They Came In Thinking
Nothing Would Work
by Giacomo Kyle Hatanaka, LAc, MAcOM | Hidden Summit Acupuncture
I’ll be honest with you: some of my favorite patients are the skeptics.
Not because I enjoy proving people wrong (though I won’t pretend there’s zero satisfaction in it). It’s because the skeptics are usually the ones who’ve already tried everything else. They’ve done the physical therapy, the chiropractor, the elimination diet, the specialist referral, the second opinion. They’ve Googled themselves into a corner. They show up to their first appointment with their arms kind of mentally crossed, a polite smile that says I don’t really think this is going to work but here I am, and a list of symptoms that’s been with them so long they’ve started to think of it as just their life now.
And then something shifts. Not always dramatically. Not always fast. But it shifts.
I’ve watched it happen enough times now that it doesn’t surprise me anymore. But it still gets me every time.
The Woman Who'd Tried
Everything
You probably know her. She might be you.
She’s sharp, she’s proactive, she takes her health seriously. When something goes wrong she doesn’t ignore it, she attacks it. She researches. She advocates for herself. She tries things. And yet, somewhere after the second or third treatment that didn’t quite do it, a quiet, exhausting thought starts to form: maybe this is just how I feel now.
That thought is a lie. But it’s a very convincing one when you’re tired and in pain and running out of options.
We see a version of her regularly. Back pain that flared up after her second kid and never fully left. Headaches that arrive like clockwork around her cycle. Sleep that used to be reliable and now just isn’t. Digestion that’s become a guessing game. A body that used to feel like hers and now feels like something she’s managing.
“I have been having 2+ years of Gallbladder pain. I’ve seen traditional doctors, who provided no solution that was effective. I thought I would have to live with this until I had it removed (and even then hearing from some, they still have the pain). As a last ditch effort I thought that acupuncture could help ease the pain. After the first couple of visits with Bex, I started feeling better. I thought it was wishful thinking, but here I am almost 2 months later and have improved with almost all elimination of pain. I believe she healed my body with the herbs she prescribed as well as her effective acupuncture! I have seen many practitioners in large cities, she’s the BEST I’ve seen, ever! We are so lucky to have Hidden Summit!” -anonymized patient
What these patients have in common isn’t just the symptom. It’s the timeline. Most of them had been dealing with it for years — sometimes decades — before walking through our door. And almost all of them, when asked why they waited so long, say some version of the same thing: I didn’t think acupuncture was really for me.
What "I Was Skeptical"
Actually Means
When someone tells me they were skeptical, I don’t take it personally. Skepticism is reasonable. We live in a culture that has a very specific idea of what medicine looks like, and it usually involves a prescription pad, a ten-minute appointment, and a clear mechanistic explanation that satisfies the analytical brain.
Acupuncture is harder to explain that way. Not because it doesn’t work — the research is increasingly solid — but because it works on systems that Western medicine is only recently starting to pay serious attention to. The relationship between stress and pain. Between sleep and inflammation. Between the way your body has been holding tension for twenty years and the headache you get every Thursday.
So when a patient walks in skeptical, what I actually hear is: I’m a rational person who needs this to make sense. Fair enough. Let’s talk about it. And then let’s see what happens after a few sessions.
“Alright, I’ll be honest. I was very hesitant to try acupuncture but as they say desperate times call for desperate measures and I was willing to try anything. My anxiety disappeared as soon as Giacomo started telling me the process. He told me to give it one session and let’s just say I have been back multiple times since. I can’t say enough wonderful things about Hidden Summit Acupuncture.” -anonymized patient
The thing about acupuncture is that your belief in it is not required for it to work. Your body responds whether you’ve bought in or not. That’s not magic. It’s physiology. We’re working with your nervous system, your circulation, your body’s own regulatory mechanisms. We’re just giving it a nudge in a direction it already wants to go.
"I Didn't Expect It to Work
This Fast"
This one always makes me smile a little.
People come in prepared for a long road. Which is sometimes accurate, to be fair. Chronic issues that have been building for years don’t always resolve in two sessions. But the body’s capacity to respond quickly, when you give it the right input, is genuinely remarkable. And a lot of patients are surprised by how much shifts even in the first visit.
