I VISITED DR. JASON HAO’S OFFICE, and what I saw and heard was extraordinary.
Dr. Hao is a grand master of Chinese medicine specializing in neuro-acupuncture. He knows he has a gift. He understands, in part, where it comes from — but even to him it remains something of a mystery, something that resists all explanation.
I spoke with one of his patients, a woman immobilized in a wheelchair, whose prognosis from the expert Western doctors was grim. While I was at Doctor Hao’s office she got up from her wheelchair. She now walks. I met the parents of a blind child, who also had a grim prognosis, and I witnessed the child laughing and running down the hallway.
And that is the nature of a true gift — it belongs equally to the one who gives it and to the one who receives it. It’s a gift to everyone who knows someone who has given up hope. And it is a gift to the witness. — OL
PART 1: THE STAR CASE STUDY
Eliana, age six, enters the clinic with her parents. She is moving, climbing, looking around the room. Four years ago, she was blind, comatose, and given a prognosis of permanent vegetative state.
Can you introduce yourselves?
Marisa: My name is Marisa Martinez. I’m Eliana’s mom.
Norman: I’m Norman, her father.
Marisa: So, before she got COVID, she was a normal two-year-old. She got COVID and was intubated and was accidentally extubated. So she lost oxygen to her brain. And then she also coded, so they had to use CPR during that time as well. For about five to ten minutes, she went without oxygen. She had an anoxic brain injury and she was in a coma for eighteen days.
She had COVID and presented with croup. She actually wasn’t diagnosed with COVID until the next day in the hospital. We went home and we treated her for the croup symptoms — hot shower with the steam, just to relax her airway. I kept doing what the doctors told me to do, and she just kind of kept on declining. She kept on struggling to take whole breaths. So we took her back to the hospital. Pretty much right before we got there, she really had a hard time breathing. Really shallow breaths. They wanted to intubate her as a precautionary thing, because they were afraid her throat would close. So they intubated her and everything — she was stable and fine. And when they were going to transport her, they accidentally extubated her.
Norman: They were trying to get her into a chopper for transport, and she had already been extubated at this time. It took a little while for them to react and get her back. She coded at that time.
Marisa: She was without oxygen approximately five to fifteen minutes, probably closer to ten minutes. After that, she was transported to the UNM hospital. That’s where the rest of her treatment was.
When we got her home, she still couldn’t sit up on her own. We’d give her baths inside of a laundry basket because she couldn’t hold her torso up. She was blind. Actually blind.
Norman: Her first prognosis was she could possibly be a vegetable for the rest of her life. Never be able to do anything for herself. She was not responding to anything.
Marisa: She started having seizures around day four. They kind of prepared us that she might be brain dead. The only reason they continued to let her come out of it — it was right after Christmas when this happened. Her dad brought her prayer bear in, and he pressed it, and it makes the praying bear song. She opened her eyes and turned her head to us, where we were standing at the side.
All the neurologists and their students were standing around, and I remember them — they held my shoulder and said, She’s not brain dead, because she did that one motion. She remembered what her bear sounded like. She opened her eyes and turned to us. Because they were preparing us that she might be brain dead — her eyes weren’t reacting to the light.
The doctors said she could learn, but that motor would be her hardest. They didn’t even really tell us she was going to be blind until we were in rehab. They just said she’s going to have cortical visual impairment. And they said she can get up to one hundred percent better, but months had already gone by.
Norman: Their diagnosis was pretty much, We’re just going to have to wait and see. Live the new normal. We didn’t accept that. To me, that’s not acceptable. I want to try to do as much as we can to get her better. Whatever we gotta do, we do.
How did you find Dr. Hao?
Marisa: I work in the hospital as a nurse, and one of the doctors sits on the board with Dr. Hao and was telling us about acupuncture. He’d had an injury himself, got acupuncture, and asked if it would help her. That’s how we got referred.
After the first treatment, when she walked out, she could see again. We were sitting in the truck and I turned to look at her, and I was like, How are you feeling? Just talking to her. And she looked at me, and then she looked at Norman, her dad, right afterward, and then she giggled. It was like she saw us for the first time. This was after the first treatment. We were just in the parking lot here, actually.
She could see? After one treatment?
