As that’s pulse diagnosis. Now, with my system, it’s very important that we feel a flow in the pulse. So when we have our fingers on the patient’s pulses, both left and right, we want to be able to feel a flow of sine waves.
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Hi, this is Dr. Martha Lucas, and I am here to talk to you a little bit about pulse diagnosis today. I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for this opportunity to talk to you to speak with you because if you know me at all or have watched any of my presentations here, you know that I think the most important skill that we have in Chinese medicine is the correct diagnosis.
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And for me, As that’s pulse diagnosis. Now, with my system, it’s very important that we feel a flow in the pulse. So when we have our fingers on the patient’s pulses, both left and right, we want to be able to feel a flow of sine waves. So for example, here, we would want to be able to see a flow of sine waves.
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Going from this way, and then on the left side, we want it to go this way. And as a sine wave is up and down, right? Yang rising to the peak, and then the yin down. And between these, so between our left and right pulses, we will see the sine waves connect in what looks like the infinity symbol.
These connect this way. around and over and up. So we get the infinity symbol from these wrists. Infinity coming over like this. Sine wave. That’s how we know that all of the organ systems are connected. connected and flowing with each other because good health is the flow of energy, the flow of yin and yang from organ system to organ system.
Now, if you’re not paying attention to the flow, let’s say you never heard of that before, things, yin and yang do the tai chi symbol, they flow with each other, but you’ve never thought about that in the pulses. Do what? You take what you think is slippery away, or you take what you think is wiry away, and then you say, Oh, good.
It doesn’t feel wiry anymore. That’s not really a sufficient goal for treatment. Sure, the acupuncture needles did something. They, theoretically, what they did, if it doesn’t feel wiry anymore, was, They opened up the channel to more energy flow, which is always a good thing. Or if you feel like you felt slippery and that went away.
Then again it opened up the channels for flow. I always pick on slippery and wiry because the name of my book is Pulse Diagnosis. One of my books, pulse Diagnosis Beyond Slippery and Wiry, because I feel like in a lot of schools, especially the school I went to. We all knew how to feel slippery and wiry, but there’s so much more than that, and so many depths of pulses than superficial, middle, deep.
We can feel the depth of even pre birth emotional issues in the pulses, so we know that We can feel the person’s whole life from the very beginning to up to the end when yin and yang start to separate, which looks like this, right? The yin is going, the organ systems are getting empty. They can’t hold the energy anymore.
And so that allows the yang to just rise up uncontrollably. So the pulses literally start to separate like this. And it’s interesting that students sometimes in my. Intern courses will bring, I always tell them, bring in their toughest cases. Oftentimes it’s somebody who’s a little bit older, maybe they’ve got some cancer going on, and they’ll say, feel how this person’s 84 years old and feel how strong their pulses are.
And I will point out to them that isn’t a good thing. That’s not a healthy, strong pulse. It’s yin and yang starting to separate like that so that the yang is hitting your fingertips very hard because it doesn’t have any control. Core down there. So there are many beautiful things to learn about the pulses.
These are what has kept me interested in Chinese medicine for 25 years. In fact, I recently took a little trip to the town where my mentor lived and took it. It’s now a barber shop, but I took a picture of the little building and I’m going to write a little newsletter about how that What is now a barbershop was really my beginning in Chinese medicine with my pulse diagnosis mentor Jim Ramholz more than 25 years ago and how that has just kept pulse has kept Chinese medicine alive for me.
So I wanted to tell you a little bit today also about a recent situation where I Balance the pulses, but I did not use acupuncture because, I like to tell people Chinese medicine is a complete system of medicine, right? Acupuncture is just one of the therapies that we use. It’s probably the most well known therapy, the most very much.
well studied in terms of research studies therapy, but it’s not the only therapy we can use when someone comes in and we need to give them some treatment. And you all know Gua Sha, Tui Na, all that, but with this particular case, I used a combination of just touching the person while I had my hand on certain points.
on either the left or the right wrist, depending on what I was trying to change. And some moxa. So just stick moxa. I didn’t use a moxa bong. In this case, I wanted to be able to move the moxa around to different places with my hand on the pulse. And so I use stick moxa. So this person someone I’ve treated for a long time.
