  Soundtrack: "Drewie's Accordes" by an anonymous Elizabethan composer, a duet for two lutes, played by Paul O'Dette and Jakob Lindberg. I've had this chronic pain in my arms every evening for about two weeks, pure fire from the fingertips of the last three fingers of both hands to the elbow. I've an appointment with NUH Neurology this wed, but till then I'm on painkillers that don't seem to work.
Sometimes I wake up from the pain and can't sleep. What's really weird is when the arms hurt and the left leg twitches too. One night my parents were worried cos I woke up screaming. Let's not forget those strange raised bumps on my hands and feet that appear in the evenings and disappear by noon... they're like mosquito bites, but sore in addition to itching in a most vexatious fashion. For weeks I thought I had a mosquito problem in my room, but there's no reason they'd concentrate on palms of my hands and soles of my feet and not bother with other softer fleshier bits where the skin's thinner.
Mum and I think they're allergic reactions of some sort - the sore bumps are almost symmetrical on right and left limbs. My lower back pain from the hunting injury years ago is also back to bother me. At this point I'm beginning to feel like Molière's La Malade Imaginaire (The Hypochondriac)... I can just hear Charpentier's overture playing in the background... So alright, things were getting a tad out of hand (ha ha). Parents and I figured while waiting for NUH neurology, it couldn't hurt getting a Chinese physician's opinion on the matter. So we found one in Chinatown, and he agreed it seemed a matter for the neurologist. Meanwhile, he'd do some Chi-clearing to help smoothen the flow of the Chi and give me some herbs to help soothe the system.
Oh, and he'd also do a bit of acupuncture. So there I lay on a table, with 4 needles in my neck and upper back, one in the left forearm and another in my left thigh. No, insertion of the needles didn't hurt at all. The doc twiddles with them and twaddles the ends a bit, then attaches an electric current to the needles. A curious throbbing tickling ensues, and a warm sensation around the needles. I fall asleeep for half an hour and wake up with the pain in my arms and back gone.
The doc gives me some herbal concoction in a bottle, with directions to drink 10ml thrice daily, and to take some herbal pills (with sugar coating). The concoction tastes appallingly bad, and Dad assures me that old Chinese believe good medicine never tastes good, so they intentionally make it smell and taste horrid. I'm a believer in acupuncture now. It is important to understand that Acupuncture (and Traditional Chinese Medicine in general), is not "folk medicine". It is a highly developed, systematic, recorded, researched, and peer reviewed form of medicine with several disciplines that continues to evolve. It has a massive amount of real-world data to justify the application of techniques based on several thousand years of human trials.
Throughout the world, lay-persons have adopted the techniques far more readily that scientists because they do not have to understand how it works to take advantage of it. From janitors to high-profile quarterbacks, the word is out... it's cheap, it's painless, and most importantly... it works. What happened after? The raised welts came back at night, but far fewer and far less irritating. There wasn't much pain. When pain goes, I'm not really bothered where it's gone. 
