My first instinct was fear.

I had just returned a couple of rented movies to the store and was sitting in my car with the door open, when I heard someone nearby say, “Excuse me.”

I looked over to see a guy who looked like a panhandler. He was maybe in his late 30’s or 40’s. Weathered skin tinged with yellow and grey and a little red. Bloodshot eyes. Worn clothes. Like a longtime smoker, drinker, “white trash.”

He explained that he was from Alabama and was stranded and could he get a ride to the highway (a twenty-minute drive).

Multiple scenarios flashed through my head in that moment, many of them involving me being attacked with some sort of sharp weapon. So I said no, I was going in the opposite direction. He thanked me and left me alone.

After that, I was so torn. I couldn’t decide whether to change my mind and help him out or not. I watched him for a minute, and it didn’t look like he was asking anyone else for help. Quite unlike your usual panhandler. But still, my fears gripped me. Finally I just started the car and left. But two minutes away I could not stop thinking about him, so I pulled onto a side road and stopped the car.

The worst case scenario was that he was some sort of psycho and I would put myself in grave danger by helping him.

But another worst case scenario was that he really, genuinely needed assistance — he was far from home, and no one else would lift a finger to help him … and I was going to just dump him there.

I didn’t know what to do. My paranoia warred with my compassion, and mixed in there was guilt about class and wealth, as well as my own physical fatigue and the ever-present concerns about generosity versus self-preservation that everyone in a helping profession must struggle with.

Then, I swept all of that aside and asked myself: What do I feel, in my gut? And as I tuned into my body-feeling about him, I remembered the look in his eyes, and I knew then that he was real. And since he was real, I had to help him.

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A guy comes in for treatment the other day. He’s down on the table and I start putting needles in him, when he starts complaining that his headache, which had been vague today, was getting worse and worse, like it was really stabbing him like a knife in the head. I asked him where it was and he pointed at the top of his head, just a little to the left of midline.

So this is what’s remarkable. First, I had to know that the acupuncture meridian that crossed through that point was the Bladder meridian. Then I had to know that the Bladder meridian was associated, in an esoteric Chinese theoretical way, with the Small Intestine meridian. Then I had to know that the Small Intestine meridian ran along the ulnar edge of the arm. Then I had to know that the hand correlates to the head, and therefore the point that might best be associated with his headache was Small Intestine 3.

Most of these are things many an acupuncture student will know, but it just blows my mind how what once seemed esoteric has become practical.

So anyway, I stuck a needle into SI-3 and stimulated it strongly.

And the headache died down dramatically.

A quick cure with just one needle.

That’s so cool.