Marisa: We didn’t really realize how blind she was, because when she learned to walk, she was walking into walls. That’s why she still kind of walks carefully — she developed a careful walk because she couldn’t see. She does a lot better now. She runs and jumps and climbs and gets on everything. She can run and jump off a step and turn and jump and run back. She’s doing so good.
And the seizure medication?
Norman: We got her off all her seizure medication.
Marisa: They really did slow her down. She would take them, and she’d be like a zombie, honestly. We noticed in the afternoon, after the morning dose wore off, she was bouncing off the walls, having fun, playing. Then she’d take the medication and be back to nothing. She was on those seizure meds for a long time. I think they really slowed her down — learning, being able to do things, talking.
Norman: She’s overcome every obstacle except speech right now. She does understand a lot. The more we came to acupuncture, the more she started to understand everything you’d tell her. She only had receptive language, and still mostly does, but she really does understand a lot more just from coming here. Three or four days after acupuncture, she started to do something new, do something better.
Were other doctors surprised at her recovery?
Norman: Everything with them is medicine, to be honest with you. They were kind of against the whole taking her off seizure medication. I told the doctor that we wanted to wean her off, because it really did slow her down.
Marisa: She has what they call CVI — cortical visual impairment. It’s actually just the connection from the brain to the eyes. The optic nerve and everything is good. It’s just because her brain was damaged — she had a global brain injury. It disrupted the communication between the eyes and the brain. She was completely blind before she started acupuncture. It definitely helped the connection in the brain.
Norman: I wish we would have found him even earlier. We didn’t start seeing Dr. Hao probably until almost a year after her injury because we were looking all over. My wife researches everything. She finds different things to try.
Are you from New Mexico?
Norman: Yes, we’re from Las Vegas, New Mexico. We drive here to see Dr. Hao. It’s only about a forty-five minute drive.
Marisa: We used to come every week for a long time until she started getting better. Now we come about once a month.
This is kind of a miracle.
Marisa: Yeah. It is. The first time, I didn’t even know if it was just because I wanted it to be, you know — because of course, at that time, you just want anything. You don’t even believe what you’re seeing.
Norman: We’re just lucky to still have her. She’s doing good.
Eliana is treated during the interview. She cries briefly during the needles but calms quickly. Afterward, she walks around, looking at things, climbing on furniture, interacting with her parents. She is, unmistakably, a little girl in full motion.
PART 2: THE NEEDLE AND THE NERVE CASE STUDY
Alan Goldton was an elite endurance athlete — a competitor in Leadville’s legendary 100-mile mountain bike race — when a strange tingling in his fingertips became, within days, a life-threatening paralysis. Diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, she spent six weeks hospitalized and left in a wheelchair with no reliable prognosis. Then, on his third acupuncture treatment with Dr. Hao, she simply stood up. What follows is a conversation between Alan and Dr. Hao about what happened.
Alan, when did you first know something was wrong?
It was August 22nd. I was visiting family in New England. I’d just competed in a hundred-mile mountain bike race in Leadville a couple weeks before — 12,000 feet of elevation gain — and I was working on my bike when I noticed tingling in my fingertips. I didn’t think much of it. I figured I’d just tweaked my fingers fiddling with bike mechanics.
But I went for a ride that day and the tingling didn’t go away. By evening it had spread to my toes. The next day, I started to feel numbness around my mouth and lips. My friend Jalen, who’s a surgeon, was at a family birthday party and I mentioned it to him very casually. He said there could be so many explanations and we agreed to talk it through the next day.
That morning I got into the shower and I could tell something was wrong. The water hitting my legs and back felt reduced — like the sensation was just not there. I started to freak out. I did what most people do now: I asked AI what was going on. It actually named my real diagnosis among a few possibilities. The internet said go to a hospital. Jalen said I was probably fine and to see my primary care doctor when I got back to New Mexico.
So I made it home to Santa Fe. I woke up at 6 a.m. — which is not normal for me, I’m a deep sleeper — because I was in a ton of pain in my legs. Something I can’t fully describe, like the core of my legs was on fire. I went to the ER at Christus that day.
They ran every blood test imaginable, sent me for MRIs of my brain and spine, did a lumbar puncture. They were trying to rule out MS, West Nile, meningitis, Lyme, Guillain-Barré. No one felt confident. And there was no in-person neurologist in Santa Fe — I was seeing telehealth neurologists who were trying to coordinate with the internal medicine team. The neurological exams — where they push on your arms and legs and test your reflexes — are really difficult to describe remotely. I stayed four days. Every day I was getting weaker.
I’m someone who just did a hundred miles in the mountains. I know my body. And I knew I was much weaker than I should be. But the doctors couldn’t clinically confirm it. They discharged me.
What happened next?
My mom had flown in from Portland by then, which turned out to be incredibly fortunate. Over the next two days I just descended. I couldn’t sleep because of the pain in my legs. I would walk around my house in the middle of the night trying to feel anything other than pain. I’d sit on the floor of my shower just to have some relief. My mom would stay up with me all night watching mystery movies so we had something to do.
Then I fell on the stairs. I couldn’t get up. I had to call my fiancé to come get me off the floor. That was the first moment I really understood: I’ve lost mobility. I don’t know what’s happening to me.
How did you end up at the hospital?
We were connected to Phil Shields, who was the head doctor at Nexus before they closed and is a neurosurgeon. He came to my house on a Saturday to examine me. He said, I don’t know exactly what I’m seeing, but you need to go to a hospital right now — I’d even consider Denver or Boston. We also knew the head neurosurgeon at UNM, and Phil called him directly. They had space for me. We drove to the Albuquerque ER on Saturday night of Labor Day weekend.
It was intense. And I had a terrible headache and was incredibly nauseous. But a neurologist saw me fairly quickly, and almost immediately he said, I’m ninety-nine percent sure you have Guillain-Barré syndrome — specifically AIDP, acute inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy. I nearly broke down. After a week of doctors telling me they didn’t know, here was someone who was certain.
He said, have you been able to see any neurologist in person? And when we said no, he said, that’s why. He said it was life-threatening — if the paralysis reached my lungs, I’d be intubated and it would be a much longer road.
I was at UNM for nine days. The treatment is an infusion of immunoglobulins — two hours a day for five days. After that, it’s just waiting to see when you hit the bottom, and nobody can tell you when that will be.
When I entered the hospital I could still walk maybe ten feet. The next day I needed a walker. The day after that I couldn’t walk at all. Then I couldn’t even stand. My mom would help me pivot from the bed to a bedside commode, and at one point I just collapsed on the floor — too weak to stand, even with the walker’s help.
Every four hours I breathed into a device that measured my lung power. That was the number everyone was watching. I couldn’t lift my legs off the bed. My arms could only come up about this high. The sensation in my legs had gone up to my hips; in my arms past my elbows. My mom and my fiancé were with me around the clock — I needed to be turned over in bed.
What did the doctors tell you?
Nothing specific. They couldn’t tell me if I would be intubated. They couldn’t tell me when I’d recover or how fully. They just said: time. You have to wait and see. On the fifth day — the day after my last treatment — I finally stopped getting worse. That was the best news they could give me. They transferred me to inpatient rehab at Christus.
I was there three weeks. The typical stay is seven to ten days. I was in a harness attached to a rope system on the ceiling so I could practice walking without falling. It was me and mostly ninety-year-olds recovering from broken hips. Every step of the way, my fiancé and I would tell ourselves, okay, by the time I leave this part of the hospital, I’ll be walking. And every time, I still wasn’t.
I was discharged on September 29th still in a wheelchair. That was really depressing. Western medicine’s answer had become essentially: go home, wait, and when you can feel your muscles responding, use them.
But I couldn’t get out of bed by myself. Couldn’t go to the bathroom by myself. My fiancé had to carry me up and down the two flights of stairs in our house just to leave for appointments. We hired a home health aide five hours a day so I could be home. I did Legos because there was almost nothing else I could do — and even that was hard because my hand strength and dexterity were so reduced. My vision was doubled for weeks because the focusing muscles in my eyes were affected.
I’m someone who moved to Santa Fe specifically to be outside every day. And I couldn’t leave my house alone. I was completely sedentary and deeply depressed.
When did you start seeing Dr. Hao?
