I spent almost ten years working in South Korea. Two years after I arrived there my left knee balloned to twice its size. I could hardly walk. I had a history with this knee. A friend helped me hobble up about fifteen steps in as many minutes. The traditional doctor drew out "bad" dark blood using sterile bell-shaped glass jars slightly larger than a shot glass. To do this he first used a ink-pen-sized lancet and then placed the bell-shaped vacuum jars over skin-deep micro incisions. The bell jars were attached to a rubber vacuum hose which was in turn attached to an impressive-looking machine that could have at first glance passed as a MIG-TIG arc welder. After about ten minutes he drew back the privacy curtain, and slowly twisted between two fingers about 8-12 gold-plated acpuncture needles of varying lengths into my knee. I couldn't look. I felt about 1-2 degrees of pricking pain on a scale of 100. After he came back and removed the needles painlessly, he immediately applied about 4-6 latex silver-dollar-sized suction cups attached to electrodes to another machine. It administered a controlled pattern of 5-6 different electrical pulses in an ascending-descending pyramid sequence for about ten minutes. When he returned again, he quickly removed the suction cups and applied an ultra-violet heat lamp to the knee. Treatment finished. I rolled up my pants leg. Adjusted my belt. Put on my socks and shoes and WALKED with a full stride of about 80-90% full natural-gait leg extension towards the payment counter. In 1998 in Pusan, this treatment using my insurance card, cost me about a $5(five)USD co-payment fee. After two to three more visits to the same doctor, and receiving the same treatment, my knee was at least 95-98% pain-free. Now after all these years it IS PAIN-FREE. It cost me less than $20 USD's. The entire med-pharma system in the US would shrivel up and become a mere shadow of itself if even half of the Asian natural cures were to become commonly used. The AMA would have to become a 501c3 not-for-profit charity for heaven's sake. If you added two cups of green tea a day, engaged in Buddhist or Christian meditation for only thirty minutes a day, it would be impossible to imagine the world. Some may see this scenario as a near-perfect ending...others as a near-perfect beginning. | 
