Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.
Hi everyone. This is Sam Collins, your coding and billing expert for acupuncture and the American Acupuncture Council Network. With our other episode on always looking to continue to grow your practice, to give yourself more opportunity, to see people and help people. And as always, I’m going to give you tips on coding and billing and really practice management.
This is a great time to be an acupuncturist, but how do we make sure we’re getting from gaining full advantage to get access to patients and the services we provide? So what I’d like to do with you today is to talk about coding and billing specifically for cupping. This is one that I get this question a lot is that seminar producer, as well as doing our network services, where people call them with questions.
One of the questions I get is, Hey Sam, how do I code for cupping? