As his patients are sure to get the point.

• Position: Brief Article

After retiring as a cardiovascular surgeon, Sewell Dixon took up acupuncture, the ancient Chinese art of poking patients in pertinent places to treat pain and other ailments. "When I told a good friend, the chief of pediatric surgery at the University of Virginia, what I was doing, I think it took him three minutes to stop laughing," he says.

Not all doctors are amused. Acupuncture can be a prickly subject among physicians. "The Chinese believe that acupuncture removes blockages in the body's energy flow and puts the body back in balance," Dixon says. "Beyond that, I only know that it works."

Dixon, 60, earned a medical degree from Emory University in Atlanta in 1964 and did his residency at Duke University Medical Center. Acupuncture first piqued his interested in 1973 -- the same year he started his cardiovascular-and thoracic-surgery practice in Greensboro -- by another surgeon's home movie of a trip to China with President Richard Nixon. It showed a man under acupuncture sipping tea while having a lung removed.

Dixon didn't think much more about it until after he retired in 1993 and formed the Dixon Group, a Washington, D.C.-based healthcare-policy consultant, and became a director of Galen Institute, a nonpartisan think tank on health-care policy. Recalling the videotape, he started boning up on acupuncture.

He entered the acupuncture program at University of...