By
RICK BONNELL
Staff Writer
Charlotte Observer
November, 1997

You don't have to watch Dr. Daniel Motuz stick tiny needles in people's joints to tell he's a maverick physician. Monday he wore jeans and a green Looney Tunes ski-bum shirt while treating patients. He talks in simple words and thinks many of his fellow doctors take themselves too seriously.

And he practices acupuncture on Muggsy Bogues' sore left knee.

Motuz says he didn't "become a voodoo doctor" when he incorporated acupuncture into his anesthesiology practice in 1985. Rather, he says, "you combine this with what you already know." So far, Motuz knows how to keep Bogues on the basketball court. Though acupuncture can't replace the cartilage missing from Bogues' knee, he expects to start tonight at point guard when the Charlotte Hornets face the Seattle SuperSonics

Acupuncture blocks Bogues' pain to an extent that he's played in five of the Hornets' 11 games. Bogues has been crucial to the team's success—they are 4-1 with him this season, 2-4 without him. Bogues' knee felt so sore two days before the Nov. 2 opener that he questioned if he'd play at all this season. That's when a friend, Dr. Preston Fogle, referred Bogues to Motuz. Bogues thought of the 3,000 year-old Chinese treatment as "all this hocus." However, desperation has a wondrous way of prying open closed minds.

"When you get to a point where nothing is working for you, you've just got to take a step out (of your comfort zone) and say something else may work," Bogues recalled. "I asked a lot of questions: It was not dangerous. It was not surgery. It wouldn't set me back" if it didn't work.

Acupuncture involves little pain and no blood. The needles Motuz uses are so thin, they make stick pins look like railroad spikes. As Motuz describes, the needles "separate tissue" rather than tearing it. "I thought there'd be these big needles they'd inject you with," said Bogues. "It's just a little stimulation. " Stimulation comes from either twirling the needle with your fingers or charging it with electric current. Motuz uses both methods on Bogues. "The bone is loaded with nerve fibers. We're stimulating those fibers," said Motuz. "The stimulation overrides the nerve fibers shooting pain up to his brain."

The ancient theory behind acupuncture is that the body is a system of circuits, and the needles re-route the signals causing severe pain. "The Chinese view is wherever you have pain, you have blockage in these circuits," said Motuz, who studied acupuncture in a seven-month program offered by UCLA. "Once you break that barrier, the pain will go away."

That's all kinds of pain—sore backs, arthritic joints, and migraine headaches. Recent research suggests acupuncture increases the release of endorphins one of the body's natural painkillers. Endorphins are what give joggers so called "runner's high."

Acupuncture has also been used as an aid to lose weight or quit smoking. The treatments— which usually involve stimulating the ear — seem to help some avoid the impulse to eat or smoke.

As recently as the 1970's, acupuncture was perceived as so radical that some doctors feared losing their licenses if they practiced it. Now more than 3,000 U.S. physicians are certified in the field. Motuz says acupuncture is an alternative, not a replacement for Western medicine. He says the proof is not in research studies, but in how his patients feel.

"Most of us believe in a God, but we don't see him," said Motuz. "Once you see this work, you believe it." Bogues is sold. "I'm just trying to be true to my body," Bogues said, "let it talk to me." Thankfully, it hasn't talked of late in a tortured scream.