How These Tiny DIY Ear Seeds Helped Me Sleep Like a Baby for the First Time in Months

A brief history of ear seed acupuncture as a revolutionary practice.

Quick updates: My Muay Thai fight last week ended up getting called off at the 11th hour, which was a huge bummer—especially after a month-plus of being super disciplined and training every day. I’ve spent the past week processing all of that and might write about it.

Meanwhile for National Geographic magazine, I profiled a team of neuroscientists in the Netherlands who are using AI to identify brain tumors with incredible speed and precision. For Dream Baby Press I shared my LOVE/HATE list (thank you,

Matt Starr

!) and earlier this month I went on Middlebrow Pod with handsome comedians Dan Rosen and Brian Park to talk about menswear and health. Also, please check out Minor Medicine, a new “wellness” podcast by my old bud Nathaniel Friedman of FreeDarko fame and his partner June Dawn Everett. Our conversation covered, let’s say, a lot of ground lol.

I have a few more cool things coming out this week. Stay tuned.

When I was in middle school, my dad and I had a nightly ritual. He’d come home from work around 11 p.m., and we’d watch Star Trek: The Next Generation together while I jammed a few needles into his back.

My dad has spent most of his adult life suffering from a severe case of ankylosing spondylitis, an excruciating disease in which the cartilage in his vertebrae hardens and fuses with the bone. This severely restricts his mobility to the point that he can’t look left or right without first shuffling his feet and reorienting his whole body like a penguin. Because of this, he possesses, by an order of considerable magnitude, the highest pain threshold of anyone I’ve ever met. Acupuncture is one of the only modalities that has ever provided him with relief.

He learned acupuncture from his brother, Jun, a lifelong Catholic missionary who worked in remote Zambia, and my dad, in turn, taught me the basics: like the measurements for how deep a needle should go (cun) and the spot near the knee that helps relieve gas (ST-36). We’d practice from an old ratty book that had yellowed over time and was written mostly in Chinese, which neither of us understood. But we knew which points helped ameliorate his pain, so I’d dutifully dab alcohol on his usual spots—spots I’d memorized by their proximity to certain moles and birthmarks—and gently tap a few needles in.

That’s all to say I’ve long been a believer in acupuncture’s ability to help people feel better. It just works. Studies of its efficacy are there. Centuries of history are there. And it’s long been used by marginalized communities here in the United States as an antidote to the failings of our broken healthcare system

After my conversation with J Wortham, I went down a rabbit hole on the radical health practices of the Young Lords and the Black Panthers, who used acupuncture, specifically the NADA (National Acupuncture Detoxification Association) protocol, throughout the ‘70s to treat heroin addiction in their communities:

Failed by mainstream medical institutions, 1970s revolutionaries of color sought to take health care into their own hands. A lesser-known phenomenon was their use of acupuncture. In 1970, an alliance of Black, Latinx, and White members at Lincoln Detox, a drug treatment program in the South Bronx area of New York City, learned of acupuncture as an alternative to methadone. In Oakland, California, Tolbert Small, MD, used acupuncture for pain management following his exposure to the practice as part of a 1972 Black Panther Party delegation to China. Unaware of one another then, the Lincoln team and Small were similarly driven to “serve the people, body and soul.” They enacted “toolkit care,”—self-assembled, essential community care—in response to dire situations such as the intensifying drug crisis.

In early 1970, fed up with the government’s refusal to provide care, affiliates of the Black Panthers and the Young Lords took over Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx, establishing what would become known as the Lincoln Detox Center to combat the flood of synthetic opioids being suffused throughout the Black and Latinx neighborhoods, which was a strategic component of the U.S. government’s illegal COINTELPRO program.

From a pamphlet titled A Radical History of Acupuncture in America.

The NADA protocol in particular was developed in 1973 by a Chinese neurosurgeon named Dr. H L Wen, who had successfully used trigger points in the ear to treat patients suffering from opium withdrawals. At some point, the care givers at the Lincoln Detox Center caught wind of Wen’s work and began experimenting with a five-point treatment system, finding that the use of acupuncture needles was cheaper and just as effective as prescription drugs like methadone.

One of the innovations they developed over that decade was the use of tiny seeds (usually taken from a Chinese herb called vaccaria), which could provide the same stimulation as a traditional needle since the ear’s trigger points are close to the surface of the skin. You simply glue the seeds to the points with an adhesive.

In 1979, a battalion of something like 200 New York City cops stormed Lincoln and shut down the detox center. But the NADA protocol lives on.

***

Two weeks ago, at a wellness showcase by Jack Taylor PR (basically Coachella for people who take creatine) I saw that a new health center in New York City called Remedy Place was offering ear acupuncture using 24k gold ear seeds to help with sleep, immunity, pain, digestion, and stress. (I texted the below picture to J because my mind was lightly blown.)

In some ways, it’s the inevitable life cycle of any new idea in the wellness space, everything from yoga to sea moss to sound baths: The idea is maligned by the orthodoxy before it’s adopted by marginalized communities out of necessity, and then finally, it’s commodified and repackaged with trendy fonts for the white upper-middle class.

Still… I love this kind of shit.

As regular readers of this Substack know, I’m a fucking terrible sleeper, which was amplified considerably that week since I was supposed to have a Muay Thai fight that Saturday. (The fight ended up not materializing at the last minute because my opponent came in overweight.) I was a bundle of anxiety. My Whoop said I was getting five-and-a-half hours of sleep a night from all the tossing and turning, and I was desperate for a solution, especially since I try not to use melatonin, which fucks with your hormones.

So I relayed my problems to the acupuncture practitioner and, after signing a waiver, got a few ear seeds installed in my right ear (more about the specific placements after the jump). And let me tell you: For the next two nights leading up to the fight, I slept like a baby. Real honk-shoo honk-shoo mi mi mi-stuff. It was shocking. I was getting closer to eight hours of sleep a night and felt like a million bucks.

Leaving the showcase that day, I felt mellow for the first time in weeks, like I’d taken the perfect hit of indica to put me at cruising altitude. I woke up on Saturday morning unusually calm and relaxed—maybe a little too relaxed—but eager to throw hands.

And since I’ve learned that applying ear seeds yourself is pretty easy to do at home for under $30. Here’s how: