In a small second-floor room in a nondescript building on Lakeway Road, Barb Hammerquist laid on her back, knees peaked at an angle, her breaths long and deliberate as her arms rested at her side.
The afternoon sun filled the room with a comfortable glow. Along with Hammerquist’s deep breaths, a small fan on the floor made the only other sound.
Her eyes were closed, the blinds were drawn and 18 tiny needles were stuck in her skin, from her ears to her toes.
Kate Johnston, Hammerquist’s acupuncturist, came into the room and took a green blanket from her patient’s feet.
Then, delicately, one by one, Johnston removed each needle. Hammerquist slowly came to life.
She normally takes quick, relaxing naps on the table. She’s been to see Johnston often enough to where she can completely give in to the treatment and zone all the way out.
Hammerquist has dealt with whiplash for more than a year and also had shoulder surgery not long ago.
After the needles came out from her legs, arms, ears and forehead, Hammerquist turned over and Johnston worked from her neck down. She placed the needles along the back of her neck and shoulders, along her vertebrae, the backs of her legs and finally on the outside of her ankles.
“I don’t love needles,” Hammerquist whispered. “But the more you do it, the more relaxing it is.”
Minutes later, Hammerquist dozed off again and the healing was underway.
An ancient treatment
The practice and study of acupuncture has only been a common medical procedure in the United States for about 40 years. In Asia and other eastern countries, it dates back nearly 5,000 years.
The Chinese are credited with starting and perfecting the craft. The first document that describes acupuncture as a medical practice was “The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine.”
Acupuncture, if it could be summarized in a few sentences, is a method of medicinal healing that involves small needles used to relax muscles and manipulate the natural energy in someone’s body to make it flow the way it is supposed to.
Modern medicine practices that most people in the United States are familiar with includes fixing something that is broken or malfunctioning.
That can be through surgery, removing the broken part, rearranging or prescribing medicine that will take over and do what your body isn’t doing for you. Modern medicine is pretty straightforward.
Some would argue that it is fairly narrow-minded and stringent in what is supposed to work and what wouldn’t work.
Instead of providing an alternative or supplement, acupuncture encourages the body’s natural ability to heal.
The traditional concept of acupuncture recognizes there is energy that circulates through the body. It’s the same energy that exists in every other living thing. It’s not a mystical or supernatural energy but the real, scientific kind.
Energy flows in very specific pathways through the body, and as long as it flows freely and abundantly, a body is healthy. Even if someone is sick, gets a rash, comes down with a cold or catches something, the body will heal itself in most situations as long as the energy has a path without traffic or disruption.
If something is wrong in the body and not going away, that indicates there is a problem with circulation and with that energy. Based on symptoms, an acupuncturist has an understanding of which pathways are having problems and the needles are used to adjust how that energy circulates.
Johnston is one of those acupuncturists.
Meet Kate
Johnston grew up in Normal, Illinois, a small, rural college town and home to her alma mater, Illinois State University. While she was in college, she remembers hearing a saying that both confused and infuriated her.
We, as humans, only use 10% of our brains.
“How can that be true?” she thought.
So she took a job that would hopefully dispel that saying. She became a military intelligence agent and worked in Korea from 1981-83 and spied on North Korea.
While she was in Korea, Johnston took a kung fu class and one day, after a classmate attempted what she calls a “spinning, flying kick,” he dislocated his knee.
If that had happened almost anywhere else, he would have been on crutches for six weeks minimum and been told to stay off his leg for a long time.
What happened next propelled Johnston into the career she has had for more than three decades.
“The instructor put his knee back in place, poked a couple of needles in it and the kid got up, finished that day’s class and came back the next day without a problem,” she said.
Johnston was stunned.
Over the next few weeks, she brought as many friends with ailments to her kung fu teacher and secret acupuncturist to see if he could heal them. They all said they felt even a little better after seeing him.
