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AAC – TCM multi-targeted approach to cancer care – Yair Maimon

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Hello everybody. I would like first of all, to thank the American acupuncture consult to put up this show. And today I will try to squeeze 15 years of research experience into 30 minutes. So two minutes kind of per year, I’ve been very fortunate to do, uh, in depth research, both in the lab and with patients with actually eventually won a formula of Chinese herbal medicine, which we took all the way from clinical to preclinical studies in order to prove a one thing the Chinese medicine works, but it’s also have evidence. Uh, this, um, research was also chosen to be presented to NASSCO two years ago when there was a TCM, uh, science day. So I was lucky to present it. I called it multi targeted approach because today all the treatment for cancer is targeted, targeted towards cells targeted towards actually a specific parts in the cells or on the outskirts of the cell.

And Chinese medicine offers a very different model and a very different paradigm. Um, most of my research, at least in the recent years were done in a, the center of integrity of medicine in the cancer Institute and cheaper medical center. It’s a huge, it’s a make a hospital. It goes one by Newsweek of one of the best hospitals actually for cancer in innovation. So it’s a mega hospitality. It has like 20,000 cars per day, 1,800 beds. So it’s really big. And as you know today, hospitals serve a lot of patients coming from also from the whole region, but also patients suffering from, uh, Corona and other, uh, acute situations in our oncology ward. We have, we are very lucky to have the center, which has both a clinical part where a patient can feel like they are in a different environment, healing environment. And it’s very unique to us to have also the research part, the research part, which has a proper lab, and it’s actually molecular biology labs.

So we can go deep into the effect of herbal medicine on immune system, on cancer cells and study even mechanism of action. And as I say, I’m fortunate, uh, to be leading this project for so many years, this is by the way, how the Herb’s look. So in the lab when we, uh, um, put them in some solutions. So you can see that they have different colors and different shapes. Um, this is part of the group that is working with me, uh, including, um, we can say faintly Zoe going, um, North Samuels and, uh, actually Steve Melnick from Miami children’s hospital came and visit us. And you could see me here as well, smiling faces. So I want to start the research actually from a very deep point of view of looking at Chinese medicine, because at the beginning we took cancer patients who were undergoing chemotherapy later, we went into looking deeper on Chinese medicine, but when we look at chemotherapy and when we look at its effect in the body, we are actually going to the deepest place.

We are going to the bone marrow and in Chinese medicine, the bone marrow belongs to the kidney and it’s like the most hidden and deep part of the body is the one it produces the immune system and produces the red blood cells. Cause the bone marrow produces eventually bends the red blood cells, the white blood cells and the platelets. And so this deep production house is housed in the most deepest part and sacred part in the body, inside the bones, in the, in a sense it could be anywhere. But if we understand it from a Chinese medical point of view, we are going to very deep essence of the body. And in Chinese medicine, it is the kidneys. So we want, when we want to address a patient, especially patient and they’re going chemotherapy or RAF treatments or having problem with his bone marrow in Chinese medicine, we know we have to think about the bones or about the marrow and in if we translate it to the substances in the body, which thinking we’re talking about gene, and when we look at the production of the gene, it’s the same as Western medicine.

So Chinese medicine already 3000 years ago, going in along the same line of what in Western medicine is discoveries just in the last decades. So the production of blood, we can look at all the blood in Chinese medicine. And when we look at the production of white blood cells, we would think about the cheap and the effect of cheap. So when we are addressing in Chinese medicine, um, and when we want to protect the bone marrow and the production, and when we want to 25 unity, we have this picture in front of us, looking at the gene, looking at the blood and looking at sheep. So in a sense, we are seeing something from the outside, which now we know is happening very deep inside the body. And if I look at the herbal prescription, if I’ll make a herbal prescription for patients, I can also talk about acupuncture.

Then I’ll put some herbs like or herbs that are, tonifying deeply sorry, the, the gene together, maybe with the herb, the tonifies, the bland and Herb’s the, tonifies the cheek Lakeisha and Juan. So this will be a prescription that you see goes into a very deep layers of the body. Tonifies the production house and also it’s product. And that’s unique about Chinese medicine. And that’s what unique about making a herbal formula rather than using one herb or even using one active ingredient, which is the common process in Western medicine and in chemistry. So when we did the research into formula, which we called LCS one Oh one, we looked at its effect on white blood cells, red blood cells, and even deeper into the immune system on neutrophils, especially in patients who are undertaking chemotherapy, that their bone marrow is suppressed. And therefore the production of the cells is reduced.

And the patients are suffering from anemia, leukopenia, and cetera. This research started more than 15 years ago. And as you will see, it has now many publication in very leading journals, medical journals in the world. Actually, one of my research will LCS one Oh two, which may be will continuing. The series was just probably three days ago. It’s a prescription that works only on immunity or mainly on immunity. So if you want to read, it was published at the medical biomed just two days ago, took about seven years. Uh, so, and by now, this formula was researching seven medical centers in Europe, in Israel and in the U S and this gives it a lot of credibility, because if you can repeat the research in different centers with different scientists, it means that whatever your findings are, they’re very valid and they’re considered more valid because if it’s one center, one place producing all the research, there’s always this question who is overlooking at the research, the results.

So by now, if we’ve kind of been involved in research in seven different institutes, um, and two of them in America. So we had the cooperation with MD Anderson, actually our last publication of LCS one Oh one, we had a cooperation with Arbor medical center. I’ll tell you in then with one of the leading oncologists there. And then we did some of the clinical work calls, not the preclinical work in Miami children’s hospital. So there was a collaboration with many different hospitals. Uh, and, uh, as I said, we were very lucky to find researchers to collaborate with us and Sheba medical center is a sister hospital with MD Anderson. So it was also helpful. This is the formula that cover researching 14 Hertz. Don’t worry if you don’t get it, it’s listed all of our research paper. And whenever you want to put dot com, you’ll find all the research that we’ll be talking about safe.

I’ll be brief on some details. Don’t worry, it’s all research published. You can download, or you can just write to me and I’ll answer questions. The very special thing that we found after we finished this whole series of research that Chinese herbal formula have multi effect. As we know it affects the immune system or they also, they, they achieve the body’s strength. It protects against side effects of different drugs. And it tells also in different research that we ran in the lab, a very interesting effect on cancer cells. But the reason I researched this formula and here is also, I can show this effect. Like I’ve put the, the Chinese herbal prescription into three different formats to show that there is a certain amount of herbs, which are addressing the protection or protecting the gene like New Zealand, Z that I mentioned before, the certain Arabs that we are considered that can kill cancer cells like band Juliane or itself.

And there is certain herbs that are more working on the immune system, like punchy, which is very known or by you, I’m using the Chinese names because I’m more used to them. Uh, and this is really where it all started because I’ve seen very good results in my clinic, treating cancer patients. And in the hospital, I was always, I got a very kind of a cold shoulder, especially from the oncologist that don’t cology department. And this was already in my previous hospital that I was working in. And I was asking, why are you so against natural medicine equals even not Chinese medicine? And always dancing was there is no evidence. And when adopted means, if there is no evidence, it means it doesn’t work because, you know, it’s, it’s a nice, safe to word to say, there is no, but evidence also is approved. So there is also more ways to eat.

But I must say that today, we have so much evidence for acupuncture and oncology acupuncture and the lecture about it. And still, you will hear doctors saying there is no evidence, so you need to read about it and find out, but that will be the very common, uh, kind of thing that, that will hear in the oncology department. They did change after all the research we have done. So we have now a total different acceptance and, and we are heard in a very different way because eventually when you bring evidence, then you’re considered when there is no evidence, you are in a different ball game, I can say. So the first research we did exactly like you do as a, um, regular medicine, double blind randomized, we took a breast cancer patient. In this example, we could have taken other, uh, cancers and they were divided randomly into two groups.

And they were given, one group was given LCS one Oh one. The other one was given placebo. That looks exactly the same. And then this patient were undergoing chemotherapy. So it’s about half year for this breast constipation. And then we compare the results, took about five years and another one year to finish up, eh, all the publications that’s the amount of time good research takes. And sometimes longer the results were quite amazing and stunning because when you look at white blood cells, so we are looking at the herbs that were protecting the bone marrow, but also increasing or helping the white blood cells activity. So if we look at the placebo, I’m looking at the one that had a, a leukopenia or under 3000 counting their blood counts. So it was 42% in the placebo, in the real one, 18%. So less than half, which means 80%, 82% of the patient, they didn’t have leukopenia.

Oh, they didn’t have reduction in white blood cells. It’s almost double, uh, if you look at it from that side on the placebo one, and the same went for a model of being under 10. So there group that took the LCS one Oh one 82%, didn’t have the, uh, the reduction in there and didn’t have anemia reduction in the hemoglobin under 10 while 52%, uh, head reduction. Well, no, sorry. 48% had reduction in 52%, not in the placebo. So see, again, it’s more than half of the women in this respect suffered from anemia. So what we are showing is that we are protecting somewhere deeper because if the red blood cells, white blood cells and we’ll be, look at the neutral fields level is protected means we are protecting the bone marrow from the damage of the chemo, and this was the results. And we published it in, in one of the most respectable, um, oncology journal.

