A treatment for vision related disorders such as macular degeneration, diabetes, glaucoma and retinitis pigmentosa.

"Nobody knows how horrifying it is to lose their sight until it actually happens to them. But to be able to see the details of your own child's face--that's irreplaceable."
Thel Breedlove

Can This Man Save your Sight?
Health Living Magazine, December 1998
Reprinted with permission

Hendrickson was sitting in the beauty parlor last March when she first heard the news. A photographer by trade, Hendrickson had been diagnosed nearly two years earlier with macular degeneration and was slowly losing her sight. Her doctor had told her there was almost nothing he could do--her vision would gradually deteriorate, making it harder and harder to distinguish faces, traffic signs, and written words, until, tragically, she would become almost totally blind.

But now, the woman in the chair beside her was telling her about an acupuncturist in Arkansas who was achieving remarkable success in treating people with eye diseases. And for the first time, Hendrickson dared to hope that she might not have to accept her diagnosis.

Not long afterward, Hendrickson, age 60, found herself in the small storefront office of the plainly named Arkansas Massage & Acupuncture Center, part of a brown-brick building cozied up to a restaurant and pizzeria on the outskirts of the resort town of Hot Springs. An hour's drive from Little Rock, it's far removed from the world-renowned, high-tech research clinics of hospitals and universities, where top scientists are still puzzling over ways to treat macular degeneration, a perniciously widespread ailment that affects anywhere from 13 to 15 million Americans.

The small waiting room, an unassuming, country-decorated space with a blue, gingham-checked couch and teddy bear pillows, hardly looks like an antechamber to a world of medical miracles. But that doesn't appear to bother Per Otte (pronounced Pair ît-tay). Highly energetic yet extremely mild-mannered, the acupuncturist has shaggy gray hair and lively blue eyes and seems almost nonchalant about the difference he is making in his patients' lives. And yet, according to Otte, he's actually restoring some vision to an astounding 98 percent of his patients.

Sight, perhaps more than any of our senses, is something that most of us take very much for granted. But to take in the magnificence of an autumn afternoon or to see the expression on a sleeping child's face is the very stuff of life. And for the millions like Hendrickson who rely on their eyesight to earn a living, blindness can be all the more devastating.

Macular degeneration--Hendrickson's disorder--is the most common cause of blindness in the United States. Because it's highly prevalent in older adults (approximately 30 percent of those age 75 and older have early signs of the disease: another 23 percent will develop those signs within five years), the ailment is often referred to as age-related macular degeneration, or AMD.
While scientists have speculated about the root causes of AMD, there have been few definitive answers. Like many other pieces in the aging-process puzzle, though, studies have connected environmental hazards--smoking, pollution, poor diet, ultraviolet rays--to increased incidences of the disease. "All those things that are toxic to the body can be linked to macular degeneration and other eye diseases," says Marc R. Rose, M.D., who is the coauthor of Save Your Sight! Natural Ways to Prevent and Reverse Macular Degeneration (Warner Books, 1998) and an ophthalmologist practicing in Los Angeles.

And that, perhaps, is where acupuncture comes in. Traditional Acupuncture has been used for thousands of years to help the body deal with pain and to restore its energy levels. But while acupuncture has been shown to ease everything from arthritis to migraines, there's been little documentation of successful treatments of afflictions of the eye.

Enter Otte. Fifteen years ago, the 39 year-old Dane was working as a peat moss farmer in his native country. His previous careers included time spent as an electrician and a welder, and he was growing weary of the farmer's life. A weekend trip to see one of his friends, an acupuncturist named Freddy Dahlgren, sparked his interest in the power of this ancient practice. "It was amazing for me to see the effect that acupuncture had on people," says Otte. Convinced that this was how he should be spending his life, he began training as an acupuncturist only a few days later.

Dahlgren had been making advances in a field that he called "Oriental Zone Therapy" as a way to treat a variety of ailments, and Otte quickly joined him. Unlike traditional acupuncture, which uses several hundred points on specific spots around the body, this relatively new system zoned in on only a fraction of these, primarily based near and around the joints, on the theory that they contain more energy (think of that the next time you strike your funny bone). Because some people found the original term confusing, the two men changed the name to "microacupuncture," referring to the reduced number of points.
Dahlgren and Otte began experimenting with microacupuncture to treat back pain, arthritis, and eye diseases. It was the latter that seemed to draw the most promising results, especially with macular degeneration. The very first time the procedure was tried on a patient suffering from AMD, says Otte, there was a noticeable improvement. "All of a sudden, this person could see the black spots that were part of a pattern on the ceiling," he recalls. "I knew we were on to something."

The two men continued to refine their technique, which Otte says looks far simpler than it really is. "It seems so easy," he laughs. "But you need to be extremely precise about where to place the tip of the needle"--or the treatment will be less successful. Otte, who came to the United States in 1992, trained with an ophthalmologist in Dallas before starting his practice in Arkansas in November of 1995.