November 11th was my first appointment. Still in the wheelchair. Basically unchanged since leaving rehab. Dr. Hao told me: you won’t feel anything for the first three treatments. On the fourth, you might start to see change.
On the third treatment I stood up. Completely by accident. It felt like there had been five atmospheres of weight on top of me and suddenly there was one. I just stood. And it was incredible, because standing changed everything. All of a sudden I could get myself out of bed. I could go to the bathroom on my own. I could get a snack from my wheelchair. That one thing — standing — gave me back so much independence.
Dr. Hao, what were you seeing when Alan first came in?
In Chinese medicine, we assess the patient differently. We look at the tongue — the color, the coating, the pulse — to understand the core energy and where the blockage is. When Alan came in, I saw what we call stagnation of energy and blood flow. The inflammation had disrupted nerve conduction. The brain’s signals weren’t reaching the body properly.
AIDP is essentially the immune system attacking the myelin sheath — the covering on the nerves. We treat the central nervous system through specific points on the scalp and then work peripherally on the arms and legs using electrostimulation. We call it neuro-acupuncture. I’ve been doing this for 35 years. I treated a similar case in Phoenix in 2006 — a woman with AIDP — and she made a complete recovery. She went back to yoga. Got married. So when Alan came in, I knew what I was looking at and I knew what was possible.
Alan, what was the progression after that first standing?
December 3rd I could do my stairs with a cane and the railing. December 24th I took my first steps with no equipment at all. It was so emotional. It had been months since I had walked unassisted. Today I use a hiking pole outdoors, one or two depending on the terrain. Doctors who’ve seen me since say this is a remarkably fast recovery for Guillain-Barré.
There was a profound sense of hopelessness in where Western medicine left me. Even the doctors in the hospital couldn’t tell me if I’d need a ventilator, couldn’t tell me the timeline. Part of what Dr. Hao gave me was hope — genuine, specific hope. He told me when I’d see change. And then I did. That shift was as important as the treatment itself.
Dr. Hao, do you believe Alan will make a full recovery?
Most of my patients reach a permanent cure. They don’t need to come back. Some have setbacks — that happens with any condition — and we see them again. But the nerve system can reorganize. New connections form. The body has its own healing power. What we do is help it find the path.
PART 3: THE HEALER
Dr. Hao sits down for a conversation to explain how he has spent 34 years doing what Western medicine says cannot be done.
I see a lot of amazing things doing what I get to do, but this thing I witnessed was quite extraordinary. Do cases like this amaze you also?
I see blindness recovered, paralysis cured. It’s not a surprise to me anymore. In the beginning, this was a surprise, but now it’s almost happening every month, every week.
But if you see someone who was blind and then they could see, you might say it was a miracle. How do you look at it?
Miracles? I would say science. I can repeat it. The students I teach, they can do that too.
Do you see yourself as a healer, an artist, a scientist?
What I learned at school, you’re a scientist or you’re a doctor. But now we are in this place, in Santa Fe, in the art. I’m thinking, why do I get better results than somebody else? We get the science plus the art. So your left brain, your right brain, your gift — you learn, they merge, they become you.
The science and the art merge.
You have to have the gift inside, then you learn, and then you merge them together. The Western, the Chinese, you integrate them. The art and science merge together. So in many ways, beyond the practitioner, you have to do a lot of different things to enhance your own energy. We call it chi. When your energy is strong, you have to become different.
In China, there are people jerking around all year in the hospital. They have no idea what to do about that. They plan to put them there and they never finish the treatment. I travel all over the world teaching. I teach lots of MDs.
You’re obviously a man of empathy and compassion. Do you ever wish you could do more? You’re only one person.
No, that’s why I started the school. I travel all over the world to teach, and I’m going to teach online. And next week, I’m going to Harvard, to the university, to demo, to teach.
So most people are able to actually implement what you do?
Yeah, that’s a gift I have. I’m a regular doctor in China, I’m a neurologist. I have the language. They can recognize it; they can receive that; they can use that. I don’t use traditional terminology — yin yang, meridians. I use neurology terminology. They understand. Most doctors like it.
You grew up in China. When did you realize you have this gift?
I look at it like an art. I just look at it and know how to do it.