So you can see least less than email. It’s the container and less neutropenia. All this is extremely important. And we published it in the Don cologists one of the best peer reviewed the oncology journals. Uh, so this is what we were kind of seeing that we are protecting, but it has a lot of meaning. Cause when you protect the bone marrow and when you reducing leukopenia and uh, in anemia. So first of all, people can, uh, this patient could do well and adhere to their chemo protocols so they could finish it. So they, it’s also part of the effectiveness of the protocol. They have less complicated complication that less potential secondary infection. When you have low immunity and general better quality of life for the quality of life, we did another group of people. And again, we also published it and we are showing that for fatigue, nausea, low appetite, weakness, pain, bowel function, all of this, a patient who took the LCS one Oh one and the better quality of life than expected.

Then we’re looking at the anticancer properties of the formula and republished it. And then we look even deeper. And we saw that this killing effect of cancer cells was selective, which means it was killing cancer cells and not normal cells and even the same as protection. So this selectivity means that when you use normal chemo, it will kill both the good cells and bad cells. When we were using the protective wall, we can so that instead of chemo, it is only killing the cancer cells and not the normal cells. This is like, if we go for a minute to the lab, you can see this is normal cells of a breast. And you can see on the zero to three, four, five, we take the concentration of LCS one Oh one and they’re thriving. And when we take cancer cells here, you see, they’re almost, they’re almost all dead.

So at this concentration, this one are dead, but the normal cells are alive. And the same when we go for colon cancer, prostate cancer, and later we did on a, um, and bladder cancers, lung cancers, and then other types of prostate cancer was actually also the main one. This is how we chose on the chart. And actually this is for prostate cancer. Again, you see the normal cells are reliable. Even if we go up, some of them are thriving while the cancer cells are dying. So it’s a very unique phenomenon of the selective killing. And this was even further. We shown the selective protection between when you take just a chemotherapy like Doxirubicin or five, a few, it will kill both. When we are adding the LCS one Oh one, it will protect almost totally the normal cells and helping killing the cancer cells. And this was published actually with some scientists from MD Anderson and again, a very interesting publication.

So what you saw and tell now is this protection and killing of cancer cells selectively in a, in, in vitro model. And now we look at the immunity, how the same formula affects immunity, and they always ask me, why do you need so many herbs? Why can’t you reduce the number of pallets? They, they kind of nightmare of a lab work. You know, they have so many protein apps, you have hundreds of ingredients in it, but I say, according to Chinese medicine, we have to follow this logic. And that’s why a whole formula, I call it a team can do so many things. And when we look at immunity, we can see deeply that it activates immunity, both T cells, cells and natural killer cells. This the innate immunity is also the one, which is so important to fight with viruses, but it’s also the type of immunity that kills cancer cells or mutated cells on a daily basis.

So we could have shown on human blood that we are activating the natural killer cells, even sometimes 400% more the normal. So very strong activation. What we did also through all this research is realizing that in order to deal well with herbal medicine, you need to bring it to consistency, to batch, to batch consistency. So today we are doing a very special production in order to bring it to batch, to batch consistency. We are concentrating the Arabs in a different way. We are identifying them. We are looking at their biological activity, not just their chemical activity, obviously the cleanliness, as far as residues of, uh, any toxins. And so we had to go very deep into producing something, which is reproducible for research and later on for, uh, also consumer use. So just to kind of give you a glance, we went deeper because always the concern there is interaction with chemo and radiotherapy.

So, and not a publication. We took 10 different kinds of cancer and 10 different types of common chemos. And there was no negative inter interaction in many times, even a positive one. So again, published, you can read it and everything here takes years until it comes up, but I’m very proud of it. And even also in this publication and others, there’s always oncologists. This is the head of the oncology department in Sheba medical center. But then also we have to look at Ray radiotherapy. There’s always this fear that you will use the effect of radiotherapy because you can be using like the oxygen. But we found actually that the formula is working through different mechanisms. Some of them is like ROS reactive oxygen, which is exactly the same, his radiotherapy. So when we look at the combination, when we combine the range of therapy with the LCS one Oh one, and you see the higher rate going the dosage, the more eh, killing we have for the cancer cell.

So the blue bond is only a zero, uh, formula. So it’s only a red, your therapy. You increase the dose of radiotherapy. So I see more and more cancer cells are dying, but still up to here, almost 30 of them are alive with this dosage of the radiation. But when you’re adding the LCS one Oh one, and when you’re adding them in there larger effect, you actually see a synergistic effect. And this, we also tried on almost 10 different lines of cancer consensus to show that it works, uh, on, on many different types of solid cancers. And again, a very good publication on cancer research, clinical oncology journal, one of the leading journals. So kind of to summarize all this, we need, eh, another research in summary that we published about a year ago and this publication was done with our head of the group is professor Rosenfeld from MD Anderson, from sorry, from Harvard medical school that also helped to endorse our science and to look deeper into it.

So we showed all this effect and just to bring it more to the clinic, um, I’ll show some cases how we use it in the clinic. And we have no cases that we are following more than 10, 15, I’ve even 17 years of patients. Some of them are taking the LCS one Oh one for four years for different reason. This is a classical patient. Uh, she started it when she was during treatments and then she continues, uh, also continues more for maintenance and recovery, and then also to keep her healthy during her life. So when she took it during the chemo, there was an increase in white and red blood cells and very minor side effects. This is, has repeated itself many times, by the way, this is the reason, I mean, there were the whole way of selecting the herbs. The formula was done, first of all, in there, like how can st a clinical setup?

And then when I see repeating the results in my clinic, I went to the hospital to check it with evidence-base and then to improve it and, uh, and, and prove you to also, uh, and, and this is, I think that the advantage of Chinese medicine, we see clinical results. So we start from something, we know we are proving what we know, but this proving is important and has later many implication of how we can utilize on a larger scale. Hopefully that’s my dream, that every patient will get regular therapy together with Chinese medicine together with the therapy that can enhance his quality of life can enhance and protect him from how she effects of treatments. So I can say not just Chinese telephone therapy is what we’ll call, um, today in integrative therapy. But I think Chinese medicine is deleting in the integrative medicine, both from the evidence and from what it can offer.

And the example of and a lung cancer patient who started it after surgery. Again, it was very weak after the surgery. It helped him with recovery immediately and elevation of the white blood cells. You had the throat problem and, uh, immediately got better. Uh, some patient, I think it’s, I think it’s also with him, we’ll continue to take it after. And yeah, he was one of them that was even telling me, you know, I’m like after the chemo, after the cancer, I’m on holiday, everybody around here are sick with virus. It was a few years ago, one year ago, not with coronavirus was just flu, but I’m the only one who’s not getting sick. So I think when we tonify the cheek and he was a chief efficiency and a yang deficiency, I also use acupuncture to tonify the lung. And also the point, his case, a lot of lung cancer can have also part of efficiency and some depression and feeling kind of associated with life and owning your documentary.

It will help them very deeply also on this quality of life issue. So, um, the only was telling me, and I’m keeping taking a LCS one, one. Now we call it protectable. And, um, I’m feeling better. This is another interesting case of a woman that I followed 17 years. Uh, she had a metastatic case of breast cancer and, uh, she takes it together with anti hormonal medicine. And as she started to take it two years ago, this was I’m following him around more many years. Uh, there’s a better quality of life. And also her sweat, hot flashes, sleep, everything got better. So she’s actually quite old by now still metastatic. And, um, it feels very well in her case. It was more the gene deficiency and the kidney deficiency also due to age and also due to anti hormonal medicine, which I reduced it even more, um, another case of a pretty static, eh, prostate cancer, metastatic prostate cancer took this formula for over two years in his case.

Also, we are trying to address the gene part of his, uh, uh, of the formula and of his constitution. So he feels less fatigue, better quality of life. He and I really heard it also from other prior patients. It says that they have back there, even their sex drive, the sex drive, which was reduced after chemo. And, uh, sometimes after the disease itself, because it kind of finds the gene and it kind of finds the vitality of the person. So when we use this in the clinic during treatment, as I gave an example, after helping to recover in maintenance, but also in patient with inactive disease. So usually a full dose, two dates in the tablets, I would use it like two tablets, three times a day, six tablets in full dose maintenance. Those usually have like three tablets a day. Health maintenance can be one or two tablets.

And people who have in active disease usually will be nine tablets. Like you can and make it five times more. If you want to think about the row. Herps because usually from five kilos of Moreau, Herb’s, we’ll do one kilo of powder here. We are actually concentrating in even more. So they’re taking quite a lot of herbs a day, uh, as far as quantity, but it’s quantity really matters. And that’s what we showed in the research. It’s time dependent and also dose dependent. So he really concentrating the formula very much just to finish up with the other research. Uh, there’s been quite an interesting research. This one came from Taiwan that, that followed up, uh, 729, uh, advanced breast constipation, and, uh, looked at mortality rate also. And the only two breast cancer patient who, uh, took, um, herbal medicine, um, and it followed them up.

And this was the most common herbs that they use because different prescription, we see, uh, the major three of them also in LCS, one, one, and the conclusion was following this patient, not patient who taking a herbal medicine, comparing to patients who are not taking that. Uh, they say the TCM may lower the risk of death in patients with advanced breast cancer. So this is a very interesting research, uh, um, prospective research, which compared this kind of population in Taiwan, taking her ups, comparing to the one that are not taking herbs. And, uh, it shows the effect or potential effect of herbs in even in, uh, in this respect. So just to finish up, I tried to do to in 30 minutes, I told you 15 years in 30 minutes, but I have to finish up with a dear mentor of mine. Um, eh, who was one of the, I think most of my inspirational people, as far as studying more the, of Chinese medicine and the depth of Chinese medicine.

And he kind of explains that by returning to the classic roots of Chinese medicine, we can make a truly significant contribution to the medicine of the future. And I think this is very true and the more we will see evidence of it, and the more we will see the, um, usage of it in the West and follow up, uh, the more human in humanity will benefit the better health. So just to say about, uh, how it looks when you do research and this, I heard from my colleague, one of the best researcher, a human first son, who is now himself fighting cancer. Uh, but I held it from his lecture. He says like, Gandy, first, they ignore you. Then they laugh at you.

Then they fight you when you get good results, but then you win. So I hope we are on the winning side. And I think Chinese medicine is gaining more and more acceptance. I know we are still not where we want to be, but I hope with more research of colleagues or research like this, we will help to create a significant change in Maine cancer care and this individual patient’s life. So I want to thank you very much. And again, to saying the American acupuncture consult for hosting me and especially in this days, uh, I would like to wish you the best of health and keep safe and all the very best for me. So thank you very much and have a good time.

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AAC 5 Ways To Quarantine-Proof Your Practice

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Hi there, Jeffrey Grossman from Acupuncture Media Works and AcuPerfect Websites. I am really glad that you are here right now. Thank you, the American Acupuncture Council for inviting me back here to do one of their live trainings for you. I appreciate that. And I appreciate what they are doing every week to bring all this information, and wisdom, and insight to the profession, to keep us going forward in these strange and weird times. For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Jeffrey Grossman, and I am the owner and creator of Acupuncture Media Works and AcuPerfect Websites, and also AcuDownloads. And I’ve been helping acupuncturists grow their practice, educate their patients, and keep their patients in care. Since 2002, I’ve been in this industry of helping practitioners. So, I’m really glad that you are here today. Today I want to talk about five ways to quarantine-proof your practice.

As you all know, these are some really strange times that we’re in and none of us expected to be here. None of us even prepared to be here. And as it stands now, we might be going through various lockdowns over the course of the next few years when things like this arise. So, I want to discuss five different ways that you can quarantine-proof your practice, that you can invest time and energy in now, so when it happens again, if it happens again, hopefully it won’t, but you will be prepared and ahead of the game. So, these are some of the things that I’ve been discussing with my mentees in my mentoring group. And I decided that this is information that would be interesting and, I think, important for the rest of you guys to hear about. So, the the first thing that is important to help quarantine-proof your practice is to learn a new skill.

Now, most of you are acupuncturists so all you really might know about is acupuncture, needling, cupping, gua sha, and all of those things that you do inside of your clinic. And they’re all powerful, and they’re all helpful. But it won’t help you to do those kinds of things in the future if you have to do telemedicine, or distance education, or if your practice has to close. So, it’s important to learn new skills that you can use and start to initiate in your practice now so you can cultivate that awareness. So you can cultivate that familiarity with these. And a couple of things that I would encourage you to think about doing is learning the EFT technique, the emotional freedom technique.

Learn how to do some tapping, learn how to do some distant healing. Also, healing with some tuning forks. Possibly, you might want to learn how to do some facial diagnosis that you could be doing over the telemedicine. Also, one of the things that’s really important is to asking better questions. Now, as an acupuncturist, we have some amazing skills as questioning is a part of our diagnostics. But when we are doing telemedicine and remote medicine, we’re going to need to really balance our diagnoses based upon asking better questions.

Also, you might want to learn how to properly share acupressure techniques with your patients. And some of you might be interested in learning about homeopathy. Now, these are all skills that you could learn now that you could be using with remote and telemedicine. You could be hosting online classes about these. You could be doing this process during your telemedicine classes. The other thing that would be really interesting for you to tap into now, during this time, is how to create and teach online classes and trainings. Now, there’s a lot of things as an acupuncturist that you could teach about. And one of the things that really drew me to this medicine back in the late 90s was that, as an acupuncturist, you’re also that of a teacher. And there are so many amazing things that you could be teaching to your patients to empower their health and to empower their wellbeing and to help support them during these times of quarantine, that are happening now and that might happen in the future.

So you could teach about acupressure points to help alleviate stress and anxiety, to improve sleep and possibly digestion. You could even teach about workplace ergonomics. A lot of people are working from home and they might not have specific ergonomics set up correctly for them. Another thing to teach about is TCM nutrition, kitchen remedies. You could teach about congee recipes. Even breathing techniques like Kundalini or Mantak Chia, the six healing sounds to transform stress into vitality, which is an amazing tool and technique that you can be sharing with your patients that help to talk about and educate about the different meridians. Each of the healing sounds that help activate each of those meridians.

Now, when you’re going to be any teaching, you could be teaching through telemedicine like using Zoom or Doxy.me, or you could be teaching via some specific platforms. Now, I’m going to review a couple of quick platforms here for you and you can choose and check out the ones that you might find more interesting depending upon what your needs are. There’s Teachable, there’s Teachery, there’s Thinkific, there’s Google Classroom, which is free, there’s Podia, CourseCraft and Learnworlds. Those are all specific platforms that you could be using to teach your class. One thing that you might be interested in, something that’s happening in some of my mentoring group, is some of the mentees are putting together online trainings on specific acupressure points. They’re offering them for free to their patients and then charging a small fee for access to these classes and hosting them on a platform like Teachable or Thinkific.

And the beautiful thing about these platforms is that they are an all-in-one solution. They host the videos for you. They will play the videos, you can add downloads that people can access. And also, you’ll be able to email patients through those platforms as well. So, it’s important for you, as a practitioner, to move beyond your skillset from treating inside the clinic, to moving outside into the world of tech. And I know that many practitioners are not very tech-savvy, and I get that. I totally understand it. Fortunately, I am. I’ve grown up in this world of tech and I’m very tech-savvy. And that’s why we do websites for acupuncture. That’s why we have a lot of digital online programs and trainings for acupuncturists. But I encourage you all to really cultivate that tech side of you and cultivate that side of you that is comfortable in this realm of doing online videos or online trainings, or even putting on courses for your patients.

Now when you do have any of these courses, some of them could be live, sure, that’s fine. Or they could be prerecorded, which gives you the option to edit them and perfect them as you will. The other thing that I would really encourage you to do is to diversify your income. And one of the ways to do that is to set up your online store. For those of you that have a website, there are definitely a lot of plugins that you could be employing on your website that create a shopping cart for you. So, what should you sell? Well, you could sell your own products. Many of you are gifted in creating herbal remedies or poultices or other topicals. So you could sell your own products in your website store. You could sell another practitioner’s products on your website store. You could do herbal consultations and sell herbal remedies through your online store, or even hook up with companies like Emerson Ecologics, and having a wholesale account with them and sell some of their supplements through your online store.

You could sell aromatherapy, you could sell ointments and other topicals, but I definitely want to encourage you to really diversify your income. And if you’re not already selling anything other than just acupuncture in your clinic, you should tap into adding to your income by selling other products. One way that I’ve been working with some of my clients is in helping them cultivate their herbal remedies in their clinics, helping them manage their process through doing herbal consultations through the internet, through telemedicine, and then making some recommendations. And then having people buy the herbs through their website store. Also, a lot of these stores allow you to dropship for you.

So you don’t even have to carry any product. So, when you get set up to sell some products through your website store, you could do it in a few ways. One, you can open up wholesale accounts. You could have dropshipping where the order’s made through your website, and then it is automatically dropshipped from the herbalist or the herbal company to your patients. You could also set it up where there’s an affiliate arrangement. Where, let’s say, you’re working with another practitioner. And if you sell their product, you get a small commission based upon that sale. Something to also make sure that you have, is you have a shopping cart on your website, you have an order page on your website. And if you can’t do that, the least that you could do is set up a direct link to a wholesale account for the products. And for those of you that have WordPress websites, it’s easy to embed some products on there with links that link out to other shopping carts.

Ultimately you’d want them to add the materials to a shopping cart on your website. That might be a little more robust than a lot of the websites that you guys have, but that is one way to help you quarantine-proof your practice. There’s a couple of different types of software that you could be using on the back-end to create a shopping cart. One of them that’s really great is WooCommerce, W-O-O commerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, Cart66 Cloud, and WordPress EasyCart. Those are really simple cart softwares that allow you to put and embed a shopping cart on your website very easily.

And the fourth thing that I encourage you to do during this time is to audit and improve your website visibility. So what to do? Now, during this time of quarantine, when you’re home, you might have a lot of time on your hands. And I would encourage you to take this time to audit your website. You want to check your SEO to make sure that your website is updated and that your pages and your plugins are updated on your website. You also want to make sure that you take this time to really update and modernize your design and your website. Make sure that if you are putting out new offerings on your website, like selling products, or hosting telemedicine classes, or teaching a class on acupressure, that there is an “offerings” page on your website that has those new services and offerings that you’re putting out there.

Make sure your blog is updated too. So we’ve spent three months in our homes, and it’s a good time to really focus on really upkeeping your website. There’s no excuse for your website to look like it’s five or six years old, it should be current. That’s the first place people go to when they start thinking about you and your services. Also, the other thing that you want to do is to really tap into social media marketing and promote your website, and your services, and the products that you offer on social media regularly. And make sure that you have a backlink from social media back to your website.

