And the topic of my talk today is the importance of clearing blocks before doing cosmetic or any facial acupuncture treatment.
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Hi, my name’s Michelle Gellis. I am an acupuncture physician and an international educator, and I am also the author of the book, “Treating the Face.” It is a comprehensive guide for acupuncturists and health professionals. It is a full-color, 500-page book encompassing everything having to do with treating the face.
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First, I would like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for giving me this opportunity to speak to you today. So what I’m going to talk about today comes from chapter two of my book, which is all about five element acupuncture. And the topic of my talk today is the importance of clearing blocks before doing cosmetic or any facial acupuncture treatment.
So what is a block, and why is it important to treat them and clear them? So a block is the im– is an impediment to the smooth flow of qi throughout the body. It’s if you think about water going downstream if you think of your qi as like a river flowing, and if there were sticks blocking the water from going downstream, that is energetically what a block to treatment is like.
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So how might it show up? Blocks can… The effect and how it could show up is it could make symptoms worse, or it could make your treatments not as effective. And this is important to us when treating the face because when we are treating someone’s face we’re not just treating them from here to here.
All of my cosmetic treatments involve a full body acupuncture treatment, and this is because we are treating the whole person. So if the qi is blocked anywhere, then it is going to affect our cosmetic acupuncture treatments, and this can show up in, again, the treatments not being as effective or your patient can have increased side effects from the treatment strange sensations, headaches, dizziness, these types of things.
So it’s really important to clear energetic blocks to treatment before treating the face. The health of the entire body is reflected on the face, and our face is the most yang part of our body. So things like wind and heat and a lot of different stagnations and deficiencies can show up on our face.
They can show up as red spots, dark spots, dryness, puffiness, especially under the eyes. And when we’re thinking about the face and blocks in particular, all of the yang organs, all of the yang channels converge up on the face, and we’ll get back to that in just a second. Thinking about our five element…
I’m a Worsley trained five element acupuncturist I think a lot when I’m designing my treatments, I think a lot about the emotions and how the emotions affect our overall health, and our face is how we express our emotions. And if we can’t or don’t express our emotions due to some sort of blocked channels, blocked qi or perhaps there’s neuropathy somewhere, or your patient has been getting some sort of neurotoxins in order to relax certain muscles, or if your patient has a condition like Bell’s palsy or myasthenia gravis and they can’t express an emotion, then this is not just affecting the face, it’s going to affect our overall health.
So the first thing that I always do when I’m doing a cosmetic acupuncture treatment is I check for and treat any blocks to treatment. So today I’m gonna talk about two blocks to treatment, and one of them is referred to as aggressive energy. So aggressive energy is contaminated, polluted qi that might be circulating through the channels, and it can affect all aspects of our mental, physical, and emotional health, so body, mind, and spirit And there’s really no way just by looking at a person or talking to a person or probably not even feeling their pulses unless you’re highly skilled to know if someone has aggressive energy.
So what we do is we test to see if the person has aggressive energy through an aggressive energy treatment. So the treatment is a test, and the test is also a treatment. So by testing for aggressive energy, you’re treating the person. The points that we use are the AEPs on the back, all the Back Shu points and they are bladder thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, eighteen, twenty, and twenty-three.
So we’re going to go top to bottom, right to left. We’re going to put the points in, and we don’t push the needle all the way in. You just tap the needle in so that they’re just hanging there, and then you’re going to put in a test needle, one in the upper jiao, one in the middle jiao, and one in the lower jiao.
And if the redness around the acupuncture points, the Back Shu points, is different in size or color than the redness around the test needle, then that is usually a sign of aggressive energy. And the test needles are put either between the inner and outer bladder line or between the inner bladder line and the spine, any place that’s not an acupuncture point.
And you will leave these needles in until the aggressive energy clears. I always leave them in for at least fifteen minutes just in case. And I do this on all of my patients for the first treatment and typically within fifteen or twenty minutes, the AE will clear. Another block that’s very important to check for and to clear when you’re treating the face are entry/exit blocks.
And if we think about the flow of energy in the Chinese clock, the energy goes from heart to small intestine to bladder to kidney, etc., etc., around the Chinese clock. And energy moves that way through the channels. So when you’re feeling the pulses, if you notice that the, let’s say, small intestine pulse, which comes right before the bladder pulse, if that small intestine pulse is really big and pushy and the bladder pulse is very small, then it sh- can be a signal that the energy is not getting from bladder to small intestine, and there is an exit/entry block.
And the way you treat this is by treating the exit and entry points of these two channels. So the exit point for small intestine is small intestine 19, and the entry point for bladder is bladder one What you would do is you would if you feel this on the pulse, then you would treat small intestine 19 by tonifying it, and the way we do that is we put the needle in and we turn it 180 degrees clockwise, and then we take it out.
And then I do bladder one and a half kind of on the bridge of the nose and instead of getting all the way into bladder one, and you are going to tonify that, turn it 180 degrees, take it out, and then you would do the same thing on the other side. And usually, this will clear any blocks. You can also suspect these blocks in addition to the pulse.
People usually report they’re having ear issues with their ears. Some, so something physical, headaches and the headaches that cause you to go like this and it feels better. And this is really important because you don’t want to be treating the face unless the face is completely open and the energy is flowing freely.
Can you put up the slide, please? So there are several other blocks that we check for in five element acupuncture having to do with the Shang cycle and I cover all of these in my book and I go into depth about spirit blocks possession husband-wife imbalances, and all of these have to do with getting the chi to move smoothly throughout the body and the face.
You can take the slide down
That is a little bit about why it’s important to clear blocks before doing any facial treatments on your patients. And if you would like more information, you can visit my website, facialacupunctureclasses.com, and check out some of my recorded classes and my live classes. And I hope to see you in class one day soon.