Acupuncture for athletes: clinic uses Chinese medicine on sports injuries, with some inside knowledge
- She plays rugby, rows for Hong Kong and lifts weights. Toto Cheng says that helps her treat her patients, all of them competitive athletes, coaches or referees
- CrossFit, baseball, swimming, tae kwon do, water polo, netball – she treats all sorts of sportspeople, and dreams of helping one of them become an Olympian
In her parents’ cramped living room in North Point, Hong Kong, lean and muscular 28-year-old Toto Cheng sticks acupuncture needles into a patient’s calves with practised precision. Two other patients lie face down on massage tables feet away from each other. Their pants are slightly lowered to uncover their buttocks’ meridian, the point on the body through which qi, or vital energy, is believed to flow, and where needles are inserted to treat ailments.
“Some things surgery can’t fix,” says Janice Lau Chi-kay, one of Cheng’s patients. And Lau should know – she’s an orthopaedic surgeon. She’s also a national baseball player for Hong Kong, and regularly visits Cheng for treatment when she is injured.
All of Cheng’s patients – local or expat, young or middle-aged – have one thing in common: they are athletes nursing sports-related injuries. As a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, Cheng is unusual, in that her clinic focuses almost exclusively on competitive athletes.
For Shirley Porbo, an Australian-Indonesian stay-at-home mother-of-one and competitive CrossFitter, Cheng’s treatments have become a biweekly routine, and help to keep her injury-free.
“My goal is to do better than last year [in the CrossFit Open] and to not get injured. Toto is part of that plan,” she said.