A mother answered when her son asked her a question. What he saw next became a surprise when he glanced at the table beside her. On the table was his mother’s hearing aid. Not needing any assistance, she was able to hear her son clearly for the first time after using the aid for 15 years.

On her neck just by the ears and on her jaw were four thin needles when this happened as the mother and son were in a cubicle of an acupuncture center. Her face was somewhat quizzical when she was on the medical examining table. It was her who said that things were great. Thinking that she had her aid on because no one raised their voices, they were mistaken as her aid was on the table.

The mother and son arrived in Washington from NY after a local paper ran a story about the center which used the traditional Chinese method of acupuncture to heal nerve deafness, they inserted thin needles into the body as part of the treatment. Most of the time, acupuncture is ideal for relieving pain but it is used to cure deafness here.

Consider that cure only applies to the condition of nerve deafness though. This we can show audiometer results before and after treatment. Out of the population with hearing loss 35 to 40 percent develop nerve deafness and this is the only condition treatable with acupuncture. There is no benefit for persons whose deafness was caused by punctured ear drums, disease and other causes.

One doctor responsible for the acupuncture treatments guards his patients against false claims about the procedure, his interest in the method grew when his family was exposed to it during a trip to Argentina. An average of eight treatments results in an improvement of 75 to 80 percent. The improvement often is less with older people. With children aged 7 to 12 we often get complete restoration of hearing. He noted that acupuncture sometimes must be repeated eight months to a year after the initial treatments as a booster.

While patients underwent their treatments, the US deputy undersecretary of labor for legislative affairs waited outside for his tenth treatment. The undersecretary is a young Montanan whose job is to give the administration precise and unemotional reports on the mood of Congress and the chances for passage of legislation affecting the Labor Department. His left ear suffered a loss of hearing after a 1968 virus attack. He said doctors diagnosed his condition as nerve deafness and held out no recovery of hearing. Even all types of hearing aids were used to no avail.

The undersecretary said he took the conclusions of his doctors as final and learned to adapt to deafness in one ear, shuffling people who were talking to him to his right side. But the hearing loss was distressing in such activities as hunting and there was a nagging fear of deafness in the other ear. When he read of the acupuncture center opening, he didn’t believe in it. It seemed to be just too simple to be a cure. Anyways he opted to try acupuncture out and his initial audiogram reading came out registering complete deafness in his left ear.

Due to dreading needles, after a few were inserted in him his initial reaction was to back out of the entire treatment. Next was the beeping of the audiogram machine. Regaining 70 percent of his hearing after nine treatments, he vows to keep getting treated as long as further improvement can be seen.

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