At the time, Johnston was dealing with a horrible cough. She went to a doctor several times to stop the chronic annoyance and at only age 20, she didn’t know what to do.
Why didn’t Johnston take the opportunity to get checked as soon as possible?
“I was afraid of needles,” she said, fully aware of the irony.
After her first acupuncture appointment, she didn’t cough again for six months. That made her a believer.
But what put her over the edge to make this her career path was her mother.
Johnston’s mom was diagnosed with cancer at home in Illinois in the early 1980s. Treatment for cancer, at the time, was radiation and morphine.
“That’s it,” Johnston said.
Spending time in Asia, Johnston learned that with medicine in that part of the world, something is always providing the body something while another form is hurting it.
Radiation and chemotherapy is basically poison for the body. Johnston will never forget what her kung fu teacher told her when her mom was dealing with cancer.
“You Americans,” he said. “You’re so rich, you have everything, yet your health care is so bad.”
With radiation and similar modern medicinal practices, “the basic idea is poisoning the body until the cancer is gone and hoping that they make it,” Johnston said.
Unfortunately, her mom didn’t make it.
As those life events happened, Johnston went on a journey of her own and hasn’t looked back.
The beginnings of Gillette Acupuncture
After Korea, Johnston enrolled at Samra University of Oriental Medicine in Los Angeles.
At the time, it was only one of six schools in the country that taught acupuncture. Now there are more than 50.
“Acupuncture has come a long way in this country,” she said.
After school, she worked in both California and Arizona and she and her husband moved to Newcastle in 1992.
Getting people to buy into acupuncture in northeast Wyoming was a lot easier for Johnston than most people would think. It started in a very cliché way, very Wyoming-esque.
One old rancher with a bum knee wasn’t able to ride his horse for a stint and “all the other ranchers knew that old Billy couldn’t get on his horse anymore.”
“When they saw him on his horse again, I suddenly had a lot of ranching patients,” Johnston said.
Business spread from there, mostly by word of mouth, and a couple of years later the family moved to Gillette to make it easier for the business to thrive.
Since then, business has been steady, the country has slowly come around to the practice and Johnston’s passion for acupuncture has blossomed even more.
The future of acupuncture
When Johnston opened her practice in Newcastle, she was only one of two licensed acupuncturists in the state. The other was in Jackson.
Now she estimates there are more than 30 in Wyoming.
As years have passed, more research has come out about acupuncture and the long list of benefits has grown exponentially.
Acupuncture has long been known to help with anxiety, arthritis, depression, whiplash, migraines, nausea, inflammation, insomnia and many other issues.
Now, thanks to grant funding that was handed out two decades ago, studies are coming out literally almost every day about new benefits of the practice.
In just the last few years, studies have shown that acupuncture can help physiological issues, stem cell health and endorphin levels.
The future is bright for acupuncture. Ten years ago, Johnston attended a conference at the hospital in Sheridan about the possibility of introducing alternative methods of medicine like acupuncture into cancer clinics.
A lot of the groundbreaking research is still happening overseas, but more and more are catching on in the U.S.
Johnston has always loved the discovery aspect of acupuncture. She’s a natural problem-solver and genuinely enjoys seeing patients get better and witnessing them discover a new way their body works.
“It’s all really rewarding,” she said. “I love the process of putting together a roadmap that will get the best results for the patient.”
Hammerquist said she had tried a handful of other methods to help with her whiplash. Now she swears by acupuncture and recommends it to as many people as possible.
When she was in college, Johnston wrote her master’s thesis on how acupuncture can help cancer patients. She sent the paper to the American Cancer Society for review, still chasing that dream to save the world from what took her mom.
The words the American Cancer Society sent back was that acupuncture was “a bunch of hocus-pocus.”
That was more than 30 years ago. Johnston guesses she wouldn’t get the same response today.
When asked why she thinks it caught on so quickly here in Wyoming, Johnston’s response could also tell the story of why it has been so popular.
“People have problems,” she said. “This actually helps.”