And today I am going to speak to you, I’m doing part one of a lecture on facial motor points.
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Hi, my name’s Michelle Gellis. I’m an acupuncture physician specializing in facial and cosmetic acupuncture classes. And today I am going to speak to you, I’m doing part one of a lecture on facial motor points. Can you go to the first slide please?
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So the title of this talk is Facial Motor Point, use for Cosmetic Applications, and in part two I’m going to talk about a little bit about facial motor points for neuromuscular facial conditions. Here is some of my publications from the Journal of Chinese Medicine. And I’ll put links up at the end to my social where you can actually view some of these publications.
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And these are all the classes I teach today. The Motorpoint lecture will focus on treating neuromuscular facial conditions and some of my advanced techniques. Motor points have been used for a very long time, not just by acupuncturists. They’ve also been used by medical doctors and they. Date way back to the late 18 hundreds.
And more recently some acupuncturists and other physicians have been using facial motor points for neuromuscular facial concerns. So what is a motor point? When a muscle is either in spasm or in a flacid state. It is not firing properly, and if you take an acupuncture needle and insert it properly into the muscle’s motor point, it will cause the muscle to jump and reset it into normal function.
So this is what motor nerve looks like here. So this would be a sensory nerve going out to the skin and here’s a motor nerve going to the muscle, but in. With our face, the muscle is actually connected to the skin, so when you reset the muscle, it can help to enhance the appearance of the skin.
Now, motor points are not trigger points, mo trigger points or sore spots and muscles, but. Fortunately for us, many motor points are acupuncture points on the face. So it makes it easy for us to find them. So here’s a, just a picture of bone and muscle. And on the face, the muscle is connected directly to our skin, which is why we can move the scan.
On our face. So again, if the muscle is pulled tight, then the skin will wrinkle. So when we’re thinking of neuromuscular facial conditions, when we’re looking at the motor points, the face is innervated by two nerves, CN seven, and. Also the trigeminal nerve. So when you’re using facial motor points, they are wonderful for any conditions involving paralysis.
And what you do is you needle into the muscle, but not through the muscle. So on most of the face, you’re going to go on an oblique angle about a quarter to a half an inch into the muscle. And facial motor points will treat the muscle and the fascia, and this can help to enhance the appearance of the skin unless it’s some sort of a skin disease discoloration or a scoring.
So when might you use motor points if you’re doing cosmetic acupuncture? As someone who practices cosmetic acupuncture extensively, I always start with basic cosmetic acupuncture treatments and if they, my patient has a difficult to treat. Concern then I will use these motor points to help to enhance the effectiveness of my facial acupuncture treatment.
So here is what a face looks like as it’s aging. We have nasal labial folds, chin wrinkles. You can get loss of volume in the temples, we get lines between our eyebrows. The face can hollow, the jaw contours change. And we can get wrinkles in our chin and neck and also sagging underneath the neck.
So here would be an example of someone who’s not showing many signs of aging and then coming into their fifties, some signs of aging, and then more advanced signs of aging. So let’s talk about some specific types of wrinkles that you might see in your treatment room and when using cosmetic acupuncture motor points might be beneficial.
So one of those. Would be forehead wrinkles. And frequently an individual will have forehead wrinkles because their frontalis muscle has become very tight. And even when they feel like they’re relaxing their forehead and they’re not making an expression, the muscle itself is very tight. And the. Folds in the skin remain there.
So by relaxing the frontalis muscle, the entire forehead will relax and it will smooth out the wrinkles. Also treating the frontals can help to lift the lid, the eyebrows and also the eye lid at the same time. This was a patient of mine who came to me and she was noticing her brows were starting to descend as she was getting older, and so I treated just the left her left.
Eyebrow and I used the frontals muscle, and you can see after one treatment, when the muscle relaxed, the skin laid flat and it pulled the skin up into a more normal functioning for her.
So here we have the frontals muscle and the motor point for the frontals is fortunately for us, easy to find gallbladder 14. So if you wanted to work with the frontals muscle and the, again, the frontalis muscle wrinkles the forehead, it raises the eyebrows up and. What you would do is you would put the the needle straight in on a very slight oblique angle.
And you’re going to go into the muscle, but not through the muscle. Depending on how thick their forehead skin is, would determine how deep you have to go before you hit the muscle. So here’s a quick video. I had a patient who had Bell’s Palsy and they could not raise their eyebrows and they could not fully open their eye because of the Bell’s Palsy.
So I had put this needle in and stimulated it. And you can see the needle started moving immediately after the needle went in. And I put the needle right in the motor point. Is another example of when you might use a facial motor point would be if someone had very stubborn lines between their eyebrows, either the two or the one we call them frown lines, and we would needle the corrugator.
Muscle and the motor point for that is just lateral to bladder two. And it’s right in the corrugator muscle. The corrugator muscle pulls along with the procerus, pulls the eyebrows together very strongly,
and you would also, whoops. I have a little delay here. You would also needle the motor point for the processis, which is yin tongue, and when you’re using it as a motor point, you’re going to needle it slightly towards the nose.
Another area that. Motor points are very beneficial for is treating wrinkles in the chin. And as we age, these chin wrinkles or chin dimples can be more noticeable because the mentalis muscle and the depressor ang oris muscle, they can become. They don’t function as well. And so by doing the Le Depressor, Labi, inferior Aus and or the Mentalis and or the Depressor, angular Aus, all of these muscles are going to work together to cause that issue.
But. I’m showing you the de depressor, Labi inferiors and the motor point for that is the extra point. One soon lateral to this extra point here. And the way you. Oh. I’ll show you that in a second. And then medial to that is the mentalis and the motor point for that is a half a soon lateral to Ren 24.
So here is a video. And this was a patient, another patient who had Bell’s Palsy. And I had put the needle in the mentalis. And as you can see, when I stimulated the needle, the muscle jumped and my patient reported back to me that. The issue that she had been having with drooling when she was like brushing her teeth, she couldn’t spit she couldn’t drink through a straw and she had Bell’s palsy many years prior.
But still in this one side, she had issues.
Lip wrinkles can be treated very effectively with facial motor points. We would needle the motor points around the orbicularis orus, and there’s two of them on each side of the mouth. One is LI 19, and then the other one is between stomach four and Ren 24. So it’s like right here. Some other uses for facial motor points would be points on some of the muscles pertaining to the levator muscles and the oculis oculi.
So the lator muscles in the face, on the cheeks. Will if they’re not functioning properly, along with some of the tendons and other things, but can contribute to the nasal labial folds, the motor point for the rezos. If you treat that, it can help. With the little marionette lines, there are motor points for the neck that can help with the necklace lines and the neck bands.
And then there are motor points around the eyes, which I go over all of the motor points on the face in my classes. But there’s motor points around the orbicularis oculi that can help with crow’s feet. In part two of this lecture, I will go over facial motor point usage to treat neuromuscular facial conditions like Bell’s Palsy, Ramsey Hunt Syndrome, TMJ Hemi Facial Spasm, and others.
If you’re interested in checking out my classes, you can go to facial acupuncture classes.com and my social is for Instagram, it’s Michelle Gillis and Facebook. You can look up my Facebook group, which is facial acupuncture. Thank you so much.