On the Job: Practitioner offers skin care and alternative treatments
People's desire to look young and an increasing openness to alternative medicine allowed Dr. Zeyi Chen, 74, of West Ashley to expand his Skin Therapy Center to Mount Pleasant, where he opened a second location two years ago.
In a house converted into a spa and acupuncture treatment center, Chen seems to have a device for about any skin treatment a patient could ask for. He has treatments for wrinkles, sagging skin, age spots and scars. He uses acupuncture to treat pain, headaches, stress and other ailments.
He opened his first office in the Byrnes Downs neighborhood in West Ashley in 1994. The office is situated next door to his home. He works from the Mount Pleasant office in the afternoons and from the West Ashley office in the mornings. If someone wants a treatment at 8 p.m., however, he tells them to come to West Ashley and he just walks over.
Since opening his office, Chen said, he's treated thousands of patients. Eric Johnson, 19, a College of Charleston sophomore, came to Chen when he was 16 for treatment for headaches because medicine from traditional doctors hadn't solved his problem.
'There was nothing I hadn't attempted at that point,' Johnson said.
Johnson said his headaches became less frequent after acupuncture treatments and that he no longer has migraines. Chen also treated Johnson for acne, and he returns occasionally for skin treatments.
Bev Collier of Mount Pleasant, a chronic-pain patient, suffered a severe spine injury in a sky-diving accident in 1998 in St. George. She missed her target, landed in some trees and fell 60 feet, blowing out a section of her spine. She takes acupuncture treatments and has weaned herself from pain medication in the past three years, she said.
Chen studied skin care and acupuncture in his home country of China. He grew up in a rural Chinese province, where he and his family lived in a two-room straw hut with pigs immediately out the back door. If he wanted a pencil, he took a chicken egg to the market to make a trade, he said.
At 14, he was sent to work in his uncle's sock factory. He made socks with a group of other children in a small factory where he also lived, sleeping on the floor. He worked seven days a week. He wasn't paid, but his uncle sent money to his family: parents and six younger siblings.
'I didn't know my future. I just worked,' Chen said.
Chen managed to attend night school and completed his high school education and he later entered a Chinese medical school.
The university asked him to specialize in dermatology, and he later went to work for the French government. He visited Charleston during a conference in 1981, and, he said, the rest is history.
