The Baltimore Sun Article

December 2, 1997

Pointing the Way  By Patricia Meisol: Sun Staff

          A strange smell neither sour nor sweet, permeates the office above Field’s Pharmacy in Pikesville where Dr. Yu Chen practices Traditional Chinese Medicine.  Bottles and boxes of plants imported from China line the shelves of one wall.  In a small examination room, an acupuncture patient waits.

            The patient had struggled for each breath when he first came to Chen in early November.  Two needle in his scalp and an herbal tea twice daily returned energy to his lungs.  Now 10 days later the pneumonia is gone.  Yu Chen inserts needles into the man’s legs to boost his immune system.  She lights the moxa plant on the end of the needles so heat can descend into the man’s body to take away its dampness.

            “I’m 100 percent better.” the patient says.

            While a panel of American doctors studies the ancient healing arts of Dr. Chen’s native land, she is pioneering herbal remedies and acupuncture treatments for American ailments—and fighting for recognition among medical doctors in this country.

            She mixed her herbal tea for pneumonia two years ago when tougher strands of bacteria rendered prevailing antibiotics helpless.

            And it was here, in her Pikesville office, that Dr. Chen made her first breakthrough – an acupuncture treatment for anxiety that she developed for an actor in the TV show “Homicide”. 

The five-minute, $15 treatment calls for a “plum,” a seven-star needle to be tapped on the back “shu” points, as acupuncture entry points are called.  She first applied it to the actor Yaphet Kotto in 1995.   He suffered from debilitating panic attacks for 33 years, experiencing them as often as three times a night, and other acupuncturist had been unable to cure him. “Miraculously, my panic and fear disappeared after only one treatment.” from Dr. Chen, he said.

Since then, Dr. Chen says she has achieved an 89 percent success rate using the treatment on patients who previously relied on psychotherapy of drugs. Of 37 patients who came to her after hearing about Kotto’s success, 33 percent were cured, she reported in a paper delivered at an international acupuncture conference in Beijing last month.  They included patients who overcame the fear of leaving their homes.

The report on her panic attack treatment generated letters from around the world.  But the treatment is not likely to be used in her native country.  A colleague in China told her; “This is an American specialty disease.  There isn’t the same stress here.”

Winning recognition in the United States for original treatments is difficult even when many patients appear to be helped.  Herbs are not considered a medicine—they are regulated as a food in this country – and only now are U.S. academics finding ways to measure and catalog acupuncture’s benefits beyond patient testimonials.  Researchers at the University of Maryland, for instance, recently developed a foolproof placebo acupuncture treatment that allowed them to test the effectiveness of acupuncture on dental pain.  The conclusion: It helps.

Lack of Controls

            The lack of controlled study is the reason no one in this country has published Dr. Chen’s discoveries.  But she says giving acupuncture and its placebo randomly to patients isn’t practical or even possible in some cases.

            “If they insist [on such controls], Americans won’t learn,” she says.

            What do you do about the rare malady - like a patient with a half-body tremor? She asks.  “I don’t have a control.  I have only one case.”

            The patient, a 69 year old grandmother, came to Dr. Chen with a constant tremor in her left arm and leg.  The woman sought Dr. Chen’s help after three doctors and various medications couldn’t solve her problem.  Dr. Chen administered acupuncture treatments three times a week, and the tremors stopped after three weeks.

            When Dr. Chen asked the National Institutes of Health for help with lab work in a study of the vaginal yeast infection suppository she invented, NIH addressed its response to her husband, a retired pharmacologist listed as a second investigator, and left off Dr. Chen’s name completely.  Then NIH insisted she reveal the molecular structure of her formula.  Worried that NIH investigators would take credit for her invention, Dr. Chen threw out the letter.

            She is nothing if not hardheaded.

            From the age of 7 she knew she would be a doctor—her father, an internist, directed her to follow in his footsteps.  “In this field you will always have something to learn,” he said.

            She was trained in Western medicine in a Beijing medical school, where she was required to study acupuncture as well.  While treating factory patients in Beijing, she was assigned by the Communists to study and practice Chinese herbology.

            After a decade of doctoring in China, three months’ study of English at Cambridge, England, and a fellowship at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, she accepted a research job at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.  There she married an American and like her colleagues, longed to make her own discoveries.

            Unfilled by lab work and unwilling to earn an American medical degree, she opened an acupuncture practice.  In 1993, after her husband retired, she moved to Maryland because acupuncture is licensed here.

            Now, at 55, Dr. Chen is at her zenith, moving between two cultures, two medical traditions, keenly aware, that each patient requires a singular diagnosis and treatment.

            “Let me think about it,” she tells a patient who asks her to take on a case that stumps American doctors.  A week later she offers a solution that is as apt to be influenced by her Western medical training as it is her knowledge of restoring Qi (pronounced chee), the energy that flows through the meridians of the body.

            Traditional Chinese medicine holds that pain or illness occurs when the body’s energy is blocked by physical or emotional injury.  The body has more than 300 acupoints where needles may be inserted and manipulated to relieve pain and restore energy.

Cannot be explained

            In the West, acupuncture has a somewhat dubious reputation, partly because it cannot be explained in Western terms.

            “Hocus-pocus,” thought Lynne Perry, a nurse who manages people’s pain for Hartford Insurance Co.  Then she saw what Dr. Chen did for her son Josh, a 21 year old top athlete at Hereford High School who became paralyzed on one side while being treated for a brain tumor.

            After his third visit to Dr. Chen, he moved the toe on his paralyzed foot and raised his arm.  The movement improved Josh’s spirits enough for him to enjoy a trip to the college he hoped to attend before he died in 1995.

            “There is so much joy in that office,” Mrs. Perry says.  “Chen told us, ‘I can’t cure the disease,’ and we knew that.  But if there was something we could do to improve the quality of life, I wanted to try it.”

            The doctor also mixed herbs for Josh that cured the ulcers he developed in his mouth from chemotherapy treatments.

            Americans don’t like the taste of some Chinese herbs and often ask Dr. Chen to flavor them with lemon or honey.  But she warns that the taste has a purpose: a sour taste is an astringent and it goes to the liver; a bitter herb descends into the body.  “Hold your nose to swallow it,” she tells patients.

            She is now seeking a publisher for a book of case studies describing 25 treatments, most invented by her.  Besides herbs and acupuncture, Dr. Chen says she has successfully used magnet therapy on diabetes.  She says the therapy reduced blood sugars in 70 percent of her patients.

            “I want to publish everything.  I don’t worry about losing patients; actually I gain them.” she says.  More than anything she wants to publicize her cure for panic attack since patients suffering from this disease find it hard to travel.

            If Dr. Chen finally gets the recognition she believes she deserves, it most likely will come from her homeland.

            Recently she mailed her pneumonia formula to the chairman of the World Acupuncture Association in Beijing and told him to try it on his patients in the Chinese-Japanese Friendship Hospital.

            “If it works,” she told him, “make a pill and send it back to us.”