She initially came to me many years ago, probably. 20 years ago because she wanted to get pregnant, she ended up adopting a child, but that child is now in college. So I know it was a long time ago and she’s gluten intolerant. So she was, she, I’ll never forget, told me that if she goes to a restaurant and a piece of wheat has touched the plate on which she ate, she would have some sort of a gluten intolerant reaction.
So in her case The diagnosis of gluten intolerance and her experience with it was intermingled with fear, right? And fear we see in a scattered kidney pulse. The kidneys look, I draw them like little dots on the piece of paper, which means there’s no form to it. It’s just, little pieces of energy that are just scattered in and among the kidney position.
So in this case, we had a few things to deal with, but for example, this patient never traveled because she was so afraid of gluten. We, I, she ended up being able to travel. She got I think a scuba diving certificate. So she was able to travel and do that. And her life, she still. She doesn’t eat anything with gluten in it, but you can tell that her life was more robust.
She had less fear, et cetera, et cetera. Of course, adopting a child added a good deal of joy to her life. So I would see her on and off after that. But she recently came in just, she looked, she almost looked like a ragdoll. Her spirit was, Not really even there. I thought she looked a little gray.
She was very thin. She’d lost 15 pounds very quickly. She was just basically an emotional wreck, which is why her spirit looked so dull and just almost not there. She looked, she might have, you might say, like an empty vessel. She had a number of emotional. Her daughter went away to college, but that was about a year and a half ago.
She claimed that it all went well, but she had gotten a divorce prior to that. There was divorce, there was the daughter going away to college, which again, she claimed she was totally well adjusted to, but I have my misgivings about that. But she had most recently had a very Separating interaction with her parents and her sister, and her parents are aging and need some care, and so there was the burden of the guilt of feeling like, oh, I’m going to need to take care of my parents.
And now I’ve broken up with the more or less. Plus, she also had a relationship breakup. And because of all this emotional burden, and, she was not able to eat. So that was where the weight loss came in. Everything she ate, even the things she knew were quote unquote safe to eat, she couldn’t eat, lots of vomiting, and panic attacks.
The day she came to see me was in the afternoon. She told me she’d had five panic attacks that day. So I thought, alright, just looking at her, I, and I’m a good and gentle needler. And she is one of my less is more needle patients. I’m sure we all have some of those where you’re, you take the pulses and you study the, I study the pulses to think, what are the four to six needles I can use with this person that’s actually going to change the pulses back to normal and back to balance.
So she’s one of those. But I just said to myself that day, I’m not going to do any needles. So I said, look, let’s get you up on the table and see what’s happening. One of the things that was happening was that her heart was completely blocked. So the liver came up toward the heart, but there was just a big block there.
No movement in the heart pulse at all, which made sense to me because she had just separated herself from some people. It didn’t really go well. She had a breakup, et cetera, et cetera. So the heart doesn’t want to, feel any of that kind of energy. Remember, all of the organ systems are set up to protect the spirit.
So the I, so I had my hand, that’s the left side, right? The left pulses. So I had one hand there, my pulse taking hand. And all I did was put my right hand over her heart. I didn’t put it on any acupuncture points. I just thought, I’m just going to put my hand here as a comforting, comforting.
Motion and lo and behold, it was just unbelievable, the heart pulse opened up. So I thought, alright, so the heart is feeling, it needs to be open, right? How are, how is this energy going to get over to these kidneys, like I told you in the figure 8, if this isn’t open, if the heart isn’t open, the heart’s small intestine position.
I was very thrilled about that. So I just kept that position for a few minutes, just, letting her calm down, letting her breathe, letting her spirit be open, feeling the liver calm down, feeling it get much more smooth, then the kidneys can come in, right? Because the kidneys want to protect themselves against getting stolen away by perverse liver energy.
So I thought, all right, once I get that open, I went over to her. took her right pulses, right side, because of course, she’s got that gluten intolerance, digestive issues. And so in this particular case, her spleen and stomach pulse was empty. So it went down like this. It was, I draw it like a down arrow. So from childhood, she had issues around nurturing.
