http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/culture/200503/kt2005033119170611720.
htm

By Kim Chang-young
Embarking on a trip to Moscow today, Korea's acupuncture guru beams
with a high hope of breaking fresh ground in the Russian medical
services sector, dominated by Western treatment techniques and still
almost ignorant of Oriental acupuncture.

Kim Kwang-ho, 45, will show off the mystery and superiority of the
nation's time-honored acupuncture therapy to Russian political and
business leaders in a one-month demonstration in April which will
lead to the establishment of a few Oriental medical clinics in
September, he said in an interview yesterday.

The clinics will be located in the heart of Moscow and a well-to-do
district in its suburb and open to the public, and the rich and
powerful, respectively, in accordance with arrangements between
Kim's Ilchim Oriental Medical Institute and its Russian
counterparts.

Ilchim is a society of his proteges numbering over 100 Oriental
doctors with profound expertise and knowledge. It now runs four
clinics in Seoul, Pusan and Taegu, highly acclaimed for the best
records of treatments. On the long list of its clients are top
political and business leaders ranking among Korea's who's who.

Its Russian counterparts include Oleg Barinov, president of the
Independent Association of Machinery Manufacturers, and Dr.
Alexandre Leontiev, president of Natural Therapy Institute of
Russia. Russia has some Chinese and North Korean Oriental doctors
actively serving its patients, but remains totally unknown to South
Korean doctors who enjoy prosperity in the local market.

More than 100 Western medical practitioners applied to study Kim's
own acupuncture method in February when he and four members of his
staff at the Ilchim Oriental Medical Clinic cured Russian patients
at the Ilchim Oriental Medical Center, opened in Moscow one and a
half months ago as part of the hub for Korean medical service
exports. The center functions partly as a clinic and partly as an
educational arm.

Kim's venture into the Russian medical quarter, the first of its
kind in South Korea, has not happened to come overnight. He offered
free-of-charge services to Russians as well as Korean-Russians in
Russia and Uzbekistan in July and August, 2002, together with his
team.

Similar services were given to Japanese war victims in Hiroshima in
August, 2003, and to Russians in Moscow in February, during which he
and his colleagues enabled paralysed patients to walk on their own
feet by means of acupuncture and surprised Western doctors by the
unbelievable result.

His far-flung project finds no bounds. Sponsored by foreign
businessmen and doctors fascinated by his mastery of acupuncture, he
plans to make inroads into Japan, China, the United States and
Europe. In a short period of time, he will establish an Oriental
clinic specializing in acupuncture in Canada in a joint venture with
Japanese capitalists.

His particular efforts will focus on the United States and China for
different reasons. He is aggressively pursuing to set up a well-
equipped college in New York or Los Angeles to spread the oriental
medicine to what he thinks the "heart of Western medical science."

In China, he wants to compete with its doctors in the "birthplace of
the Oriental medicine. By opening clinics in Chinese cities, he also
wants to make the most of South Korean students who have majored in
Oriental medicine at schools in the vat nation but denied medical
licenses there. At present, close to 2,000 South Koreans have
completed the five-year course and 4,000 others are on study in
China.

He has already held international seminars on oriental medical
theories and practices and displayed his unchallengeable talent to
American doctors regularly, and has a lot of apprentices both in the
Western and Oriental medical spheres, according to his colleagues.

Acupuncture still stays in the realm of mystery in the Oriental
medicine hardly understood perfectly even by Oriental medical
doctors. Its far-reaching effects, however, have long been
appreciated in Asians over centuries and are now gradually
proven "scientifically" by means of high-tech medical equipment
including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Slim and short needles made of simple alloyed metal and weighing a
piece of gum have remedied a variety of symptoms and diseases over
thousands of years in China, Korea and Japan, among other nations.
Historical records show that acupuncture had been applied since the
Neolithic Age as small stone sharply ground to be like needles have
been found together with ancient relics.

Kim's mystique, based on the teachings of Tongui Pugam, the treasury
book written by the most renowned royal doctor, Ho Jun, in the
middle of Choson Kingdom, enables him to use just one or less than
four needles to cure even Parkinson's disease, which was described
as "weak heart and tremor of the hand" in the voluminous book. He
complements acupuncture with injections of distilled herbal medicine
of his own making.

Secrets of his "Ilchim" method lie in the application of the
acupuncture to the opposite side of the painful spot. A patient who
feels pain on the left side of his or her face is given acupuncture
on the right leg and hand where that pain is believe to originate.

"Acupuncture applied directly on a painful part is something like
stopping up a hole with palms to prevent water from flooding, while
acupuncture on the opposite side is remedy for the direct cause of
the pain," he explained.

"To find the right spot for acupuncture is, say, as hard as for the
world archery champion to shoot the bull's eye with no error in a
windy day. The spot varies even daily according to physical
conditions of patients," said the doctor of doctors who teach 100-
odd Ilchim members every Saturday through midnight.

In September, all the Ilchim doctors will apply for the NCCAOM test
for acupuncture licenses to practice in the United States. Kim plans
to select a group of best-skilled acupuncturists among them to form
a "dream team" in charge of overseas services and further in-depth
research and development of Oriental medical science.

Prof. Cho Byung-hee of Seoul National University's Graduate School
for Health, says an increasing number of Western doctors have been
keenly interested in acupuncture. "The doctors, who had given a
deliberate snub to oriental medicine, have been awakened by the
effect of acupuncture and many of them now apply it as an
alternative to Western medical practices."



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