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A series of needles, inserted into my scalp, forms a thin Mohawk. Across the table, a friend who is afraid of needles sits still, closes his eyes and breathes through his nose. Ash Yoon perches on a chair so she can lower the pins, each the thickness of a hair, into his scalp.
Of all the things one might do after a glass of Malbec and a bowl of chili — washing dishes, having another drink, gabbing — this is not on my usual itinerary.
But when acupuncturist Yoon and her colleague Naomi Frank had asked, “Do you guys have back pain right now?” we were all like, “Obvs.”
I’m no evangelist for Chinese medicine. But it was once my saviour. While working as a cook, removing a 20-kilogram roasting tray of bones from the oven, my spine spasmed. For a week I could barely move. When I finally arrived at an acupuncturist’s clinic, it was by cab, my body bent to nearly 90 degrees, clutching a cane. An hour later, I walked out, whistling. If it weren’t for that, I would have the same healthy skepticism for acupuncture that I reserve for dry cleaning and True Blood (really, it’s a good show about vampires?).
On my left, my pediatrician friend Mark Tessaro is having needles inserted into his arm.
Western medicine, he says, often fails us. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” he recounts having to tell many adult patients during his training. “But it’s not one of the emergencies that I’m trained to recognize.”
That’s what my doctor had told me and why I’d turned to acupuncture.
In addition to chronic pain, Yoon and Frank treat patients for a variety of issues, such as addiction and gynecology. But Yoon’s clinic, Toronto Acupuncture Studio, operates under the community model.
“We’re trained in school to spend an hour with a person and to charge them a whole lot of money,” says Yoon. Instead, her clinic sees multiple patients, simultaneously, in a large room, which lowers her overhead. “This is how acupuncture is practised traditionally in China and Korea.”
She charges on a sliding scale, with no questions asked, from $15 to $35. “Basically, I’m a villain in the acupuncture industry because the going rates are $50, if you’re lucky, to $125.”
Frank believes there is plenty of room for different types of practices. “You don’t have to have a gourmet meal every time you eat,” she says, an analogy that I can in no way endorse.
What we’re doing right now is not a proper treatment. There is something decadently self-involved in digesting food while meditating on the sensation in my skull, which, if I understand human physiology, is where the liver processes gamma rays. But the needles are barely in for 20 minutes. And I do have to start moving on the next course, a roast.
Eventually, pork prevails. I’m comfortable with braising and confiting large cuts, or frying and grilling smaller ones. But a roast makes me nervous. Maybe it’s the dependence on a thermometer to know when it’s done. Explaining this to my charcutier (if you do not have a charcutier, you can confide in a shrink, or a kindly uncle), he advised me to treat it like a big steak, inviting me to squeeze the one in his oven. “Medium rare?” I’d asked of the 21⁄ 2- kilo hunk of beef. He gave me that nod and look that means, “Use the force, Luke.” So before dinner, I had roasted this twokilo loin (brined, rubbed with garlic, zest and pepper) to what felt like rare, resisting the urge to use or trust the thermometer. Once Yoon has plucked the needles from my skull, I finish off the roast, adding boiled red potatoes to the pan, heating up my spicy Braeburn apple sauce. With everyone so relaxed, I am the only one in the room who feels suspense as I carve into the meat. But with just a suggestion of pink, it is so soft it makes a baby’s bottom look like a day-old pizza crust.
The last roast I’d tried, governed by the thermometer, had been overcooked. I’m not saying that science is wrong, but that in this case my instincts were right, and worth listening to.
The truth is, though I’ve reread the explanations of food scientist Harold Mcgee, I don’t understand how heat works on meat any more than I understand how antibiotics or acupuncture function. I only know that none of them are magic. Acupuncture can’t make water boil and an MRI machine cannot get HBO.
This may seem profoundly ignorant, but sometimes science garbles what our fingers know to be true. mintz.corey@gmail.com