Not always the main thing they came in for. Sometimes it’s adjacent. They came in for back pain and they slept better that night than they had in months. They came in for headaches and noticed their digestion had quietly settled. They came in for one thing and their body, given a little space to regulate, started tidying up other rooms too.
“I have been receiving treatment for various areas of arthritis pain, neck pain and headaches with Giacomo as my practitioner with much appreciated relief…I have particularly uncharacteristic migraines and have seen a very significant improvement where physicians and physical therapists have been less successful. I highly recommend their caring services.” -anonymized patient
This is one of the things I find most interesting about this medicine. It doesn’t just treat the symptom you present with. It treats the pattern underneath the symptom. And when you address the pattern, things you weren’t even tracking sometimes start to improve.
The One That
Stays With Me
Every practitioner has patients who stick with them. Cases that remind you why you do this work.
For me it’s often the people who came in somewhere in their early-to-mid forties, quietly overwhelmed, holding it together on the outside with both hands. Managing the career, the family, the household, the social calendar, the health stuff that keeps popping up. Sleeping five or six hours and calling it fine. Pushing through the headaches. Ignoring the digestive stuff because there’s no time to deal with it right now.
And the response to all of it is to just push harder, stay more organized, handle more.
What acupuncture offers that person (and what I’ve seen it do, repeatedly) is permission. Permission to slow down long enough for their body to catch up. The treatment itself is often the first time they’ve been horizontal and quiet in weeks. And their body, given that opening, starts doing things it’s been trying to do all along.
“I’ve been working with Bex for the last 6 weeks and am I feel like a different person. She is so easy to work with, she listens, explains, and shares her knowledge of other things you can add to your lifestyle to maximize your results. I just cannot say enough good things about Bex and Hidden Summit!” -anonymized patient
Why People
Wait
I think about this a lot. Why does someone live with chronic neck pain for four years before trying acupuncture? Why does the sleep issue get normalized for so long?
Part of it is the skepticism we talked about. Part of it is access and awareness. Not everyone grows up knowing this is an option. But a big part of it, I think, is that somewhere along the way a lot of us — especially those who are used to taking care of everyone else — decided that their own discomfort was not quite urgent enough to prioritize.
It’ll get better on its own. I’ll deal with it later. It’s not that bad.
Here’s what I want to say to that: it doesn’t have to be an emergency to deserve attention. You don’t have to be at the end of your rope to come in. The best outcomes we see are the patients who come in early, before the pattern has had years to entrench itself. And who keep coming in periodically, not because something’s wrong, but because maintenance is medicine too.
“I started going here after injuring my shoulder at the gym. After a very costly MRI, X-ray, and months of limited movement I was desperate enough to finally try acupuncture, and I wish I would have come months sooner! My pain has almost completely subsided, my movement is no longer limited, and I’ve become a true believer in the power of acupuncture…10/10 recommend Hidden Summit Acupuncture if you’re looking for chronic pain relief.” -anonymized patient
What Actually
Happens in There
I realize for people who’ve never had acupuncture, there’s a basic practical question underneath all of this: but what does it actually feel like?
Mostly, it feels like a nap you didn’t know you needed.
The needles are so fine that most people barely feel them. Occasionally there’s a brief dull ache or a subtle pulse at the point, which is actually a good sign that we’ve contacted the right area. And then most people just drift. Some fall asleep completely. Some stay in that warm, floaty half-conscious state that your brain goes to right before sleep.
They come in tense, and they leave loose. They come in wired, and they leave calm. They come in thinking nothing would work.
And then they book their next appointment.
What To Do
Next
If any part of this sounds familiar — if you’ve been managing something longer than you should have, or if you’re just curious what this could look like for you — we’d love to talk. We’re right here in Boise, and the first conversation is easy. You can book online right here. No commitment, no pressure. Just come see what your body does when you give it a little room.
Read This
Next
Giacomo is a licensed acupuncturist and co-founder of Hidden Summit Acupuncture in Boise, Idaho, serving patients across the Treasure Valley including Meridian, Nampa, and Eagle. He has a deep appreciation for skeptics, a low tolerance for unnecessary suffering, and genuinely believes your Thursday headaches are not just a personality trait.