acupuncture

I went to acupuncture this morning. I'm sure that a lot of you don't have experience with "Eastern Medicine" so here are a few tips:
1) The night before, you should go out to the bar for a few hours, get coffee and cake around midnight, and then walk home and lie awake wired, wondering if you should watch the "Rosemary's Baby" DVD that you rented at the library.
2) The next morning, pop a couple of vitamins.

I assumed, wrongly, that the "initial consultation" would not include needles in my arm. I don't know if any of you have had acupuncture. Basically, she (the acupuncturist) asked me what was wrong, and I bumbled my way through a description of my arm pain, shoulder tension, back pain, rapidly diminishing brain cells etc... I laid on a table and she massaged my arm to find the pain. When I winced, she put in needles.

There were less than ten needles in each arm. If you could draw a line connecting the needles, it would have followed the line of a tendon from elbow to hand. It was a weird sensation. A couple of times, I kicked my leg in reflex to the needle. And the first one made me teary. She said that was common, but maybe she was just making me feel better. They didn't hurt. They just made my arms heavy. On about 4 or 5 of the needles, she also put these little cone things and lit them on fire. They heated up for about 5 minutes and then died down. After about 10-15 minutes, she took them out and rubbed liquid tiger balm on my arms.

In general, it feels better. The tiger balm still feels good and there's a small bruise on my left elbow. I'm going back Friday.