Combat doctors to use acupuncture

WASHINGTON (AP) — Chief Warrant Officer James Brad Smith broke five ribs, punctured a lung and shattered bones in his hand and thigh after falling more than 20 feet from a Black Hawk helicopter in Baghdad last month.

While he was recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, his doctor suggested he add acupuncture to his treatment to help with the pain.

On a recent morning, Col. Richard Niemtzow, an Air Force physician, carefully pushed a short needle into part of Smith’s outer ear. The soldier flinched, saying it felt like he “got clipped by something.” By the time three more of the tiny, gold alloy needles were arranged around the ear, though, the pain from his injuries began to ease.

“My ribs feel numb now and I feel it a little less in my hand,” Smith said, raising his injured arm. “The pain isn’t as sharp. It’s maybe 50 percent better.”

Acupuncture involves placing very thin needles at specific points on the body to try to control pain and reduce stress. There are only theories about how, why and even whether it might work.

Regardless, the ancient Chinese practice has been gradually catching on as a pain treatment for troops who come home wounded.

Now the Air Force, which runs the military’s only acupuncture clinic, is training doctors to take acupuncture to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. A pilot program starting in March will prepare 44 Air Force, Navy and Army doctors to use acupuncture as part of emergency care in combat and in frontline hospitals, not just on bases back home.

They will learn “battlefield acupuncture,” a method Niemtzow developed in 2001 that’s derived from traditional ear acupuncture but uses the short needles to better fit under combat helmets so soldiers can continue their missions with the needles inserted to relieve pain. The needles are applied to five points on the outer ear. Niemtzow says most of his patients say their pain decreases within minutes.

The Navy has begun a similar pilot program to train its doctors at Camp Pendleton in California.

Niemtzow is chief of the acupuncture clinic at Andrews Air Force Base. He’s leading the new program after training many of about 50 active duty military physicians who practice acupuncture.

The U.S. military encountered acupuncture during the Vietnam War, when an Army surgeon wrote in a 1967 edition of Military Medicine magazine about local physicians who were allowed to practice at a U.S. Army surgical hospital and administered acupuncture to Vietnamese patients.

Niemtzow started offering acupuncture in 1995 at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. Several years later, he became the first full-time military medical acupuncturist for the Navy.