Like paper cutting, multiple things. You just look at it and know. I always was drawing when I was little, and I do calligraphy. So for the New Year, the parents always collected my paper cuts, put them on the windows, the doors. People loved it. And in art school, I would make small figures and they liked them. I wanted to become an artist when I grew up, but my parents said, No, you cannot. You cannot make a living.
So I got accepted to medical school. We learned history, and in history you always have heroes. My heroes are all the Chinese master doctors. The one called Hua Tuo, he could stop headaches, he could cure paralysis, and he could wake people in comas up. I said, I want to do that. And now, that’s what I do. Now, we wake up many people in comas — we wake them up.
Doctor, you really saved my wife’s life in some ways. And I bore witness to it. No one could help her, and you did.
And last month, we treated a schoolteacher from Michigan. She had a major illness — for about twenty years she suffered. Completely cured.
She goes back to her doctor. And all her organ function is normal — liver and stomach, everything. They say, Who did you see? It’s a miracle. Impossible.
We also treated a gentleman in Albuquerque. He was paralyzed, with loss of speech, lots of problems, no movement at all. Now he’s completely cured. After, he went to the Police Academy, became a policeman, married, had a baby. If I didn’t treat him, he would have had a lifelong disability.
Tell me about CRPS.
Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. I’ve treated many cases. We had one girl from Oklahoma who used to be a gymnast, who was in a wheelchair in crazy pain for two years. After we cured her, her mom sent so many people to us. Three months later, she said, Do you know how many I’ve sent? I said, I don’t know. She said, Thirty.
Thirty? And the cure rate?
One hundred percent.
What would you like to accomplish next?
I’d like a center in a hospital, or a university with special treatment for cerebral palsy. I’ve treated many of them, and they’re normal now. And autism. There’s 21.7 million children with autism worldwide. There’s no treatment. I think we can change fifty percent. If we help twenty percent, that’s four million families. That’s very exciting.
Why did you move to the United States? What made you leave China?
I was the first teacher in my university to be sent abroad. So why come to the US? I was pretty poor. I only had eighty dollars in my pocket.
Eighty dollars? That’s brave.
People would say, You’re not afraid? I’m not afraid. I have good skills. My hands are good. I also said, I know I can do it.
You see wheelchairs everywhere, there are so many disabled. I can cure many of them. I know how good my skills are. I have a good heart. And the people I take care of, I care about. That’s the way it should be. The majority of doctors, they don’t care very much. They take the people in, send them away.
How did you choose New Mexico?
I had an offer to come here in Santa Fe and another in San Diego. I came here and never looked back.
What do you like about Santa Fe?
The culture. People are open. MDs refer patients. Everybody supports each other. And the patients are very family-oriented. All the patients you cure, you become best friends for the rest of your life.
How do you find doctors who care as much as you do? You can’t manufacture compassion.
Well, if you want to be rich, you go to another profession. This is a profession where you care. You change people’s lives. That’s everything. You think of money, and you make wrong decisions. Your reward is when you make their life better. And money comes anyway.
Don’t chase the money.
Don’t chase the money. Take care from your heart. In China, you take care of your patients like your family. Some people are like your brothers. You treat the old lady like she’s your mother. You care.
I never think about how rich I can be. I often go to Europe, teaching in France, Italy, Belgium. I’ve gone to Canada twice, China three times. All teaching. New York, Florida, Palm Beach, LA, Las Vegas. And that’s all in a year.
I want to share. But you only have two hands. The more people who know what you can do, the more people you can help.
You think the location is healing?
Many patients tell me, we get good results because Santa Fe has different healing energy. It increases your opportunity to make people change quicker, to change completely. So when people say, Why are you still in Santa Fe? I say, You don’t understand — the energy here benefits me too.
We brought patients to the legislature last year. They were all in wheelchairs with CRPS, cerebral palsy, people who couldn’t walk. One was kicked by a horse in the head, totally disabled. They all stood up, talking, their tears flowing. After that, UNM wanted to have dialogue, so we could do research together.
You have to see it. Otherwise, you cannot believe it.
That’s right. You have to see it.
As if to underscore the point, during the interview, Eliana, given up on by Western medicine, climbed on the furniture, ran across the room, looked her parents in the eye, and giggled. She is, as Dr. Hao says of so many of his cases, a star.