Why would microacupuncture work where so much else has failed? As with so many holistic remedies, explanations don't come all that easily. In traditional Chinese medicine, the liver and gallbladder are said to control the eyes. Otte theorizes that his procedure releases more energy to the liver, improving its function and therefore increasing the blood supply. The more blood that gets to the eyes, the more oxygen is delivered to the retina's thirsty, light-sensitive cones. However, Otte concedes, "nobody really knows what effect this has."

Still, his record seems remarkable. Otte claims that of the 256 patients who have consulted him for macular degeneration in the first six months of this year, the procedure has offered improvement, in varying degrees, to 253 of them. He also claims some success with patients suffering from glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy.

The only acupuncturist who practices this procedure in United States (Dahlgren and another colleague continue their work in Denmark), Otte sees patients from across North America. Pins marking spots as far away as Alaska and Ontario dot a wall map in his wood-paneled office.

Across the room stands a large, electronic visual field scanner, which monitors patients' progress before and after treatments. The machine requires patients to respond to tiny beams of light that move across their field of vision, then spits out Technicolor data that resembles a thermographic weather map. In the normal range, the images are mostly yellow or gold. As vision worsens, the colors turn to green, orange, red, purple, and, finally, black. If patients fail to see improvement after five treatments, Otte discourages them from continuing. More often than not, though, the colors begin to brighten, Otte says, proudly displaying some of his patients' successful vision scans like a father-to-be showing off his first child's sonogram.

Despite his claim that the acupuncture needles need to be inserted precisely to work, Otte seems to perform the task almost effortlessly and in a matter of seconds. He jabs three long, thin acupuncture needles into the ball of a patient's foot, then two in each palm, another at each temple, and one in the center of the brow. Those on the receiving end don't seem to mind. Settled back into overstuffed leather recliners, the handful of mostly gray-haired men and women look more like couch potatoes settling in to watch Wheel of Fortune than human pincushions. Many, especially the out-of-towners, come twice a day for 20-minute sessions (at a cost of $50 each), and stay a week or so at a time. After about a year, says Otte, they need to come back for a tune-up.

For some, the treatment is nearly miraculous, although not always instantaneous. Hendrickson, who first consulted Otte in March, saw only a little improvement after her initial few sessions. But by the seventh treatment, she says, it was as if a cloud had lifted. "I could see my eyes in the mirror to put on my makeup," she exclaims. "I could see the alarm clock by my bed that I couldn't make out before. It was amazing."

Others say they didn't realize how poor their vision had become until they'd walked through the acupuncturist's door. "After two sessions, I was watching TV and I noticed that I could actually distinguish the faces," says Martha Cathey, a 56-year-old education supervisor from Hatfield, Ar. As an important side effect, Cathey, who suffers from severe rheumatoid arthritis, began to notice that her joints had become significantly less swollen.

"My wife could stand 30 feet away from me and I couldn't recognize her," says Glenn O'Donnell, a 78-year-old retired counselor from Little Rock, who was first diagnosed with AMD in 1961. "The doctors kept telling me there was nothing they could do." O'Donnell says his vision has slowly, but steadily, improved after two weeks of treatments.

Word about Otte's success has spread through grapevines and gossip channels. Emma Kniseley, a sprightly 82-year-old from San Bernardino, Ca., first came to the office three years ago after hearing about Otte's success from five different people in the church she attends. "After my first treatment, I could already see better in my bad eye, declares Kniseley. "Everyone says you can't do anything about this, but I can see more clearly. And I'm determined to prevent my good eye from getting worse."

Yet Otte isn't without his detractors. Some traditional acupuncturists grumble that the Dane's claims are purely anecdotal, that he hasn't published his findings in peer-reviewed journals, or even been able to successfully teach the technique to others. Others point out that he lacks licensure by the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, the largest national certifying body.

Otte counters that he simply doesn't have the funding to conduct a scientifically valid study. He does intend, though, to help make microacupuncture "an accepted practice," and envisions a day, not too far away, when trained micro acupuncturists will work will work hand-in-hand with ophthalmologists. And Otte's European certifications earn him the right to practice in Arkansas, according to a spokesperson from the Arkansas Board of Acupuncture, who adds that he will most likely be granted a license by the state this year.

As for not being able to train others, Otte says that while he has tried, his students have failed to learn the technique because, "they didn't put their souls into the work." Still, he promises to begin a series of seminars next spring to try to teach the procedure.

In the meantime, patients like Hendrickson will continue to make the pilgrimage to his Hot Springs office in the hopes of restoring their most treasured sense. "Nobody knows how horrifying it is to lose their sight until it actually happens to them," says Hendrickson. "But to be able to see the details of your own child's face--that's irreplaceable."