Reptile Rx : Lizard-Head Shakes, Snake-Oil Rubdowns and Needles Part of 'Miracle' Treatment for Once-Squeamish Raiders and Boxers

By RICH TOSCHES

Dec. 13, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

If the supermarket tabloids, those journals of knowledge read by, well, real smart people, got hold of this one, the headline would be simple:

Football Player Eats Lizards for Energy!!

And like most of those stories, there would be at least a shred of truth to the story. Key word: shred . There is a football player involved. His name is Anthony Smith. He’s a 270-pound defensive lineman for the Raiders, the team’s No. 1 draft pick in 1990.

The rest of the headline, of course, is absolute nonsense.

Smith does not eat lizards. That’s ridiculous.

He only consumes their heads.

And he most certainly doesn’t eat them.

He drinks them.

And about those needles that Smith occasionally begs to have plunged into--among other places--his forehead: Hey, a guy has to find some way to relax in this crazy world.

Welcome to the world of Neal Stuart Miller, acupuncturist and herbal medicine guru, who heals, his patients say, in miraculous ways.

The treatment: needles, heated glass jars that suck a person’s muscle and skin nearly off the bone, smoldering tree roots, the heads and other appendages of Gecko lizards, parts of snakes and many other animals, lots of insects and nearly 1,000 types of flowers, shrubs, roots and leaves.

If all of that doesn’t make your eyes flutter a bit, perhaps this will: Miller also has developed a concoction--one not used by any athletes, he said--that he insists will boost a man’s sexual energy, a drinkable brew that contains the part of a deer that makes a buck a buck, and it’s not the antlers.

The patients: Smith, Raider teammates Aundray Bruce and Greg Townsend, and a large and growing number of boxers, including former middleweight champion Michael Nunn, current sensations Gabriel and Rafael Ruelas and once-beaten middleweight Frank Liles, a man who takes to needles like Don King takes to a part in his hair.

“Needles scare me to death,” said Liles, of Sherman Oaks. “I mean, I really hate them. Just a few months ago, I fainted while giving blood. Just saw the needle and fainted.

“But Neal, well, he makes it different. I’ve let him put needles in me three times. The results have been amazing. Soreness has disappeared instantly. Injuries have healed almost overnight. Sometimes, it’s been like a miracle.”

Bruce, a 6-foot-5, 250-pound linebacker who was the NFL’s No. 1 draft pick in the 1988 draft, said shooting pains and severe stiffness in his neck had been a daily part of his life since the early days of his college career at Auburn, an occupational hazard common to those who make a living by running headfirst into things.

Three treatments by Miller involving acupuncture needles being jabbed deeply into his neck, along with industrial-strength rubdowns with oil made from snakes, has him feeling like a new man, he said.

“In one week, all of the pain and stiffness was gone,” Bruce said. “I don’t mean it felt better. I mean gone . I haven’t felt like this since my freshman year at Auburn. He had needles in my neck and needles in my shoulders and he was playing this Chinese music in a dark room and . . . I don’t understand it. But I do know it worked.

“Like a miracle.”

Bruce shares something else with boxer Liles besides his belief in miracles: a fear of needles. Before being treated by Miller, he insinuated that he would rather be run over in his sleep by Christian Okoye than have needles stuck into him.

“Hate ‘em,” Bruce said. “Real bad. Mostly they didn’t hurt at all, though. Painless. But a few times, when he turned them a certain way, it felt like lightning bolts were shooting through my body.

“Anthony and I joke about the lightning bolts.”

Smith, the Raiders’ 6-3 defensive end and the AFC leader in sacks this year with 13, sought out Miller early in October, before a game against the Buffalo Bills, because of lingering pain in his left ankle and both shoulders. He said that traditional treatment, heat and ice and whirlpools, hadn’t budged the nagging pain.

But a dozen needles and a Gecko head or two had Smith feeling like Superman.

“I went to Neal and he fixed the pain right then ,” Smith said. “Instantly. The next week, before the Seattle game, I started taking lots of capsules and liquids with the lizard heads. I got four sacks against the Seahawks.”

It could, of course, be argued that the Gecko lizard itself could have had a sack or two against the pathetic Seahawks.

Nonetheless, Smith became a fanatical believer in the power of Miller, not to mention the eight-inch long reptile that sacrificed its head and face for the good of the Raiders. Now that’s a commitment.

“It gives me strength, it gives me stamina that I never had before,” Smith said of the lizard.

Ingesting the cranial region of the lizard was not, however, an easy decision, according to Smith.

“Neal told me and showed me, and when it came time to take it I had to close my eyes,” Smith said. “I honestly couldn’t believe I was doing it. I mean, a lizard head ?”

The sight of Miller grinding and then blending the head into a froth was way too much for Bruce, who had accompanied Smith to Miller’s Sherman Oaks office and China Valley Herb shop.

“I had to leave the room,” Bruce admitted.

But not, according to Miller, before lunging off his wooden stool at the herb and reptile counter and stumbling backward into the wall.

“It definitely made an impression on Aundray,” Miller said. “He hit the wall and door frame pretty hard.”

The results, however, have made both men return repeatedly to Miller’s office.

“The bottom line is that the stuff works,” Smith said. “And anything legal that will make me play better, I’ll use.”

Soon, the two had convinced two-time All-Pro teammate Townsend to join the frenzy. Townsend was plagued with pain in his left hand and right wrist, pain that had not subsided, he said, despite more than a month of daily, traditional treatment.

“I thought it was crazy,” Townsend said. “I really did not believe in any of that stuff. But when the pain doesn’t go away, you’re willing to try anything. Nothing else matters.”

So he went. In went Miller’s needles, up and down the fingers, hands, wrists and arms of the 270-pound Townsend. The needles, according to Miller, cause blood to pour into the affected areas, speeding the healing process dramatically and at the same time blocking the pain.

Townsend said the healing was indeed dramatic.

“I have no pain anymore,” Townsend said. “None. Whatever he did, it worked.”

All three Raiders also routinely undergo relaxation therapy that includes having needles embedded in their ears and forehead.

“You go out like a light,” said Townsend.

But, like Bruce, Townsend has balked at the next phase suggested by Miller. He is not, Townsend said emphatically, a lizard kind of guy.

“I thought about it, about what Anthony said it had done for him, and then I said no,” Townsend said. “The idea is just too much for me.

“Drinking a lizard? Not for Greg.”

Others share that sentiment. Gabriel Ruelas of Arleta, the World Boxing Council’s No. 1-ranked junior-lightweight, said he would just as soon gnaw the head off a weasel as consume any part of a lizard. Miller’s acupuncture techniques, however, caused Ruelas to use that M-word repeatedly.

“I was a miracle,” the once-beaten fighter said. “It started three years ago. I had a bruise on my lower back so severe that I could hardly walk. Other treatments did nothing. Neal put 50 or 60 pins in my back and within an hour the pain was gone. Just gone. It’s so hard to describe the change, to describe how the pain just went away. A miracle.”

There are, however, no miracles to his work, Miller said. The secrets are only secrets to the Western world. In the East, the techniques he developed and improved in three years at an acupuncture training center called the Emperor’s College of Traditional Oriental Medicine in Santa Monica have been around for more than 4,000 years. Miller is licensed by the California Medical Board.

“As a doctor of Oriental medicine, I combine the Western sciences of anatomy, physiology and biology with the Oriental beliefs, all toward the same goal: pain relief,” he said. “The techniques I use shut off the body’s pain mechanism while speeding the healing process.

“The acupuncture and the herbal medicine and animal and insect use are equal in importance toward this goal.”

So bring on the lizards.

And watch the eyes of Raider management glow like stars in the darkest night.

“They do what? “ asked stunned-looking Al LoCasale, the team’s executive assistant and top aide to owner Al Davis. “I remember Cliff Branch used to talk about acupuncture a long time ago, but no one took it too seriously. If it helps them, or if they think it helps them, then it’s important.

“But drinking lizard heads? Really? Well, to each his own. But I bet it’s not going to replace Gatorade.”

Coach Art Shell actually cringed when told of the practice.

“Gecko heads? You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said, his face wrinkled with the expression you see most often when a person steps on a real big bug. “Tell me you’re kidding me.”

Asked if he ever considered such treatment for injury during his long playing career with the Raiders that began in 1968, Shell smiled.

“I used a lot of ice when I got hurt,” he said. “I guess we just didn’t know about lizard heads wayback then.”