And and that ended up as gluten intolerance. So in this case, I kept my pulse taking hand on that, those fingers on that pulse and put my hand just on her abdomen. So I spread it out between REN8 and REN12 because I wanted to get as much of her abdomen as I could. And I let that fill up.
I let that particular, the earth pulse, the spleen stomach pulse start to fill up a little bit. So she had some energy to live, right? That’s our nurturing part of our pulses, the earth. So we needed to build that up so she had some energy for actual living. So I got that going, spent a few minutes with my hand right there and then I went back to the left side, tested out, made sure that the kidney, liver, heart positions were still open and flowing.
So I knew I could get some cross pulse flow going. And then I decided I was going to use some Moxa because I thought let’s get some heat back into the system, rebuild the digestion. I think that’s one of the things Moxa is really good for. And I love doing it over REN8, of course, because then we’re really building up the, her basic core, which I think had been damaged by all of this emotional stuff.
So I did Moxa. There for a few minutes again, constantly checking the pulses to see how they were changing. Then I went down to Kidney 1, excuse me, I did it on Kidney 1. And and just generally around the kidney, Kidney 1, Kidney 2, Kidney 3. Again, I wanted to build that energy up, getting it going.
Forced up through the system because remember in the pulses, the kidneys fund everything. In the, in pulse diagnosis, we know that the kidneys Sorry, the kidneys fund everything. So all the energy to all of the other organ systems is coming from the kidneys. So I knew I needed to get those built back up.
So the getting the heart built up, getting the earth rebuilt is going to start from the kidneys. So I worked on the kidneys. I went back up to the abdomen again, did more moxa around. Ren8, Ren12 to rebuild that up. And then I finished the whole treatment by once again putting my hand on her heart area to get the kidneys and the heart flowing together.
And, oh my goodness, after the treatment, she looked So much brighter. Her spirit was alive again. Of course, she felt better. She felt calm. I was a little nervous about the panic attack part. For one thing, I didn’t want to put needles in, leave her in a room when the patient had just told me that she was possibly gonna have a panic attack.
I felt really good about that treatment. And the reason I wanted to share that story was because it goes to show we don’t always have to do acupuncture. The pulses will respond to other kinds of energy. So use all of your skills. If you’re thinking, Oh, today we don’t want to do any I don’t want to do any needles today.
Always take the pulses. Make notes about what the pulses are doing, draw a pulse picture, and then you will have that to compare with at the end of whatever it is, the treatment that you give. In one of my internships, we just did, I did gua sha and some spinal work on a man that one of the students brought in, who came in super crooked and a lot of pain.
He could barely walk. And at that time, again, I felt like, all right, let’s take his pulses because it’s a pulse diagnosis internship. But we just worked on his body using physical medicine from Chinese medicine, instead of using acupuncture needles. And again, we saw a great change in not only his physicality and pain and ability to walk, but in his pulses.
So I just want to encourage you that no matter what. Whatever therapy you use, your pulse diagnosis is your way to get down to what is the cause of going on with the person and how is your treatment working or not. Because remember, if the pulse doesn’t change, then you need to change your treatment plan because the pulses will always respond when you are on the right track.
with your treatment plan. So that’s just one story that I thought just really struck me as let’s use all of our skills. We don’t have to just use that one therapy acupuncture, but we always have pulse diagnosis as our best. basic line of treatment. It tells us what’s going on with the person and their body gives us that feedback of what worked, what didn’t work.
And then we just keep going until we get those nice sine wave, very smooth, balanced, yang and yin connecting each other. So if it’s Martha, again, this is Martha Lucas. If you would like more information about my courses or my post diagnosis internships, you can go to my website, lucasteachings. com. My private practice site is acupuncturewoman.
com and you can email me with questions at drmlucas at acupuncturewoman. com. I am always happy to help someone become the best doctor Chinese medicine practitioner that you can become. And so once again, I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for letting me talk with you about pulse diagnosis and good luck in your practice.