SANTA FE Most people would cringe at the thought of a needle in their eye.

Yet, earlier this month, Irene von Horvath lay serenely in Dr. Alston Lundgren's examining room, her lids closed, with a pin-cushion-like cluster of eight needles sticking out around her eyes.

No, the long, flexible needles weren't piercing her eyeballs, but sliding around the globe to tickle the optic nerve underneath. "Very rarely does it hurt," the 85-year-old Santa Fean said.

She is one of the pioneers in something Lundgren calls the Santa Fe Protocol, which he uses to treat macular degeneration, a disease that leads to deteriorating eyesight.

Most accepted medical treatments simply slow the progression of the disease, but Lundgren claims many of his patients actually are seeing better.

A family physician and board-certified medical acupuncturist, Lundgren readily admits that his procedure is not accepted among ophthalmologists, the medical specialists who usually treat such eye diseases.

But that's why he's working so hard to refine his technique and conduct studies to document his results. In a preliminary study published in the journal Medical Acupuncture, Lundgren reported that eight out of 10 patients had improved vision as measured by two different tests.

More recent results, he said, show 25 out of 34 patients could read between two and 15 additional lines on an eye chart after the treatments. He said the U.S. Air Force has gotten interested enough to launch a study of his technique in 50 patients.

His approach combines three elements: a stud embedded in the ear to stimulate a nerve there; four needles inserted around each eye to stimulate the optic nerve; and two needles in the chest at points to access the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The needles in the eyes and chests are attached to an electromagnetic current.

Lundgren said he started out by treating patients for 15 minutes, but now has extended the time to 35 minutes. Improvement seems to be cumulative the more total treatment time that people log, no matter how frequent the treatments, the better their eyesight seems to get, he said.

It works equally well in both the dry and wet forms of macular degeneration, according to Lundgren. In the dry form, reduced blood supply to the eye causes deterioration and a build-up of junk in the retina. In the wet form, blood vessels proliferate and leak blood into the retina.

Vitamin and mineral supplements have been tried to treat the dry form, and laser treatments have been used to cut off the leaking blood vessels in the wet form. In both cases, though, even if the treatments are successful, they generally only slow the progression of the disease without improving eyesight.

Lundgren, and some of his patients, say they have seen improvement.

Von Horvath said she is legally blind from the dry form of macular degeneration.

"I had gotten to the point I couldn't make out anything in reading material. I couldn't see the landscape anymore it all was quite blurred," she said.

She had several of Lundgren's treatments last summer, stopped when they didn't seem to be working, but then came back in the winter for more, getting two a week.

"Now I can make out the details in the trees. I can see the leaves, and whether they have big trunks or small trunks," von Horvath said. "I can see the outlines of the hills and mountains. It's very exciting to be able to see anything."

It's still a struggle to make out handwriting or to read more than a page or so of print, she said.

Carrie Piro of Rio Rancho calls her experience a success. She said her left eye was 20/80 and she couldn't see out of her right eye at all "everything was chopped up," she said in describing that eye's perceptions.

"I was driving, but I had gotten to where I didn't drive out of my neighborhood, because I didn't trust myself," said Piro, 73. "I couldn't use the sewing machine, because I couldn't see to thread the needle or see the stitches."

Outside the balcony of her apartment was a tree that had become very blurry when she looked at it, she said. The morning after her sixth acupuncture treatment, Piro said, "I walked out on my balcony, and I could see every leaf, every branch. It was amazing!"

Her left eye is now 20/30 and her right eye is 20/80, she said.

Piro said she asked her ophthalmologist about Lundgren's treatment and he advised her, "All you'll get out of it is a slim pocketbook."

When he saw her for a check-up after she had the treatments, she said, he told her, "I don't understand. Your vision is so much better."

Mary Hall, an Albuquerque woman who gives her age only as "over 80," said she had laser treatment on her one eye affected by macular degeneration, but didn't see any improvement in her vision after that.

After getting Lundgren's treatments, though, she said she has noticed her eyesight improve. "You feel as if you're a stuffed chicken," she said, laughing as she described the needles. But, in playing the piano, she can make out the difference between the flats and sharps better than she could before, she said.

When she looks out the front windows of her home, she still sees small waves in the usually smooth line of vision, but the distortion is far less than it used to be, Hall said.

"I'm hopeful," she said of the treatments, adding that she is a painter and would like to return to that pursuit.

Lundgren said there are a couple of possibilities about how the treatment might work. One is that the stimulation helps improve blood supply to the eye and revives visual cells that are dormant, but not destroyed.

Another is that the stimulation of the optic nerve actually sensitizes it so that it responds better to lower levels of visual stimulation.

Answering that question, though, would require researchers with more funding and more expensive equipment than he has, he said.

He noted that his studies don't meet the usual medical standard of double-blind, placebo-controlled research. That's when neither the health care provider nor the patient knows who is getting the real treatment and who is getting the dummy treatment. That works well with drugs, when you can use a dummy pill that looks the same as the real one, but doesn't apply well to acupuncture, he said.

Most physicians want to see such studies published in their peer-reviewed medical journals, though, before they will believe a treatment works.

With a wry smile, Lundgren said that he was trained as an engineer before he went into medicine.

"What I am doing is restoring function, and that's most important," he said.

And, he added, if a patient doesn't see improvement, he doesn't charge them for the treatments. Lundgren said his official price is $165 per treatment, but he usually gives patients their first five treatments at $40 each.

Medicare won't pay for the treatment, but some insurance companies are covering it for patients who don't qualify for Medicare, he said.

From Healthy.net