LOS ANGELES - When the acupuncture needles were inserted into his body, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the Oscar-winning director, struggled to keep smiling in front of his wife and three kids, who were holding their breath and watching attentively.

"It can hurt a little, but the pain does not stay, it takes maybe a few seconds then it goes away," Donnersmarck said during a recent trip to an acupuncture clinic.

Donnersmarck has been coming to the Beijing Chinese Medical Center in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, every week for three months.

This 44-year-old German director is best known for his thriller The Lives of Others, which won the Best Foreign Language Film Award at the 79th Oscars in 2007.

Years of working hard in the movie industry caused Donnersmarck neck pains, and it got serious in February when a doctor told him he needed surgery. Then a nurse suggested traditional Chinese medicine and recommended Doctor Wu Baolin at the center.

Wu has been practicing in Santa Monica for 27 years.

Donnersmarck admitted that it was scary when he saw the acupuncture needles for the first time. "Acupuncture is a very precise, careful and caring process ... the doctor cannot miss by a few millimeters," he said. "With Doctor Wu, you feel so much the deep wisdom, the experience, the knowledge. I feel it so much and I trust him."

His trust was repaid. Without any surgery, Donnersmarck's problem was solved in a month.

"I found that Western medicine can be very aggressive, and it has extreme side effects," Donnersmarck said. "But for traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture, they do not have side effects, it is about activating the energy and oxygen flow in the body, it is about helping the body heal itself."

Xinhua