On my way to NE Pacific Mall, I often passed by a small building advertising "martial arts instruction", "eggs for sale", and "acupuncture treatments". One of my legs goes numb after I sit in those cramped tricycles, so I decided an acupuncture treatment wouldn't hurt.

I went to the little building (beside the one that sells US-made toilets) and asked to see the doctor. He was occupied at the moment, swinging a long stick at a martial arts student. I watched for a few minutes as the instructor demonstrated the proper way to disarm an attacker. He looked like he knew what he was doing. I hoped he knew as much about acupuncture.

He led me to a small room with three beds. The room had three large old posters of acupuncture points on the wall. We discussed costs and I negotiated what I thought was a decent price -- about $12. (I later learned that the standard price was about $2.50.)

The sheets on the bed had not been changed in a while and the room smelled pretty bad, but since the price was cheap, I decided to continue the process. I had to remove my shirt and lie facedown on the first bed. The doctor grabbed a handful of individually prepackaged (clean) needles and started pressing them into my back.

I couldn't see much of what was going on since I was lying on my stomach. He worked from my shirtless lower back down to my leg, inserting about ten needles along the way. He pressed the needles through my shorts when he needed too. The needles felt like any other ordinary needle piercing my skin. After they were inserted I couldn't feel them unless I moved.

There were some gauze or cotton balls at the exposed end of the needles. These were lit to allow heat to conduct through my body. The smell of burning needles actually improved the scent of the room. To some of the needles the doctor attached a machine that passed a mild electric current through my back. After ten or fifteen minutes the machine was moved to different needles.

Unlike most acupuncture patients, I found the process a little uncomfortable. I had to lie on the bed for about an hour and a half. The bed was too short and I wanted to constantly move to a new position. Each time I moved, I could feel the needles reposition themselves. Finally it was over and the doctor pulled everything from my back. He rubbed some sort of lotion on me. It wasn't an antiseptic; it was more like hand cream.

As I went home, each of the spots bled a bit leaving blood on my pants and shirt. The doctor told me I would need about three or four more treatments to make it effective. I was leaving the Philippines so I didn't return and the single treatment didn't alleviate my numb leg problem.