The Times- Herald Record Features

The Times- Herald Record Features

By TOM KANE

Record Correspondent

Tom Kane

A new therapy to relieve pain has Arrived. It’s called Soft-tissue reprocessing. Here’s how It works. Say you’ve had a disc problem for years that causes you dull pain. It won’t kill you but it makes life unpleasant. Sometimes you’re positively miserable. You’ve gone to chiropractors and massage therapists who put you on a long drawn-out treatment schedule. But the pain and stiffness returns. Then you hear about an acupuncturist who also does soft- tissue reprocessing. You go to him and your stiffness and pain go away.

Unlikely, you say. Well, it happened To me and it’s happening to others as well.

The acupuncturist I visited was Tom Chi of the Mountain Medical Acupuncture Clinic in Fallsburg, New York.

I went to him twice. I haven’t had
to go back for neck pain since and that was months ago. My neck isn’t 100 percent but I have 90 percent range and no pain at all.
I’m not the only one helped by soft-tissue reprocessing.

“The therapy Tom Chi does is very effective for certain patients,” said Hussein Omar, director of the pain clinic in Liberty. “It doesn’t work for every kind of problem. Some can only be helped by direct injections. Chi has a high success rate with the people I send him.” Hussein says. Chi’s combination of hands-on

therapy with acupuncture is probably the reason for his success.

“I have about a 50 percent success

rate with the people from the pain clinic,” Chi Said, noting that the Pain Clinic patients suffer the most severe pain. Usually his success rate is about 80 per cent, he said.

Chi, who has been a licensed massage and acupuncture therapist for more than 16 years, developed this unique ability to feel adhesions in soft-tissue like muscles and ligaments because he was a practitioner of Wing Chun, an unusual form of Kung Fu. Wing Chun is a martial art that emphasizes hand sensitivity techniques. It teaches you to sense the movements of your opponents.

"A well-trained Wing Chun practitioner knows how his opponent is going to move before he does because of the unusual physical sensitivities that can be developed," Chi said. This ability makes Chi's fingers act like high awareness sensors that can detect adhesions in the soft tissue. With a movement of the fingers, Chi reprocesses and reforms the soft tissue adhesions so that the patient is no longer predisposed to pain or reinjury. His treatment consists of about 40 minutes of acupuncture and then hands-on therapy.
"The acupuncture gets the

energy flowing and balances the body," he said. "I then go into the area of pain, find the adhesions and dissipate them." His measure of success is a rapid, tangible,

lasting result.

"I don't expect every therapist to study Kung Fu monastically for five years," Chi said, "but I think the sensitivity is something that can be developed."

"I would like to train some people in this but right now I'm inundated with people who are in pain and need help," he said.

Chi said he has a long list of satisfied patients, including U.S. Ambassadors, members of Congress and national talk show host Oprah Winfrey.

"I don't know what he does with his fingers but no one has been able to relieve the back pain I've had for 20 years except Tom Chi," said Ira Gold, a Fallsburg businessman. Gold said he'd gone to chiropractors for years without relief. They put me on a schedule of 20 visits over six months at $50 a pop," Gold said, and the pain would still come back in a few months."

Chi says his work falls more within the tradition of Chinese medicine but with a very pragmatic western orientation.

"Acupuncture is the mainstay of my therapy but I go way beyond that with hands-on therapy," he said.

The kinds of chronic pain that Chi treats are: back pain, neck pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, hand repetition stress and most forms of arthritis. "Pain is mechanical," he said. "You have to go right in there and fix it." To contact Chi, call (845) 436-9000 or 342-3000