The other things to check while you’re doing this is to make sure that your title tags are set up correctly, your alt tags are set up correctly, and your meta tags. And one thing that I find anytime I do any type of website evaluation or an audit for a client, is that they do not have many calls to action on their website. So I encourage you that when a person hits your website, you want them to take some sort of action. You either want them to schedule with you, to pick up the phone to call you, to set up a telemedicine class with you, to sign up for your acupressure class, or to even just schedule a regular treatment with you. So you’ll need to have multiple call to action buttons on your website. The other thing to do is to make sure that you have videos on your website. Talk about videos about how became an acupuncturist.

What was your road to get you to this moment where you are right now? All right, what kinds of things can you teach your patients that can add value to their life during this time? Make sure your website is mobile-ready, make sure that you have downloadable intake forms, that on your website there is a link to the maps and the directions. Also, make sure that there is a way to capture an email address. So when people visit your website, that if they don’t schedule with you or sign up for a class that you’re hosting or download an ebook that you’re having, that there’s something that you have there that will capture their name and their information. Okay? So, for those of you that are interested, as you know, we build websites for acupuncturists. And if anybody is interested in a free website evaluation to find out what your website is missing, we have a team that is standing by to put together a checklist and go through your website absolutely free.

You can visit this link right here, which is acu.pw/aac-eval. And that will take you to a page where you can submit some information. And my team will go ahead and start conducting evaluations of your website so you can see what kinds of things that you might need to work on during this time to help you quarantine-proof your practice. So go ahead. For those of you that are interested, you can visit accu.pw/aac-eval. And you can just request a free website evaluation there. Absolutely no charge, nothing hidden around that. It’s just something that we do for our clients. And I’ve got a team that is waiting to kind of evaluate your website for you.

And then the last thing that is important for you to do is to make sure that you stay in top-of-mind awareness with your patients. So, couple of ways to do that. Well, before I say that, even though you’re not in practice right now, it’s important for you to have your patients be aware that you still exist and to let them know what you have available to help them to get well, to reduce stress, to reduce anxiety, and to just stay in top-of-mind awareness. So a few things that you should be doing is to email them regularly. I know many of you think that email is bad and that you shouldn’t be doing it, but especially during this time there is a lot of valuable information and content that you could be sharing with your patients and getting in front of them about immune health, or stress reduction, or acupressure techniques.

Another thing to do is to do some direct mail. A lot of people are home right now, and they’re still getting mail. And it’s rare for people to get anything from a healthcare provider. So you can send out a newsletter, regularly, through direct mail. Posting to your social media channels on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter will keep you in top-of-mind awareness. And also, it’s important to make calls to check in. With my coaching clients, I encourage them to make their list of their A-patients and reach out to their A-patients on a regular basis just to see how they’re doing and what’s going on, just to check in with them. Because your A-patients are patients that you love, they know you, they like you, they trust you, you have a really solid relationship with them. And you might not be in their top-of-mind awareness because they’ve got other things going on. But I think if you were to reach out with them and just to check in with them, just to see how them and their family members are doing, it would go a long way in building that trust value with you.

The other thing to do is to schedule regular times to reactivate inactive patients. And you can do this by making phone calls to inactive patients that you haven’t seen in a while. Let them know what your new offerings are. Let them know that you are offering telemedicine, let them know that you are offering some online healthcare consultations, herbal recommendations, nutritional recommendations, or whatever it is that you are offering for them. So, that’s pretty much it. That’s just a quick five ways to quarantine-proof your practice. Again, thank you to the AAC for having me being part of this.

If anyone is interested in a free evaluation, feel free to reach out to us. There will be a link that we’ll be adding here, and we’ll be responding to any comments that you have with regards to wanting a free evaluation. But I just want to encourage you to stay strong and to carry on. These are some strange times, none of us have ever predicted this to be here, but don’t just stagnate and sit there and freeze up and not do anything. You still have a business to run. You still have to generate some type of an income. And there are numerous ways for you to do that, that I covered in today’s training. So, thank you very much for joining me here today. Join us next week when Yair Maimon is going to be joining us on the AAC’s live training. So, if you have any comments, questions, please post them below this video. And I will be sure to respond to them. Take care, stay strong, stay healthy, and we’ll talk soon. Bye-bye.

Here’s How Acupuncture Workers’ Comp Insurance Can Take Care Of Your Employees (And Your Business)

As an acupuncturist running a clinic, you are aware that your business can be vulnerable not just to possible lawsuits from clients, but also to a worker’s compensation in case of injury or even death in the line of duty. Both can have a drastic impact on your finances and cripple your business to the ground. That is why having acupuncture workers’ comp insurance is vital to keeping your business thrive and your professional reputation intact.

Here are some ways acupuncture workers’ comp insurance can take care of your staff (and your business) in case they figure in a work-related accident.

Hospital services for the affected employee, including any necessary medical and surgical care and procedure
Orthopedic devices, if prescribed by the doctor
Hearing devices
Nursing care

It is imperative to underscore that under acupuncture workers’ comp benefits, your affected employee may continue to receive medical care until the care is no longer needed, as long as it is related to the initial workplace injury.

Also, an insurance provider may deny a claim due to a variety of reasons. Thus, both the acupuncturist and the employee must be aware of the common reasons for denial, which include the following:

When you miss the deadline of filing for workers’ compensation claim (Both the employer and employee should be aware of the deadline of filing)
When there’s a failure to send a notification to the employer about the injury (as an employer, you must also keep track of your employee’s condition)
When an injured employee is under the influence of alcohol, drugs
When the insurance does not qualify the medical condition for coverage (there are certain types of conditions that insurance may not cover such as a simple back strain or repetitive motion injuries)
When an employee is no longer part of the company (An employee needs to ensure that he is still part of the company during the filing of the claim; an insurance company needs to ensure that if the employee has been away for so long for his recovery, he still has a job when he is back ready for work)
When the employee isn’t hurt on the job (when the injury isn’t acquired during hours)

Are you looking for a reputable company that provides acupuncture workers’ comp insurance? Contact American Acupuncture Council (AAC) today at (800) 838-0383.

Ask These Questions Before Buying An Acupuncture Business Insurance

As an acupuncturist running your own clinic, you are aware that your business can be vulnerable to several issues. From an accident of fire to natural disasters to lawsuits – all these can shake your business survival and your professional reputation. Indeed, what you need is protection from such issues and an acupuncture business insurance can give exactly that.

Acupuncture business insurance helps cover your expenses associated with disaster restoration as well as legal proceedings, in case of a lawsuit. It can cover the salary or the benefits of your staff as well should any of them get into a work-related accident.

Given the value of insurance, it is imperative that you choose a reputable insurance provider in the market. The goal is to find one that delivers its promise.

Asking the following questions can help find the most qualified in town.

Why does my acupuncture business need insurance? As mentioned above, you need some level of protection from both natural calamities and accidents as well as from possible complaints from patients. Remember that the patients’ health is in your hands, so it makes sense that there is something that protects your business and your professional reputation. It is worth mentioning also that insurance can give protection in case of the worst-case scenario – bankruptcy.

How much does an acupuncture business insurance cost? In a puzzling maze of acupuncture insurance options, purchasing one can be a challenge. But, here’s the thing about the cost: consider using comparison sites for acupuncture insurance. Your goal is to find out the average price in your area as this can serve as your benchmark whether or not you are getting a good deal relative to the coverage packages.

What does acupuncture business insurance cover? Not all insurance providers have the same level of value when it comes to packages, but a good acupuncture insurance plan provides coverage on business and property, general liability, and professional liability. When you get these three, you can rest assured, knowing that you and your business are protected.

Are you looking for the best acupuncture business insurance? Call the American Acupuncture Council today at (800) 838-0383.

AAC – Treating Cosmetic and Neuromuscular Facial Conditions with Facial Motor Points

Click here to download the transcript.

Click here to download the slides.

Hi, everyone. Welcome this afternoon. I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for this opportunity to present on treating the face with facial motor points, and I appreciate everyone coming out in the middle of their afternoon or evening or early morning, depending on where you are. If we can go to the slides, little bit about myself, my name’s Michelle Gellis, and I teach cosmetic and neuromuscular facial classes, facial acupuncture classes, internationally. This is a picture of me teaching a class about a year ago in Maryland. What I wanted to talk about today were a couple of things that work with both cosmetic and neuromuscular facial conditions, but before I did that, I did want to talk a little bit about facial acupuncture in general.

When we use the term facial acupuncture, we are talking about a very large topic, so it encompasses anything having to do with a person’s appearance and/or a function of their face so things like wrinkles and sagging skin, and also neuromuscular facial conditions like Bell’s palsy, TMJ, trigeminal neuralgia, stroke, ptosis, and many other facial conditions. Facial acupuncture is actually the largest growing subspecialty in acupuncture right now and so getting trained is something I’m going to talk about in a moment, but it is very important if you are going to specialize.

