Jaunted

The most surprising thing? Not only are 80 percent of his patients first-timers, but most are the older passengers, too. “They’ve tried everything else, they’ve had a knee or hip replacement, they’re still in pain and I’m their last stop,” he says. The average age of his patients, he reckons, is 70.

And the last ditch approach seems to work, because according to Justin, 90 percent of his patients leave the room feeling better. One lady last month, he says, came to him with arthritis. She’d just had a hip replacement, and was walking with a cane. He blitzed her with nine treatments in 10 days and she told him on the last day that “she wasn’t really needing to use the cane anymore.”

Ah, you say, but of course he’d say things like that—so know this. We actually ended up availing ourselves of Justin’s services since we boarded the cruise quite poorly with a stomach ulcer. He told us he couldn’t cure the ulcer, but he could help with the pain, so, despite being skeptical of the $100+ price tag per session (that’s the English in us), we swiftly signed up for a package of treatments.

And you know what? Although it got worse before it got better (we hit a rough patch on day three), after session five we were feeling 50 times better than we had at any point since the ulcer was diagnosed six weeks before. Genius.

Catch him while you can, though; he only expects to be at sea for a year or two. After that, he’ll return to Northern California to start his own private practice with an “online component” too. Just what his devoted cruise fans who live halfway across the world from him (um, hi there) will be looking for.

Half of the fitness center, in case you'd rather just work out

What he loves most about the at-sea lifestyle: Justin calls his job “one of the best employment opportunities in the USA”, because he loves treating people, and he loves traveling. He likes the fact that on a cruise, he gets to “share acupuncture with as many people as possible”, and with people who might not normally look into the treatment. Also, “it’s a great environment for acupuncture” on the ship because he can see people with more frequency than he could on land—and they’re less stressed. And because acupuncture has a cumulative effect, “one week on the ship can be equivalent to one month on land”.

He’s not entirely selfless, though—as for himself, he likes catching up with colleagues posted on other cruise ships when they’re in port together—he recently met up with a mate from acupuncture college in Rome.

Favorite port: St Petersburg “blows him away." Because it shows so much of the history of Russia, and because it has the Hermitage, “like the mean stepsister to the Louvre, which gets all the glitz and glam."

Favorite on-land activities: Because he’s fairly new to the ship, Justin tries to see as much as possible on land, usually by volunteering to lead excursions. On this cruise, however, he had too many patients to make it off the ship (he normally gets about 15 per cruise), and had to content himself with pointing out especially fetching waterfalls as he stuck needles in us.

Up next: On Monday we'll delve into the other side of practicing medicine onboard. Yep, it's time to meet a doctor who can operate on you thousands of miles away from an Emergency Room.

Disclosure: We traveled to Norway onboard the Queen Victoria as a guest of Cunard, but all images and opinions are entirely our own (or those of the interviewees).