John Chiota was ready to try just about anything. After a 2001 car accident, Chiota, a 63-year-old Connecticut lawyer and probate judge, had lower back pain so bad that he often had to hear cases while standing up. Simple tasks like shaving were agony. Physical therapy didn't help. Painkillers worked for a while but then wore off. His doctors suggested surgery but could not guarantee that it would help. Chiota was about give the local acupuncturist a call when he heard about Norman Marcus, a psychiatry and anesthesiology professor who runs a small, private - and controversial - pain institute in Manhattan. "I knew it was off the beaten path," Chiota recalls, "but at that point, I didn't care." Ten days after seeing Marcus and submitting to his therapy, in which he uses a needle to break up knotted muscle tissue - "trigger points" - Chiota was pain-free.