Facial hair acupuncture can include everything from just needling to using facial cups, gua sha, or doing microneedling on the face, and facial acupuncture is not some new and trendy thing that the Kardashians are doing on social media. Yes, they are and it is really something that has been around a very long time. When they found the emperor and the empresses in their tombs, they had jade gua sha tools and there are records dating back to the Sung Dynasty and even before that of people talking about facial acupuncture throughout history. I have written two publications for the Journal of Chinese Medicine. I’ve written many publications, but to specifically of interest, one is on treating neuromuscular facial conditions with more of a multifaceted approach.

Today we’re going to be speaking about facial motor points, and this is part of a multifaceted approach to treating the face. I’m a classically trained 5-element acupuncturist. I have been teaching at the Maryland University of Integrative Health, formerly the Tai Sophia Institute since 2003, and my second publication was on the importance of clearing energetic blocks prior to doing any facial acupuncture, and links to both of these can be found on my website facialacupunctureclasses.com. As I mentioned, there have been quite a few studies on facial acupuncture. I’ve listed a few here, and some of them are pertaining to the cosmetic effects and some of these are pertaining to more of the functionality of the face.

These slides will be available on the AAC site and when I teach my classes, I go over these in a little more detail, but I just wanted to let you see that there actually has been researched done on facial acupuncture. When you’re thinking about your practice and how facial acupuncture can fit in, if you’re just looking at the cosmetic aspects, it’s great because you’re not dealing with insurance. It’s a very reliable stream of cash income. Again, you’re not dealing with insurance. You don’t have to bill the insurance companies, and one thing that we’ve learned during this pandemic is just how much people depend on having other people take care of them for their appearance, and people will spend money on vanity before they will spend money on their health.

If you think about some of the signs, the protest signs for things to open up, they were, “I want to get my haircut. I want to get my nails done.” No one was saying, “I want to go see my doctor or my dentist.” People do spend money on vanity and also, if you learn the neuromuscular foundations of a lot of this, it can open your scope of practice. You can see patients or patients will seek you out because you have this subspecialty or someone who will be known for being able to work on the face. A lot of us, we go to acupuncture school where we don’t spend a lot of time needling the face. We’re not comfortable with it. We didn’t really focus on learning those points.

It opened your scope of practice, will give you a very unique skillset. These are some pictures of me doing some microneedling in a class and some facial gua sha. That’s the benefits for you, for your patients done correctly. A facial acupuncture treatment should include body points and should bring chi and blood to the face, to the muscles, to the skin. Facial acupuncture because it is a full body treatment helps with digestion, immunity, circulation, and all of these things. Everything shows up right here, and it will carry nutrients to your cells and by doing that, it helps to stimulate collagen and elastin production.

Also if you’re using intradermal needles, which are very small needles which require some specialized training to be very effective, it will actually stimulate collagen and elastin production. Again, for your patients, if your patients is having any sort of… This patient of mine had ptosis where one eyelid was lower than the other. You could see her eyelid on our right, but her left was lower than her other eyelid, and she was getting married. She was very self-conscious about it and through treatment, I was able to get the levator muscle to function better and help so that her eyelids were even. On a more cosmetic level, people that have rosacea, facial acupuncture treats the hormones.

We do hormonal points if that’s an issue, and it can help with different skin conditions. This was a student of mine in one of my classes and just during the course of class, I worked on one side of her face and she had a rosacea, and you can see how the rosacea cleared after I had done the facial cupping. People asked me all the time, does facial acupuncture work, and these are just a few of my before and after photos. This person up in the center and the top, she had a scar right in her nasolabial fold and through treatment, the scar softened and ultimately, dissipated.

This person down here in the center, had some dark spots and again, through treatment and some intradermal needles through microneedling and I also work a bit in my classes with skincare, with skincare, I was able to really help her to get some of those dark spots to disappear. This other patient here had a tremendous amount of modeling in her chin, a lot of wrinkling and the corners of her mouth were very much turned down. As you can see in the bottom picture here on her left on our right, that the corners of her mouth, instead of being turned down, they were starting to lift up. With her, I definitely used some motor points, which is the topic of today’s conversation.

Again, another patient. This was actually someone who’d been coming to me for years with wrist pain, elbow pain, shoulder pain on and off. She saw that I specialize in cosmetic acupuncture and she was concerned because she was having some asymmetry where her one brow and lid was coming down a little more than the other. I said, “Just get on the table,” and I treated the left side, and the difference was remarkable just from one treatment. Again, I used motor points in that treatment. Getting trained is important. The American Acupuncture Council does require that if you are doing cosmetic acupuncture, that you get trained by one of their certified providers, and I am one of the few people on their list of people who do training.

The reason for that is because there is special documentation, there are precautions, there are red flags and you really need to prescreen your patients for different contraindications. If someone hasn’t been screened properly and you are doing cosmetic acupuncture, you can bring on things like headaches. If they are prone to high blood pressure, it can raise their blood pressure, and many other things. The other part about training is, as you can see, there are 43 muscles in the face. Many of them are very small and when you’re working with the musculature of the face, you really need to know what you’re doing so that you don’t cause asymmetry, overstimulate a muscle or the nerves and the blood vessels, the capillaries on the face.

Some of them are very close to the surface, and really knowing where they are and how to prevent bruising is important. I’ve made a list of some of the neuromuscular facial conditions that I see most often in my practice. When someone within a 20- to 30-mile radius of where I live is looking up acupuncture for one of these conditions, I’m going to come up because this is something I specialize in. Again, specializing in facial acupuncture can be very beneficial for your practice and when I’m treating any of these conditions, of course, I will treat the underlying condition and I do use a multifaceted approach. Meaning, I use some submuscular needling and facial cupping, some gua sha, some scalp acupuncture, but motor points are a big part of treating neuromuscular facial conditions.

Also when we’re working strictly with cosmetic conditions, if you think about our emotions and how they manifest on the face, really understanding each one of the emotions, either from a 5-element perspective or just from a TCM perspective, how these organs being out of balance, what kind of wrinkles that might cause on the face. Using some of the motor points to really as reset switches, and we’ll talk about that in a second, can really help with things like hooded eyelids, the frown lines, crow’s feet and Bell’s palsy. I found these pictures in a book for artists or sculptors. They are artists, but I love them because they show a face at rest and then four different emotions, which of the facial muscles are used.

As we age, these muscles become not as functional as when we get older. Now some of them get overused, some of them don’t work as well. Some of the muscles that we overuse are going to end up causing lines and sometimes early sagginess on our face. You can see here when someone is showing rage, just how many different muscles are involved, and the same thing with joy. Motor points are something that were discovered actually quite a long time ago. Medical doctors have used them. I found an old medical text, and they were using motor points with hypodermic needles and stimulating them. I’ve listed some of the researchers, some of the people that have done a lot of work in the motor point world and what a motor point is, it’s the most electrically excitable part of the muscle.

When you find the motor point, you can stimulate it, and it is where the motor nerve bundle is… The nerve is actually attached into the muscle. Fortunately for us, many of them are acupuncture points. We don’t have to have a deep knowledge of anatomy in order to find them because we have the acupuncture points as reference points. If a muscle is too flacid, it’s not firing properly and if it’s too tense, it’s not firing properly. By stimulating the motor point, you are helping the muscle to function properly, whether it’s to relax or to get back to doing its job that it should be doing. As I mentioned, many motor points are also acupuncture points, but they are not trigger points or ashi points.

A trigger point is really a sore spot and you press on it or you needle it, and it feels good. It could be like a knot, but motor points are different, and there are motor points on the face. All of them are innervated by the seventh cranial nerve, except for the temporalis and the masseter, and those are innervated by the trigeminal nerve. In order to figure out which motor point you should use, if you looked at those other drawings, there’s arrows going in every direction. You have to understand what the functions of the different 43 facial muscles are.

When I teach my neuromuscular class or I have an advanced cosmetic class, I go through every single one of the emotions or every single one of the issues that might come up with a particular, if someone had Bell’s palsy and which motor point to use, but we are going to talk about a couple of them today. Normally, you just needle straight in or slightly at a slight oblique angle, and you want a needle into the muscle, but not through the muscle. I think I just did this slide this morning. I think this is all of the facial motor points. I’ve got one dot for each. I got a little crowded on one side, so I put some on the other side.

As you can see, there are quite a few facial motor points, and then there are others for the platysma and for the temporalis and also for the SCM, but I don’t have those marked out on here. Let’s talk about a couple, and the first two would be the procerus and the corrugator, and they give you the angry eyes or the frown lines. Here’s the corrugator muscle and the motor point. This brings your eyebrows together. It works in conjunction with the procerus, which is right here, but for the corrugator, the motor point is just lateral to bladder two. For the procerus the motor point is actually Yintang, so it’s easy to find. Again, these two muscles work together to bring the eyebrows together.

Another muscle group is the frontalis, which helps to raise your eyebrows, like if you’re surprised or inquisitive. For each wrinkle just about, there is an underlying emotion and it’s a topic for a whole nother conversation, but I just wanted to bring that up. I could talk about this for six hours so I’m trying to squeeze everything in in a half an hour as much as I can so. The frontalis again causes these horizontal wrinkles. The frontalis is two muscles right here and the motor point is gallbladder 14, and I have a little video. I had needle this on a patient and just stimulated it. You could see that her issue was a drooping eyelid on one side, and the frontalis is connected to your eyebrows so I had needled that.

