I have needles sticking out of my scalp, ears, legs, and hands. My feet are warm under a heat lamp. My body is supported by one of the most comfortable massage tables I have ever lain on. It’s my first acupuncture session ever, and I am, to my surprise, incredibly relaxed.
When my acupuncturist, Matt Pesendian of Channel Acupuncture, leaves the room, I almost immediately fall asleep.
I told him that I wanted to reduce my ever-present stress — something I didn’t believe was possible with needles in my skin. But it’s like the stress seeped out of me.
It was probably the most relaxed I have been in years.
What is incredible about Pesendian, a 55-year-old Santa Barbara native, is that he uses the skills he’s honed over 20 years to not only treat average stressed-out Joes like me, but those who truly need it.
Since 2014, Pesendian has run an acupuncture-oncology program in collaboration with the Santa Barbara Cancer Foundation and Ridley-Tree Cancer Center. He offers eight free acupuncture sessions to cancer patients, supported by the Cancer Foundation and local community donors. Since launching the program, he’s cared for approximately 100 patients a year.
He keeps up with those patients too — genuinely interested in their well-being both physically and mentally.
“When I was finishing Chinese medical school in 2003, my father passed away from lung cancer,” Pesendian said. “He used acupuncture and qigong alongside his medical treatment and expressed to me how much it eased the side effects and helped him through it. Seeing the comfort these practices brought him inspired me to work with cancer patients.”
It was Nick Fields, whose journey with brain cancer made the cover of the Independent in July 2024, who reached out to me about Pesendian. He has had some “ups and downs” since that story was published, including a recurrence and second brain surgery this year, he said. “It was pretty devastating at first,” he wrote me in an email, “but I’ve had a lot of great support and I’ve been bouncing back.”
One of those “ups” in his fight with cancer — his “most impactful supporter” — has been Pesendian.
“After the countless doctors I’ve seen, it’s refreshing to think of someone as simply a ‘healer,’ and I think that’s the best way to describe Matt,” Fields said. “He just really goes out of his way for the cancer patients.”
Through free acupuncture sessions and qigong classes — which is a low-impact, gentle movement series focusing on participant’s “electromagnetic energy” with similar benefits to yoga and meditation — Pesendian aims to relieve some of the worst symptoms of cancer and cancer treatment, including nausea and vomiting, pain, fatigue, stress, and digestive issues.
“Most importantly, I feel the greatest benefit is that it calms the nervous system, moving the body out of fight-or-flight and promoting emotional balance,” Pesendian said. “I see firsthand, over and over, that when the body is guided out of fight-or-flight, the immune system functions more effectively, helping patients navigate treatment and recovery.”
When Fields went into those first free sessions, he was aching for that kind of relief. And sure, it eased his nausea, lessened some of his daily pain, and even helped deter the seizures he was having as a result of his brain surgery.
But, he said, “What I didn’t expect was to come out of those sessions with a new friend, a new perspective on what it means to be a patient, what it means to be alive in a body, and a motivation to start turning my cancer into an opportunity to change my life.”
To learn more, visit mattpesendian.com.
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