Treating Tonsillitis and Strep Throat with Acupuncture
And Why I Wanted to Catch the Plague
A few weeks ago, my six-year-old daughter Dasi came out of bed in the middle of the night, hair all askew. “It hurts when I swallow,” she croaked. I could hear her tonsils when she talked (if you know what I mean).
I looked at her throat. It was very red, but not spotty. “Do you want acupuncture? Or do you want to go back to bed?” She thought for a minute, “I want acupuncture.”
Of all my kids, Dasi is one of my hardest patients. She’s very sensitive and scares easy. But like the rest of my kids, she knows from experience how effective acupuncture is. She was willing to trade the transient discomfort of a needle for the relief she expected it to provide.
“Is it gonna hurt?” She asked me.
“Probably, a little.” I planned to use a bleeding technique on her thumbs, which is a bit more painful than your average acupuncture treatment, but really effective for tonsillitis.
After the acupuncture, I told her to swallow. “How does it feel?”
“Much better.” She responded in a scratchy sleepy voice. “Can I have a prize?”
I had just run out of prizes in my clinic, so I gave her some new crayons from the school supplies drawer. She was thrilled. She put the crayons in her drawer, went back to bed and finally fell asleep.
My kids frequently request acupuncture for:
Back pain
Earaches
Sore throat
Cough
Dysmenorrhea
Stress
Depression, etc.
I tell them to make an appointment. (Think shoemaker’s kids.) And when my kids have an instant recovery after acupuncture, I tell them to leave a nice review on google. (They never do.)

My childhood was vastly different from my kids’. My mother is a microbiologist/ immunologist. When we woke up with a sore throat, we got a culture, which she would take to the lab the next morning. Once our throats were swabbed, we’d usually start antibiotics right away. My sister had recurrent strep and eventually got her tonsils removed.
I wish my mother had known about Chinese medicine when we were kids. It might have saved her a lot of grief. On the other hand, We kids would not have been happy with the nearly instant recovery Chinese medicine usually delivered.
We preferred the week or so home from school every time we got sick.
I would have intentionally contracted the plague to stay home from school.
I once fake-sneezed continuously for a full week! My worried mother took me to the pediatrician and I was sure I’d been busted, but the doctor was just as perplexed as my mother was (whew!) (I confessed this to my mother recently and she thought it was hilarious.)
To sum up: My sisters and I got sick a lot when we were kids. If we’d been aware of Chinese medicine in those days, I would have had to invest way more effort into my acting. And believe me; it’s much easier to catch a strep infection than to fake-sneeze for a week straight.
Patient Feedback
"I brought you Fayga years ago with recurring strep infections and repeat antibiotics and we had a full few years without trouble after a few acupuncture sessions."
~R.M., Mother from Jerusalem
"I did want to put in my daughter's experience with strep and how 1 session of acupuncture really helped. I don't remember how old Gitty was at the time, maybe about 10 or 11, but she would contract strep throat about once a year. Until we came to you when she had it, you did a bleeding treatment and told us to put garlic on the hands in that area and after that it must have been around 3 or more years until the next time she got strep. Yay for Chinese medicine!!! Thanks again!"
~T.B. Mother from Jerusalem
留言