On a recent Friday morning just past 11, Myung Paul Lee wheeled the House of Brightness Free Acu-Clinic for Homeless People into the parking lot of the McDonald’s at Sheridan and Wilson. He parked in the far northeast corner of the lot, got out, and threw open the back and side doors of the late-model Dodge panel van. He was removing a tenor saxophone from its case when Chuckie Schenkel arrived and greeted him warmly. Then the two men got down to business.
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The sax put away, Lee and Schenkel stepped up into the gleaming white van. “Take your shirt off, Chuckie,” said Lee. Schenkel complied, then lay facedown on a cushioned table, above which hung Lee’s diploma from the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. “Chuckie is number one patient,” said Lee, pulling a rubber glove onto his left hand. Schenkel isn’t technically homeless–he’s a “resident worker” at Grasmere Place, a psychiatric rehabilitation facility across the street from the McDonald’s–but this doesn’t disqualify him from receiving treatment. “He’s not rich,” explained Lee. Schenkel shows up for treatment every day the clinic is open–Monday, Wednesday, and Friday–seeking help for a sore back and high blood pressure.
After swabbing the small of Schenkel’s back with an alcohol wipe, Lee palpated the region attentively for several minutes. Reaching into a plastic storage container beneath the table, he retrieved a handful of acupuncture needles. “One time we use, we throw away,” he said, peeling one from its sterile wrapper. He carefully positioned a needle about two inches to the right of Schenkel’s spine. “Breathe in,” he said, then pushed the head of the needle down with his right forefinger. “Breathe out,” he said as he pulled away the needle’s plastic sleeve, leaving it upright in Schenkel’s flesh. “Are you OK?” he asked his patient, who answered with a nod. Lee repeated the operation three more times, creating a rectangle the size of a mail slot. Then he moved on to the areas behind Schenkel’s knees, implanting two needles into each leg. “Behind the knees is master point for the back,” explained Lee. “The needles on the spine tonify the kidney. Back pain is often caused by the kidney, we think.”
A native of South Korea, Lee immigrated to Chicago with his wife, Young, in 1975. While Young trained to become a registered nurse, Lee began a master’s program in engineering at IIT. “But I never finished the degree because my babies came along,” he says, referring to his daughter Susan and his son Christopher, both of whom are now medical students. Instead, in 1978–by which time the family had moved to the suburbs–Lee opened a dry cleaning shop in Schaumburg. The idea of providing free acupuncture to the homeless first came to him in the wake of the deaths of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa. “I felt a lot of things when this happened,” he says. “It made me want to help people from the bottom of my heart. Dry cleaning is useful, but it does not help people so completely as medicine.”
Chinese medicine of the kind Lee practices hypothesizes that the body has 12 main channels through which travels a vital energy called chi. Illness results when these channels are blocked or otherwise compromised. But healthful circulation of chi can be restored by the application of acupuncture needles to specific points along the channels. Treating my disordered spleen, for example, might require the insertion of needles into a certain spot on my ankles–although Lee hesitated to make a definitive prognosis based on such a cursory examination.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Robert Drea, Cliff Doerksen.