As you can see, it really woke the muscle up. The orbicularis oculi is something that can be affected if a person has Bell’s palsy or a stroke, and the way you would test for it, can the person close their eyes and open their eyes. From a strictly cosmetic point of view, it is involved and these are called crow’s feet. Here is where the orbicularis oculi is, and there’s two motor points. One is between Qiuhou 23 and gallbladder one, and the other one is the extra point right here, which is more or less between stomach two and gallbladder one. Another motor point and this is something that is important for pursing your lips, bringing your top lip up.

If someone had some sort of paralysis around their mouth, if they put their lips together and they blew out, air would come out. If you or I did it, it would come out evenly, or it wouldn’t come out at all, but if someone had paralysis on one side, the air would only come out on the weak side, and it can also cause lip wrinkles. You can see a picture right here of how all of this works, and the name of the muscle is the mentalis. It makes your lip go down. There’s actually three different muscles that are involved in getting your bottom lip up to your top lip, but it can cause wrinkles on your lower chin and wrinkles all around the lips, and here is a video.

I had a student in class who had had Bell’s palsy years ago, and she said she still could not close her lips completely. I went ahead and needled the mentalis, and I noticed immediately that the muscle started twitching. I stimulated it, and you can see what happens. This was a muscle that wasn’t functioning at all. One of the things that comes up right now during this time, we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and our patients should be wearing masks in our treatment room. There was a lot of questions that have come up. I teach my classes now via livestream webinar, and my students have asked, “Well, how am I going to do my job?” Well, I just started back to work last week, and I gave a lot of thought to I can certainly protect myself, but I want to keep my treatment space protected as well.

The first thing I did was I took a box of surgical masks, and I did a little video. If you go to my Facebook group, I have a Facebook group. It’s called facial acupuncture, or my Instagram is also facial acupuncture. If you go to either one of these, you will see I have hundreds of short demonstration videos, articles and this was I think last week. I just took a surgical mask and so anyway, I have a demo video of how I made this, but I just took a regular surgical mask, cut the elastic, folded it. I use some hemming tape, like seamstress might use, or you might use if you wanted to hem your pants without the needle and thread. I just use the tape on the inside, and then I just reattached the elastic.

You can see the front and the back, and this wasn’t the best version. This was a version that I did. I hadn’t tucked the sides in, but other than LI20 and right around the top and bottom of my lip, if someone is wearing this mask, you can get to their entire face and neck. If they were to cough or sneeze or whatever, it’s still contained under a mask which works. I used one six times last week and I just give it to my patients, and then throw it out. Surgical masks are easy enough to get on Amazon right now. They’re inexpensive too. The next level that I’m working on, I saw this idea on the right, which was designed for aestheticians, and it’s a lucite box. I actually ordered one, but for my purposes, it was too open.

I was concerned that it was just too open, so I’ve actually been working with the manufacturer. I have designed this box on the left. I don’t have a photo of it, until I let them know how many I want. I’m not going to be selling these for profit. I’m going to probably order five or 10 or a hundred, and then just have them shipped to acupuncturists, so they can safely treat their patient’s face. Your patient’s head would go here. There’s holes for your arm. It’s very high up. It’s 15 inches, so your patient doesn’t feel claustrophobic, and I angled this part. When you’re sitting and working on their face, you can lean over and get a little closer. The little dots here, these boxes are actually collapsible.

When it comes in the mail, it’s whatever five pieces, and then you just put it together, and that way you can take it apart if you’re traveling or if you just want to store it, you don’t need it, but it was my extra level of sneeze guarding because a large part of my practice is treating people’s faces. That is my very quick talk on facial motor points, and I am going to open it up for questions. Alan, if you’re there, I don’t know what to do with my slides while we’re doing questions though. I see. Something in the chat box, leave the slides. Okay. I left the slides. No questions. Yeah. If you have questions, you can put them in the comments, and I will answer them later.

If you have questions afterwards, you can just put them in the comments and I can answer them. Okay. Thank you again for tuning in, and you can visit my website, facialacupunctureclasses.com. There’s information about my livestream and my recorded webinars, and I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council again for giving me this opportunity. Thank you so much.

AAC-Beyond Heart 7: Alternative Approaches to Insomnia Repair

Click here to download the transcript. Click here to download the slides.

Hi, I’m Virginia Doran, your host for another edition of, To The Point. Very generously produced by the American Acupuncture Council. Today, my guest is Daniel Bernstein. He’s been a licensed acupuncturist in New York city since 1995, and around 2008, he started specializing in insomnia. And this year, 2020, he came out with a book called, Rewired for Sleep: The 28-Day Insomnia Repair Program. And he’s soon also to release a book dedicated to practitioners called, something like beyond hard seven alternate strategies for treating insomnia.

I think you’ll find it very interesting, and it’s something if you don’t have yourself, certainly some of your patients do, especially at this time. So Dan, please welcome, and tell us about your approaches to insomnia, because I know it goes beyond just TCM. Tell us what you think as practitioners we ought to know.

Great. Thank you so much, Virginia. I really appreciate you inviting me to share what I have gathered over the years. And thanks also to the American Acupuncture Council for setting this all up. It’s a great service that you all do. And yes, I’m Daniel Bernstein. I’ve been a licensed acupuncturist since 1995. I have a practice Blue Phoenix Wellness in New York city. And again for the last 12 years or so, I’ve been focusing on sleep and sleep related issues. In February of this year, I was pleased to release a book and I’m going to bring it up, here it is. It’s called, Rewired for Sleep: The 28-Day Insomnia Repair Program.

I’m just going to go to this quote here, which is, “Put your thoughts to sleep, do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Let go of thinking.” And I love this quote by the Persian poet Rumi, because, as someone who’s patients are often caught in the crossfire of self-talk when they’re trying to sleep, this quote sings to me, it has an elegance to it that calms my heart down and puts me almost into a meditative state as it is. So I’m going to go on here. Let’s go to the slides please.

And I’m assuming we’re at the slides. So that’s the quote I was talking about, “Put your thoughts to sleep, do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Let go of thinking.” Today’s goals are going to be pretty simple. We’re going to talk about the importance of sleep, why healthy sleep matters, treating insomnia, an overview. We’re going to talk about a case history. I’m going to talk about mind traps, is what I call them. And then I’m going to show you all a simple exercise that I show to my patients who have a hard time sleeping.

So, how sleep has changed. This healthy sleep means sleeping eight hours nonstop. And in my first go around with the book, I wanted to do a comprehensive, even exhaustive book on treating sleep issues, including acupuncture strategies, herbs. And instead I wrote a book that was targeted for the lay person, but that acupuncturists can use as a template for helping their patients get a good night’s sleep. Now I’m working on the second one.

And while I was doing research for that book, I began to question what healthy sleep is? Among the ideas that we take for granted right now, is a belief that in order to be fully rested, we’re supposed to sleep continuously for seven and a half, eight, eight and a half hours a night. But this idea that we’re supposed to sleep continuously is really a recent one. And it’s a construct of the industrial revolution. It wasn’t until a vast numbers of people had a report for work at eight o’clock in the morning, that the idea of sleeping eight hours through the night even existed.

You see before that, what was common, was people had first sleep and second sleep. Okay? And in that more natural cycle, a person might wake up at one o’clock in the morning or two or 2:30, and use that in between time, they’d get up and they might feel feed livestock. They might talk, they might meditate. They might eat something and then gently and easily go back to sleep. So this recent idea that we need eight hours continuously and that anything else is frankly wrong, implies that if our sleep patterns stray from the norm, we’re somehow failing at sleep, okay.

Now what that does is, it creates an immediate anxiety. If I wake up 2:30 in the morning, and I think I’m supposed to be sleeping, kicks in some cortisol. It feels like I just drank two cups of espresso and I’m off to the races. So one of the things I tell my patients is, it’s okay if you wake up. In fact, you can just say to yourself, it’s okay if I don’t sleep, you can get up and you can rummage around for 10, 15 minutes. I tell them that they can actually, just do a little odds and ends and then naturally and easily go back to sleep.

When did they start saying that it didn’t have to be uninterrupted?

When did they say that it had to be interrupted? You’re saying.

I hadn’t heard that before, that it doesn’t matter. I know in certain cultures, people have their siesta, you traditionally have a nap in the afternoon and therefore you’re…

Right. So, you’re asking, when did people say that?

Yeah, I just wondered, where you’ve seen that as a resource or if that’s a standard.

That it need not be eight hours you’re saying?

Or that it need not be uninterrupted.

Well, as I said, historically, it has been such that people did not necessarily need eight hours sleep. That uninterruptedly, it was common. My resource was the New York times. And it is talked about by Cervantes and Don Quixote, where he talks about Pancho, censor, all eight hours in without problem. But he would get up in the middle of the night and rummage around and then go back to sleep. So it’s part of the historical norm. Certainly people who worked in farms and such would understand that it was all part of the larger cycle. Does that answer the question?

Yeah. Can people go into deeper levels of sleep if they are sleeping for shorter periods at a time?

Well, an hour and a half is typically a REM cycle, typical four stage cycle. So if you’re sleeping three hours, then you’ve completed two stages and then you can go back and sleep another two or even three cycles. So yes, as long as you’re working within an hour and a half cycle of the REM cycle, you’re good. It’s just, it’s something people don’t get enough of those cycles in. So in other words, for them, they might get only two cycles in. And so they’re feeling depleted.

