by Loocie Brown

I came to the practice of Chinese medicine as a patient 25 years ago. I’d spent a year taking pain medications after swimming headlong into a pool wall, and I was struggling to do my job as a fourth-grade teacher.

Acupuncture brought welcome pain relief and a deep sense of relaxation — the same feeling I experienced riding across Alaska with two female friends in 2008. The great expanses and profound freedom of the open road renewed my desire to live without constraint.

For the past 17 years, I’ve practiced Chinese medicine and explored the country on my motorcycle, and I’ve seen how my passions intersect.

Acupuncture is a discipline that incorporates the senses. When I evaluate patients, I visually inspect the tongue to gauge internal wellness; I heed the smell of bad breath, which can signify underlying problems including diabetes; and listen to the patient's voice to discern any imbalances involving the role of each organ. A very weak and soft voice tells me the lungs need more support.

When I prepare for a ride, I also use my senses. I visually inspect my bike for leaks, listen to the engine's hum and touch the surface of the brake lines to make sure all is in working order. After a good polish, I'm ready to go.

On the road, I come face to face with nature on an elemental level. My rides have taken me through the arid expanses of the Mojave Desert, the snowy passes of the Sierra Nevada and the suffocating air of the Deep South in summer. To counterbalance weather extremes, I take simple steps like stopping to cool off and drinking plenty of fluids.

In the clinic, we use acupuncture points to mimic these corrective effects. I see patients maligned by internal forces of nature, such as the heat and dryness of eczema or psoriasis. One person came in complaining of being cold throughout his entire body after a stroke. His face was pale and his lower abdomen felt cold. We used a heat lamp to warm his abdomen and low back, and acupuncture to restore his color and vitality.

In China, many people who work long hours in rice paddies suffer swelling in the legs and feet, almost as though the water from the flooded fields creeps under their skin. We call this condition dampness. It's another example of outside influences reflected inside the body. Most of us don't work in rice paddies, but diets high in sugar can mimic this problem, causing water retention that swells joints.

On my bike, natural forces like wind tax my body, causing muscle twitches and neck tightness. I wear a jacket, in part, to guard against this. But like acupuncture, it's the external calm and the internal balance that make riding in the elements a total body-mind encounter. On the open road, the only constraint that exists is the time it takes to chase down the next adventure.

Loocie Brown is the director of the Center for Acupuncture in Lexington, Mass., and a professor at the New England School of Acupuncture. In her spare time, she spends weekends with her partner and two dogs at their yurt in the Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts.