A VA doctor diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and told him to see a psychologist. Birdzell was doubtful. He had been through a grueling years in the Marines, including combat deployments to Iraq. But he questioned whether the source of his anger and insomnia was rooted in more than his brain's software. Was it, he wondered, a hardware problem?

His brother urged him to have his hormone levels checked. So Birdzell spit into four vials over the course of a day and shipped them off to a lab in Colorado.

The results, delivered on five faxed pages, revealed that his adrenal cortex was, as he put it, "zorched." His level of cortisol, a hormone that helps to regulate the immune system and blood sugar and is affected by stress, was abnormally low in the morning and at noon, and higher than it should be at night. Those figures, according to the lab report, helped to explain his sluggishness during the day and his inability to sleep at night.

Birdzell, then studying at the University of Virginia, took his results to a VA medical center in Richmond and asked for more tests. He said a doctor there told him that the VA would measure his levels only in the morning, not throughout the day, as he wanted. Once again, the department urged him to see a psychologist for his PTSD.

Birdzell, 34, hadn't studied biology since high school, but a few days of research on the Internet left him convinced that his cortisol levels were at least partly to blame for the symptoms the VA was calling PTSD. "It's all biochemical - a lot of our psychology is a function of our biochemistry," he said. "If we nuke our biochemistry at war, how can our psychology be correct?"

He thought about taking drugs to regulate his cortisol output but decided instead to try to rehabilitate his adrenal cortex.

That required him to relax, to find internal peace after eight years of war. "I'd been running hard," he said. "I needed to rest hard."

That's how Birdzell, a show-no-weakness Marine who now works as a fundraiser for the National Rifle Association, found himself on his back, shirt open, shoes off, as Duggan, an acupuncturist who specializes in holistic health, beseeched him to spend 15 minutes meditating with pins in his feet and chest. Duggan could tell Birdzell was keyed up, even if he didn't know that his patient had sped there along the Capital Beltway, peeled into the parking lot of a nondescript office park and charged up the steps, that 15 minutes ago in the car, he had expressed regret for not killing more insurgents in Iraq.

After a quarter-hour, Duggan returned to the room, removed the pins and inserted clean ones in Birdzell's back, which had been aching since his last appointment, a pain he chalks up to his military service.