with reflexology. But I’m helping her body heal itself,” Martin says.

Dara Sims, Olathe senior, notices immediate results after her regular reflexology treatments. She says that after looking at her feet, her reflexologist noticed she had sinus congestion. After the reflexologist stimulated the areas of her feet connected to her sinuses and lungs (usually the second toe and central area above the arch), she felt her congestion lift. Sims also noticed nausea during her refexology treatments.

“If you sit up too fast you can end up throwing up. [Reflexology] stimulates all of your organs and bodily functions,” Sims says.

A different approach

When Dr. Khosh led me back to his office, I wasn’t greeted with cold medical tools or lab coats, but rather a cozy, warmly lit room. I sat down on a cushy leather couch, and Dr. Khosh asked me about myself. He asked about my eating habits, my stress levels, my lifestyle. He asked how much time I spent on my feet and how many hours of sleep I was getting.

He asked about my balance and any sort of pain—physical, emotional or spiritual—I was experiencing. It felt more like a therapy session than a consultation. My fear and anxiety quickly melted away as I spilled to Dr. Khosh about my chronic neck and shoulder pain and my severe allergies.

The actual acupuncture room was anything but the oftentimes intimidating exam rooms I was used to visiting in a doctor’s office. There were no boxes of latex gloves, blood pressure monitors or tongue depressors—not even a stethoscope around Dr. Khosh’s neck—just a bed, a peaceful painting of an ocean on the wall and a tray of glistening needles.

He told me to lie on my stomach. I barely felt the prick when he pressed six thin needles into the back of my neck and ankles—I felt more relaxed than anything else. Dr. Khosh turned off the light and told me to breathe deeply and let my body heal.

He stopped to put a blanket on my feet before walking out the door.

“I don’t want you to get cold.”

Because alternative medicine relies on holistic healing, practitioners examine every aspect of a person’s physiology and mental health—even if it’s just to alleviate a headache. Extensive consultations are necessary before an initial visit.

Amanda Assaf, Wichita junior, became interested in alternative medicine after she started regularly doing yoga and began receiving acupuncture for shoulder pain.

“I think that the fact that I was becoming more conscious of my body made me not want to put anything into it that would disturb its natural balance,” she says.

She says her pain subsided immediately after her first treatment and she began understanding the importance of natural healing.

Placebo

Because alternative medicine practices have only been included in the Western medical realm since the 20th century, they have generated skepticism from both the general public and the medical community. Though acupuncture needles have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as medical tools, most herbs and herbal supplements have not been approved because of high testing costs of the FDA and many alternative medicine practitioners’ inability to receive patents on their products.

Some think alternative medicine is based on nothing but a placebo effect. I’ll admit finding medical evidence to back up the claims of alternative medical success was nearly impossible. Qi and meridians are not defined as anatomical processes; they are explained as more of a guidance tool for practitioners. It’s clear that people have found huge success from alternative medicine, but figuring out how exactly that success is attained is a little fuzzier.

It wasn’t until the next afternoon after my appointment that I noticed my shoulders felt better. I sat through a lecture for the first time in years without feeling a twinge of pain shoot down my scapula. I immediately wondered if it was all in my head because I just couldn’t find a way to explain the absence of discomfort. A pain that had become a sort of hated companion in my life was just … gone.

Shanna Nguyen is aware of the stigma and assumption of a placebo effect attached to alternative medicine.

“People label it as some sort of witchcraft or voodoo practice,” she says. “And I do think about a possible placebo effect, like we’re just helping the person believe they can help themselves.”

But its followers swear alternative medicine has life-changing abilities and month-long waiting lists at acupuncture centers, chiropractors and reflexologists give evidence that there may be something to all of this “voodoo witchcraft.”

The 2007 National Health Interview Survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and released last December, indicated that four out of 10, or 182 million, U.S. adults and children had used some form of alternative medicine treatments in the past year, compared with the 2002 survey where three out of 10, or 101 million people, sought alternative medicine care.

Sims cannot pinpoint how her reflexology treatments have provided her with relief, but she knows something positive is happening to her body.

“I don’t know how to explain it other than saying that I simply feel healthier,” she says. “And when I do get sick I feel like the reflexology, through the stimulation of organs, helps me to recover quickly and without medications.”

Many practitioners strive to combine alternative medicine with traditional, Western medicine. Kim Nguyen, a licensed acupuncturist and herbalist, works for East West Medicine in Falls Church, Virginia, where an M.D. works downstairs and licensed acupuncturists work upstairs.

“My goal and vision is that they can exist is the same realm, offering health care services to the public,” she says.

She says having a medical doctor under the same roof has given her exposure to traditional medicine, which enhances her own alternative medicine practices. Medical care should always be the choice of the patient. She says it’s not up to any particular field to decide what path of healing is best for a person.

Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, opened its Integrative Pain Management clinic six years ago and offers patients alternative medicine options such as acupuncture, reflexology, therapeutic massage and hypnosis as an adjunct to their traditional medical treatments. Joy Weydert, M.D. and chief of the clinic, says patients’ underlying problems aren’t often addressed with medical care alone. She says alternative medicine brings balance to a person’s life by attending to physical, mental, emotional and spiritual components of his or her being.

The beauty of alternative medicine is that it is what it says it is: an alternative choice. Health is not black and white and the path to wellness may require different options and different attitudes.

After talking to Kristie Martin about her reflexology business and hearing story after story of people finding relief from her services, she said to me before we hung up, “You have a promising future, Madeline. I can just feel it.”

Pain or no pain, I’ll take that kind of reassurance over an immunization any day.