I have another question. Are you a proponent of people taking naps? Because some people seem to believe in it. Some their bodies just don’t really work that way. They feel better, not taking naps, some people it’s-

Sure. I am a proponent of somebody knowing their body enough to know what works. I know I’ve had gotten some patients who came from a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT, which often uses restrictive sleep, not allowing naps, making sure people get in bed a particular hour and out of bed at a particular hour as a way of retraining the body. I’m not a fan of that. But as for naps, I think everybody’s just different. And the body changes. Some people can never take naps, and then 20 years later, all of a sudden they nap beautifully. So, we’re capable of changing our circadian rhythms in that way.

So, and we’re talking about circadian rhythms, they’ve been thrown off by artificial lighting, of course street lights were boon to society and culture, but they also meshed with the pineal gland. And suddenly we were no longer going to sleep at dusk and waking up at dawn. So that was totally out of the window. So that on top of recently, having our iPhones, our tablets, our computers at night, adds another layer of messing with the pineal gland.

So these things have really tended to mess with that most curious organ, the brain. Some sleep facts. Okay. So 44% of Americans report having insomnia, for half of them, the conditions chronic. That’s an interesting thing, because half the people with sleep issues have slept poorly for a long time. They’ve tried every drug under the sun, they’ve done sleep nitrous, they still can’t sleep. Whereas the other half, the acute insomnia sufferers, for them it’s more situational. Okay. Maybe a loss of a job, the death of a loved one, too much responsibility and it’s situational.

And the good news for them is that, it’s easier for them to go back to normal sleep, usually, sometimes not. Over 9 million Americans are addicted to sleep aids. That’s an incredible number. And the tragedy is that most doctors, almost every patient I’ve ever had, I asked them, did your doctor tell you that after 21 days you would be addicted? And to a person, they said no, but that is the simple fact that, after 21 days a person’s, whether it’s Lexapro, Ambien, any of those drugs that are used for sleep, then the person then has to get off that drug, and they are no longer on top of that.

I asked doctors, are sleep aids, risk restorative? Do they actually help the person recuperate? Usually I got a blank stare or a shrug shoulders. It was like, I don’t know. What we do know is that sleep aids, do not take a person past stage two. So this gets us into talking about the stages of sleep. Okay. So stage one is basically, the drowsiness you feel when you’re about to or you’re watching TV. Stage two is like a power nap. Stage three is where all the action is. The restorative stage of sleep, or our brain waves are slow, your body’s busy fortifying your immune system. You’re building tissue and preparing your body for the next day.

This is where also you can add muscle mass. If you’re reaching level three, then the body can add muscle mass. Stage four is REM sleep. This plays an integral part in processing, learning, and memory. And also as a response to stress. So given the stress levels we’ve got these days, it’s a wonderful thing when we get to dreaming. Personally, I think melaton gets a bad rep. Sometimes people talk about job, all these lucid dreams.

And it’s like, yeah, that means you’re actually getting to REM sleep. That’s a good thing. So if you can handle it, I’m not a proponent of knowledge on it, but I also don’t knock it, because a lot of people do. So acupuncture and herbs and self care are bridges to healthy sleep. So that is the response. I wanted to put this in here, it’s maybe a little self serving, but it’s regards to what’s going on with COVID right now.

Okay. This is a quote from Dr. Matthew Walker, author of, why we sleep. “Natural killer cells are critical components of the body’s immune system response, serving as the first line of defense against cancer cells, microbes, and other potential threats. A single night of poor sleep can impair natural killer cells activity by as much as 70%. In the short term, this can put us at risk for developing acute illnesses colds and flu, but in the longterm, it increases our risk for much more serious threats.” And so this is where I say, make sleep a really important part of your practice, because we’re doing so much more than just helping people sleep, we’re really, not only we are increasing their metabolism, we’re really helping their immune system.

That right now is so crucial. And the opposite is well, what happens with lack of nourishing sleep? Well, depression, anxiety, diminished learning, diminished immune system, toxins remain in the body. Nutrients, not going to their intended muscles, an increase in hormones that break down muscle. I believe that’s the catabolic hormones and an increase in the hormones that make us want to eat, which I guess are gremlin. We call it gremlins, but I know it’s not. So treatment strategies. Oops.

I have a question Dan.

Yes.

You miss some sleep, say, normally you get seven, eight hours sleep. And then because of whatever reason, it may not even be insomnia, it might be travel or whatever, you get four or five hours sleep. Can you make up those hours or is that the little bit of damage to the body that can’t be redone?

I think it’s an interesting question, because science tells us, no, you cannot make up that sleep. That is what sleep scientists tell us. But I think it is a two dimensional way of looking at it, because somebody who’s really not taking care of themselves and they lose those eight hours, that’s going to mess them up. However, somebody is really doing self care, perhaps they’re meditating, maybe doing two gong, maybe eating, well, it sort of gets, I would say, absorbed in the greater good. So, theoretically, technically, no, but that’s a soft no. And I would say that if we’re taking care of ourselves, then it’s not a big deal.

So, getting 10 hours the next night, won’t…

That’s what they tell us. That’s what science tells us. They may find something else out next year, but I don’t worry about it. I’ve certainly lost a lot of sleep, I take. So maybe it’s just deluding myself, but I’d to believe that it all comes out in the wash as long as we’re doing self care.

How did you get into focusing on insomnia or sleep patterns?

Sure. Well, briefly, I had my own sleep issues. I went through a bunch of stuff around 1990, that put me on high anxiety, insomnia, and I went to acupuncture and it helped a lot. There was insomnia in my family, and it took me years to really see that, that I often would wake up in the morning and my mother would be in the dining room, finishing a dress that she’d spent all night working on. And so, it was a pattern of insomnia there in my family and I saw it up close. And so I do believe that, it’s a cliche almost to say, the work we do sometimes as healing our own wounds.

I think there’s a certain truth to that. And whether that is true for me or not, I don’t know, but I do find it interesting going back over many years and seeing that it was something that used to be… It would make me feel weird, because on one hand, you had this very productive mom and she’d make this dress, on the other hand, part of me was like, my God, she’s been up all night and that can’t feel too good. So whether it plays into it, I don’t know, but I think it is interesting.

So, treatment strategies. Over the longer term, helping patients sleep and to be participants in that sleeping process brings greater than success than nearly, and I won’t say merely acupuncture and herbs, because we can definitely get people sleeping again. But as we all know, we go in and out of balance, okay. It’s part of the human condition. And so as we go out of balance, people then start sleeping, not so well again.

And so in my treatment practice, I like to teach them simple stuff, diaphragmatic breathing, what can be better than just teaching somebody who breathes from their chest, to start breathing from their belly? That’s like 50% of everything, right? If they’re open to it, Qi Gong, use of magnets and Japanese tiger warmers. I have that in my book, acupressure, Yintang, Anmian, kidney one, pericardium six, kidney six, the standard sleep points.

And I just tell them to just either use the moxa with tiger warmer or acupressure. At the end, I have complimentary tools for self repair, including an exercise I’ll get into later called the five, five and five. This is Yogi. This is my nemesis. He’s my cat. And essentially he’s also, his attitude is the way most of my patients look when I first suggest that they can actually start taking care of themselves. So I thought, I think we all have patients like Yogi.

And cats have problems with insomnia.

Definitely strange. They definitely have oddball sleep issues. And the beautiful thing about when I work with patients, is if they go for it, when I first suggest they can actually help themselves, the beautiful part is that, if they do, they start getting a sense that they’re not victims, okay. It opens up all sorts of possibilities for that person. I mean, they’re going from, I’m doomed to, what can I do next? Maybe I can quit smoking. Maybe I can lose those 10 pounds. Let’s work on those things too.

And it’s my belief that the more aware our patients are, that they have this ability, the more they see the value of the subtle, yet powerful work that we do. So I don’t believe it’s like, well, they won’t need us later if they’re able to help themselves. No, that means that they will, instead of being 3% of the populous coming to acupuncture, it will be 30% or 50%. And I think it does help to help people, help themselves. Thank you, Yogi. So insomnia is not a disease, it’s a symptom, treat the root and that’s the theme for today.

We know that Western diagnosis tells us a little, and we also know that the main organ systems involved in Chinese medicine or the heart and the liver to a lesser degree, the kidney, the spleen, and perhaps the gallbladder. Okay. And often we see mixed pathologies, perhaps heart yin deficiency with Liberace stagnation. And so we treat those things that we see, and they’re all incredibly valuable.

I would suggest that before we treat what we see, when it comes to sleep, a root treatment is really important. And so unless, we treat the deeper energetic issue involved, the patient will have a much harder, getting better. So some of the root treatments are five elements, eight extraordinary vessels. I call it Kiiko style. Okay. I studied, as did Virginia. We both studied with Kiiko Matsumoto, and she does a lot of root treatments, adrenal deficiency, sympathetic dominance, blood stagnation, all of it is root treatments and then going on to symptom based treatments.

I believe that Dr. Tan’s balanced style is really a combination, as some others are calling doctor, master Tong as well, are a combination root and branch treatments, because they’re rooted in the i-ching and in the five elements. So, treating the extraordinary vessels. And by the way, give me five minutes, if I’m getting dangerously close to going over my 20. So a quote from the Nan Jing, and it talks about the extraordinary vessels being a root treatment. And the ones that are most involved with sleep are Yin and Yang Qiao and the Yin Wei.

