Dancer’s Nightmare: Acupuncture’s Miraculous Foot Injury Solutions

Patients coming to our clinic may notice that I have a poster hanging on the wall in the hallway. This handsome young professional ballet dancer is my patient, Francisco Serrano. In our small town Sarasota, he is a local star, being featured in many newspaper articles and local televisions shows.

On top of the poster, this young dancer wrote the following for me: “Dear Dr. Xiong: Thank you so much for helping me when it is most needed. Ponchi”. I always joke with him that when one day he becomes world famous super star in Ballet, I am going to sell this poster for big money because it has his own signature on it.

This is actually a quite interesting story in terms of talking about Acupuncture and its power. The story has to date back two years ago. In year 2014, this super talented young dancer had two very important competition in his life, one is a regional competition in Atlanta, if he won, he would be entitled to go to the finals of the Youth America Grand Prix, the world’s largest ballet scholarship competition in New York City.

One week before he was heading to Atlanta, Fransico’s father, the founder of Sarasota Cuban Ballet School called me in urgency: “Dr. Xiong, Ponchi (Francisco’s nick name) injured his foot during practicing, he can barely walk now, but we are going to Atlanta for competition in one week, is there any way you help him?”

I totally understood Mr. Serrano’s worry and stress. Ponchi was a super talented dancer, and this regional competition was very important to his dance career. I asked Mr. Serrano to bring his son to my clinic immediately.

Half an hour later, this young gentleman showed up in my clinic. After a brief checkup, I inserted several needles in his opposite hand and asked him to try to jump again. Both of them were staring at me and could not believe what I said. “Dr. Xiong, are you sure he is able to jump? You see how he walked in limping?” Mr. Serrano obviously was very worried.

Ponchi tried to jump for a couple of times, and to their surprise, he was able to jump with no pain at all within just several seconds after needles were inserted.

After the treatments in my clinic, one week later, Ponchi went to Atlanta, danced wonderfully, and won the gold medal in his competition.

Before his international competition, he started to feel some symptoms on his foot again due to heavy practicing load, this time, he got smart. He stayed in my clinic for a series of treatment to help with pain in his foot, hip, and other joints. The treatments were so effective that not only we were able to help him get rid of the pain, we were also able to increase his range of motion in major joints and make them stay flexible.

Ponchi went to New York City and placed within the top six men in the Seniors division, took a gold medal (first place) with fellow student Gabriella Stilo in the pas de deux division dancing “Le Corsaire,” and received a full scholarship from the Royal Ballet in London.

This is why he wrote those words above on the Poster and gave to me as a gift. I was very proud of him and very happy to see his achievement.

Such stories, we have had a lot in our clinic. Acute injury especially at the ankle are very common among young athletes/dancers. The pain can be so intense that preventing them from dance again is very frustrating. Most of such cases are due to Qi stagnation at corresponding meridians. We normally use mirror points to treat such cases, so often I will first treat the patient’s opposite hand, usually with a couple needles, those ballet dancers who cannot stand on their toes before the treatment will find themselves easily stand on the toes and dance again without pain. Some severe cases, there are already some blood stagnation at the local area preventing them from getting immediate pain relief, we may need to combine some cupping methods.

There are several related video testimonials Check them out if you are interested.