When she was 22, Arlene Faulk lost the ability to walk. There was no car crash or dramatic accident — the healthy college student just lost all feeling from her waist down in the course of a single afternoon.

She gradually regained her ability to walk and then lost it again several times following that first attack in the early 1970s. But now she can walk unassisted and is even teaching tai chi.

Faulk, a Chicago resident, suffers from multiple sclerosis, a disease of the nervous system. When doctors diagnosed her in 1980, the best treatments available were steroids, which only worked for a limited amount of time.

“They’d done the best that they could for me,” Faulk said. “I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

So when a friend referred Faulk to Nancy Floy, an acupuncturist and founder of Evanston’s Heartwood Center, Faulk agreed to give alternative medicine a try. Since then her life has never been the same, she said.

“Tai chi and Oriental medicine have changed my life,” Faulk said. “When you take a pill like aspirin to stop a headache, it goes right to the symptoms. … (With acupuncture) you get to the root of the cause rather than just treating the symptom.”

Acupuncture and tai chi are just two forms of alternative medicine. Although these techniques are not entirely accepted by the traditional medical community, patients like Faulk said they worked when nothing else did.

Floy began treating Faulk with acupuncture in 1995, four years before she opened the Heartwood Center, 1599 Maple Ave. Acupuncture involves placing needles into specific points of the body to promote energy flow, while tai chi promotes harmony through exercise, Faulk said.

“That’s what tai chi’s all about — pursuit of balance in all things,” Faulk said.

Heartwood, a holistic medical center, offers acupuncture, massage therapy and psychotherapy, as well as classes in tai chi, yoga and meditation. Last year, it also began offering free acupuncture to low-income breast cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.

“These are women who never would have thought they would have had massage or acupuncture,” Floy said. “We don’t claim to cure people of cancer. We claim to help them with the side effects of Western medicine.”

Although a paper published in 1997 by the National Institute of Health said the institution of Western medicine does not fully understand how acupuncture can relieve pain, it did say “promising results have emerged … showing (the) efficacy of acupuncture in adult postoperative and chemotherapy nausea.”

Evanston is home to another holistic medical center, Wellspring Integrative Medicine, 1565 Sherman Ave. Wellspring’s practitioners include acupuncturists, psychotherapists, massage therapists and chiropractors.

Director Irwin Heller said housing practitioners of four disciplines in the same office provides more complete treatment because it facilitates multiple patient references.

Heller, a chiropractor, said people might come to him to relieve muscular tension without realizing they may have an underlying emotional problem that one of the psychotherapists can treat.

“So many people’s physical pain is either caused by or exacerbated by or perpetuated by emotional issues,” Heller said.

Most holistic or integrative medical centers employ medical doctors, Heller said. A general physician usually sees new patients and then refers them to one of the other practitioners in the office.

Heller said he would like to have a medical doctor at Wellspring, but too few traditional doctors accept holistic health care as a legitimate alternative to Western medicine. His personal physician hired chiropractors and acupuncturists, but Heller estimated only five to 10 medical doctors in Chicago have done the same.

“(My physician) is one of those rare individuals who recognizes the limitations of any medical system and likes to incorporate others into his practice,” Heller said.

The lack of insurance coverage for alternative medicine serves is another sign that Western medicine has not completely embraced alternative methods, Heller said.

For HMOs to cover alternative treatments, a patient’s primary physician must make an official referral, something most traditional doctors hesitate to do, Heller said.

“From the financial end, insurance companies tend to look a little bit askance at covering alternative medicine,” Heller said. “That’s changing in the positive direction, but it hasn’t changed completely.”

Reach Lee S. Ettleman at [email protected].