Find an event
Kicking butts
A smoker sows the seeds of a nicotine-free life.
Smoking
The stress case Like any smoker worth her nicotine, Vanessa Roanhorse, 30, has tried quitting cold turkey, the patch and even hypnosis. “I know now I can’t do it on my own,” she says. “If I could, I would have stopped.” As far as cigarette horror-stories go, Roanhorse’s addiction might seem less extreme than most: Usually she smokes a pack a week in social (i.e., drinking) situations, but when she’s stressed out (over finances and about finding full-time work), she goes through three or four packs a week.
The holistic treatment Sort of a DIY acupuncture treatment, the traditional Chinese practice of auricular therapy involves rubbing small herbal seeds that are affixed to the ears, stimulating corresponding pressure points on the body. While the seeds’ placement targets particular weak areas (such as the lungs for a cigarette addict), for holistic-medicine practitioners such as Jia Xiu, the acupuncturist at Shen Shen Health and Harmony, specific bad habits are only symptoms of broader health issues, so it’s important to assess the patient’s whole body.
If Roanhorse had any skepticism about trying ear seeds, Xiu erased them with her initial health assessment. “It was pretty insane,” Roanhorse says of her consultation with Xiu, in which Roanhorse rolled up her sleeves and lay on her back while Xiu—after merely inspecting the color of her tongue and the feel of her shinbone and wrists—diagnosed nearly every health problem she’d ever had (weak knees, bruised wrists, digestion problems and increasingly bad menstrual cramping). “From there, it just got weirder,” Roanhorse says, blown away by how intuitively Xiu pinpointed every ache and pain.
Then Xiu felt around Roanhorse’s ears before affixing the seeds. “Any part of the body can represent the whole body,” Xiu explains. “The liver has a special location on the ear, the lung also. Each organ has a tiny spot on the ear.” When these organs are impaired, Xiu says, that damage is evident in discoloration or tender spots on the inside and outside of the ear.
Xiu removed backing from the adhesive tape attached to each of eight prepackaged sesame seed–sized black seeds, which come from a Chinese herb called wang bu liu zxing, and affixed them to the inside and outside of Roanhorse’s ears: one for her lungs, one for her stomach and spleen, another for her uterus and so on. “It was pretty painful,” Roanhorse says—though “not like crying, falling-off-the-bed pain”—when the seeds were pressed into the spots associated with her lungs and stomach.
The result After Roanhorse’s brief visit, Xiu instructed her to rub the seeds on her ears for about two minutes a few times a day for up to seven days, creating pressure on sensitive spots in her ears. Roanhorse’s seeds fell out after five days, but in the two weeks following the treatment, she cut her smoking in half. Cigarettes tasted terrible, and she even felt a little nauseated after smoking one. She might not be able to kick her habit via ear seeds alone, but Roanhorse is working toward better health more broadly, following Xiu’s suggestions to eat dark-colored rather than light-colored foods and to massage her back to help with circulation. “She just read me. That’s why I already set up two more appointments,” Roanhorse says after her first treatment. “I’m totally going back.”
2764 N Lincoln Ave, 773-935-4325. $50 for a 30-minute consultation and treatment.
