also one of the various forms of commy torture, acupuncture can be used to both extract vital information and cure disease simultaneously. (who knew?) so here i am finally doing the only thing that i really came to china for. well kinda, it was one of my major goals and i felt that my trip had been worthwhile after accomplishing this feat (for free..) i got needles (which i kept and will be glad to use on you, reader, when i get home) inserted into my arm near the elbow, my hand, my shins (in the muscle where you get shin splints) and on the inside of my ankle; these acu-points are pretty commonly used ones and were supposedly treating my allergies (i told the docs that if they cured my allergies i would drop out of medical school, move to china and dedicate my life to chinese medicine..) for some reason (probably for fun) they used a different technique to insert the needles into me. instead of the usual needle insertion (like when getting a shot) they put the needles in this plastic sleeve that was about half an inch shorter than the needle, set the sleeve on my skin with the needle extending out of the top, and then rammed it with their palm to jab the needle in with the plastic sleeve stopping their hand after the needle went in half an inch (sufficient explanation?) anyways, it's a good thing that this just excited me further, i think it would have freaked a good number of people out...then, just to really up the ante, i said that they could hook me up to the electricity as well (they will frequently wrap wires around the end of the needles and turn up the juice so that your muscles twitch pretty good, {on the right side of the pic}) i will admit that after about 10 minutes of all of this i had had enough and took off the electrical stim...anyways, i wouldn't say that i am cured or even that i am any better but to give them the benefit of the doubt i think this is the kind of thing that they recommend doing regularly over a long period of time...anyways, these docs really believe in this stuff, and some of it does work, they have treatments for everything and the doctors even claimed that a hospital in southern china cured 40 people of their SARS by only using acupuncture..