Don Quixote’s Hammer

What if some outlier, a self-learner, whose formal education ended before he started high school, developed a healing system as novel as Galileo's heliocentric universe or Einstein's answer to "spooky action at a distance,"and was so successful that patients traveled from around the world for consultation and treatment? And what if this system was safe enough for children to practice? If the most common side effects were deep relaxation and feelings of well-being? And its foundation was the belief that there are no hopeless cases; that obstructions in the body's physical wiring initiate disease, and by opening these, you can reset internal balance and restore health? In the early 1980s, while waiting on tables at a Chinese restaurant outside Boston, Tom Tam used his break between the lunch and dinner shifts to teach himself acupuncture. He passed the state exam, earned his accupunture license without ever having entered a classroom, and joined practice with his wife, Lea, a Chinese-trained medical doctor and acupuncturist in Boston's Chinatown. Today, he's challenging conventional thinking about cancer, ALS, Parkinson's and other dire diseases and drawing thousands of patients from across the country and around the world who have been told that modern medicine has nothing more to offer. This story, endorsed by a distinguished Boston biology professor and a former New Hampshire governor, celebrates the powers of curiosity, tenacity, and faith that made Tom Tam's Impossible Dream come true.