The Qiao’s are involved with opening and closing the eyes. And this gets into, it’s not how many hours we sleep, but how rested we are when we wake up. I get people who sleep eight hours and are exhausted. They tell me, I feel I just ran a 10K, while I was sleeping and other people sleep four hours and feel incredible. So it’s clearly not always about time, the distinction is one that’s made clear by Dr. Hamid Montakab in his book, acupuncture for sleep.

He talks about differentiating the quality of sleep versus the quantity of sleep. And we can use the extraordinary vessels as regulators of that sleep. So if it’s an issue of the person, simply not being able to sleep enough, not being able to keep their eyes closed, either theoretically or metaphorically, or literally it tends to be a Qiao issue. And what we want to do, is we may palpate kidney eight, which is the Xi-Cleft or the Qiao. And if it’s tender and everything lines up, then we may treat the Qiao. We may drain UB-62, tonify Yin Qiao.

We may add points to that, since it’s around the kidneys, kidney 27 points, along the kidney channel. However, if there’s more an emotional issue and perhaps a person’s exhausted, emotionally wrung out, they’re anxious, depressed, lethargic. These are all symptoms that the Nan Jing refers to in talking about Wei issues. So, that’s an issue of depth, meaning they’re not sleeping deeply enough. And so, we look to the ways.

And so the way that we look at that is we may palpate kidney nine, which is the Xi-Cleft of the Wei channel, the Yin Wei. And if that’s tender and we look to which one is the most tender, is it the right or left? We needle that, and then we continue treating the Wei channel. So the opening point of the Yin Wei, pericardium six, and we couple that with spleen four. Again, I talk here about, verifying that Yin Wei is the correct treatment, aside from the fact that they’re typically depleted, depressed, wrung out.

Certainly Dr. Manaca used to use the Wei to start a treatment almost constantly. If you read, chasing the Dragon’s tail, he used the Yin Wei a whole lot. So then we may needle PC-6 and spleen four bilaterally, and this is the root treatment, let the patient rest for 15 minutes. At that point, we may expand the treatment in modular fashion. Some people believe in just letting the entire treatment be the root treatment and that’s okay. Certainly it’s the five elements, we see that whether an aggressive energy treatment or external dragons, that treatment is a full treatment in their root treatment.

I have no problem with that. I typically check the pulses and, go from there. What else did I want to say about that? Yeah, I always found it interesting. Let me go back to this, excuse me, considering that the heart is the emperor, I always thought it odd that why is it that there is not a heart point on the extraordinary vessels? You’d think that that would be, top of the list there. And so I went back and I see that a lot of Japanese acupuncturists do not treat the heart typically, they will go to the pericardium and protector of the heart, and certainly points along the pericardium are crucial for sleep, anxiety, palpitations, heat, all the heart stuff.

So for me, opening the Yin Wei, is such a powerful way to begin treating someone who’s having those issues. So let me continue here to, Marianne, this is a case for Yin Wei and Buddha triangle. 38 year old woman, complained of waking up during the night, agitated, palpitations, feeling heat, et cetera. My voice is going. So I’m going to keep it simple. As you can see, those are the fairly often seen pulse tongue, palpatian issues that lead us to believe that it’s a fire and water disharmony, repletion above, vacuity below. Water is not nourishing heart.

So there’s heat above. And so one option is more of, I’ll call it a TCM style. Certainly it’s a wonderful treatment, heart seven, heart six, which does clear heat. Pericardium seven for palpitations and insomnia. Yin Tang, which is a great sleep point, CV-17, heart, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s a terrific treatment. My tendency is, if I were to go that route, I might start with a year, Yin Wei or another would treatment and then go to that. Option two, go to the root treatment, open the Yin Wei, followed by Buddha’s triangle.

So, we start on the dominant hand, pericardium six on the opposite foot, spleen four. Now what I would do often, is expand that to Buddha’s triangle. So I might start first with just the two points, and then I’d expanded to pericardium six, heart seven and long nine, which is also a root treatment. However, I don’t think you can go wrong with it. And then I would add contra-laterally. Some people believe in just those three points and they make a perfect triangle on the wrist. I to add liver four, spleen six and kidney three contra-laterally.

And that is a beautiful treatment. It really handles insomnia, anxiety, palpitations, dream disturbed sleep, and it’s a full treatment. Another one since I promised that I would give them tan treatment, I’m just going to add another one for Fir-Water disharmony, that comes from the playbook of the balance method, Dr. Tan, which is a Shao Yin/Shao Yang treatment. And this goes to heart three and heart seven on the right, gallbladder 34 and 41. And then the left side, we’re treating kidney three and kidney 10 and triple burner three and triple burner 10.

And I’ve used this and it’s a good treatment. It’s an effective treatment. You have to keep doing it. You really need to see the patient for this. You need to see patient like twice a week. It’s true for all. I mean sleep is not an easy fix. Okay. I like to joke that since Sim Yao talked about, that he’d rather treat 10 men than one woman, because of the plumbing. And I to say that as he was leaving, he muttered that I’d rather treat 10 women than one insomnia patient, because they’re paying him my gallbladder 30. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but we move on.

Where does triangle protocol come from?

I think it’s part of the five elements universe, that is where I saw it originally and I couldn’t swear to it. So I hope a lot of 5E people don’t bite me on the neck for claiming it’s part of them. But I do use it as part of that, because I do believe it’s a beautiful… To me it’s a crossover between five element and balance method, it’s got a lot of stuff going for it. I didn’t get into it, but I also will add to that, sometimes again, contra-laterally, Yang points to those two, right hand, left foot. I will add, typical as to Richard Tan, I’ll do a right foot, Yang points, left hand Yang points, depending on the secondary stuff that needs to be treated.

So, herb formula for Marianne would be, Tian Wang Bu Xin Dan. Okay. That is typically for people with heart and kidney issues that wakes them up, their palpitations. They can’t sleep, they have heat issues. And just to differentiate that, let’s say from something that’s just more kidney, like Jo bi di wang wang, that’s more kidney or something that is more blood based. That would be Suan Zao Ren Tang. The Suan Zao Ren Tang is terrific, because it also addresses heat issues. But again, it’s more blood rather than Yin deficiency, which I think Marianne was presenting with.

Again, some food cures, asparagus, chicken egg, wheat, if you want to go the Chinese formula style, banana, bamboo shoot, these are all for Yin deficiency. And then finally I gave Marianne some homework. In this case, it was the five, five and five exercise. Before we get to it. Actually, I’m just going to skip it over, we may be running out of time. Yes. Or how are we doing?

I think they’re pretty self explanatory those.

Yes. Okay. So basically I treat the sleep-disordered mind a lot, and it falls into those five categories, distractions, daily regrets, real life problems, overwhelms, things I didn’t do yesterday and things I won’t be able to get done tomorrow. And then finally disconnecting from phone, computer and TV. So one of the treatments that I like to do is, and it’s so simple. It’s called the five, five and five. Okay. It helps unwind the sympathetic nervous system and it takes 15 minutes. Okay.

Basically for five minutes I have the person write down regrets, resentments fears, overwhelms clogging their mind, all this stuff that we typically start churning at night. We’re great during the day, but when we close our eyes, they start unfolding. So I tell them, spend five minutes and no more, then fold the paper, place it aside and say, out loud. “These are tomorrow’s problems.” For five minutes, close the eyes and gently massage Yintang, whatever you wish to do. I like Yintang. And at the same time, I’d tell the person, imagine that you’re in a garden, a rain forest, someplace where you feel safe, it could be in your little den.

And then for the last five minutes, I tell them to become mindful of breath. And so these are ways that we open them up to the idea of meditation without having to call it meditation. So just follow the path of your breath with your mind, down into your lungs, back up through your nostrils and just keep doing that for five minutes. And so these are, I feel stress free ways of getting someone to begin the process of unwinding the sympathetic nervous system and engaging their parasympathetic nerve system at night.

And then finally, I use something called autogenic training, and it was invented by a German cardiologists in 1931, who frankly was tired of seeing his patients dying. So he invented a calming technique that would reduce their levels of stress. It’s an eight week program. And it really helped in the way that no other Western method had, using a version of a progressive muscle relaxation.

And so I have that on my website, which is rewiredforsleep.com. If you go to the Explorer page, you’ll see that, and I think three other recordings, that’s all free to listen to. And well, I mentioned before the exercise and rewired to give for the sleep disorder, I think any acupuncturist wanting to provide their patients with tools to combat insomnia, anxiety, stress, and PTSD can really benefit from it as well for their patients and for themselves.

Have I missed anything? So, finally, I have already popped my little book. I’ll do it one more time. Rewired for Sleep: The 28-Day Insomnia Repair Program. It’s available on Amazon in both digital and paper. And if you’d to know when the next book is coming out, please feel free to email me at daniel@bluephoenixwellness.com. I’m going to say one last, thank you to American Acupuncture Council and to Virginia for allowing me to visit and give my little talk. Thanks again.

Thanks Dan. It was really lovely having you and I’m sure people will get a lot of benefit from this book, practitioners and patients.

Thank you. Thanks.

All right, so we’ll see you all soon. Thanks for tuning in, again, I’m Virginia Doran, luminousbeauty.com , and sayonara.

See you.

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