Attorney Holmes was born in Boston into a relatively poor family. He took odd jobs shoveling snow and paving streets as a teenager before joining the army for three years, which helped pay for his college tuition. He started drinking alcohol when he was serving in the military. When he was in his early forties, he decided to stop drinking alcohol because he finally realized that drinking made him feel horrible afterwards and because he believed that alcohol could damage his brain cells. Since he was trained to be a disciplined person in the US Army, once he decided to stop drinking, he was able to stop drinking altogether. But years of drinking had caused hormonal imbalances. For example, abnormal levels of estrogen stimulated his prostate and when he was seventy years old, he developed prostate cancer. He received radiation treatment and developed impotence for a time after surgery due to nerve and blood vessel damage. However, because he no longer ate junk food or drank alcohol, he was physically very healthy and was able to put his impotence behind him after about a year.
She came to my clinic four years ago due to numbness and weakness in her hands, as well as muscle atrophy. At the age of 82, he was still in court a few times a week as a defense attorney. He walked his dog a mile every day, did not take any medication, and amazingly, was still able to sleep through the night for 7-8 hours. But he was drinking too much coffee, 4-5 cups a day, before starting acupuncture treatment.
When he first came to see me, I noticed that his thumb muscles were slightly atrophied. His grip was not firm and sometimes things fell out of his hands. First, she went to see a hand specialist, who recommended surgery, but he said that while surgery can fix the problem, it can also cause chronic pain, swelling, and even nerve damage. She decided to try alternative medicine.
First of all, I recommended that he reduce his coffee consumption to one or two cups a day. Because acupuncture helps her body produce endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine, she found it easier to cut back on coffee while on treatment. Although the coffee didn’t disrupt his sleep, it caused the blood vessels in his hands and feet to constrict, stimulated his heart rate, and made the muscle in his upper shoulder very tense. I told him that if he could cut down to one cup a day, he could still stimulate his brain cells without sacrificing the health of his heart and hands. She slowly reduced her coffee.
I also discovered that he loved to sleep on his stomach with his head turned to one side. This may have caused her muscular tension and pinched her cervical nerves. If the nerve compression lasts too long, the muscles in his hand could get weaker and weaker. I chose acupuncture points on his neck and foot to deeply relax his neck muscles, and then used electrical acupuncture to facilitate regeneration of the nerves in his hand, which also strengthened his hand muscles. Once the blood circulation in his neck and hand improved, his hand muscles quickly became stronger. After 24 treatments, her hand function fully recovered and she no longer needed acupuncture.
Two years later, he returned with severe pain in his hip, leg, and ankle. The bread was so bad that she had to take Aleve in the morning just to be able to walk. I once treated him with electrical stimulation, combining points on his lower back and leg. He felt instant relief within a day. Then, she had such severe pain in the morning two days later that she had to double her dose of painkiller. She was so afraid of not being able to walk that she decided to increase her acupuncture treatments to two or three times a week.
I noticed that her pain was distributed along the L3, L4 and L5 area. In the morning, her pain was worse and moving around helped ease the pain. Considering his sleeping position, which may have strained his pear muscle and irritated his sciatic nerves, I recommended that he sleep on his back. Initially, she periodically had to turn on her stomach because that had been her preferred sleeping position for the last 84 years. In this way, she could not stay in one position for long. I could sleep on my back for 3 hours and then sleep on my stomach for another 4 hours. By combining position changes and acupuncture treatments twice a week, we managed to get rid of this new pain in three weeks.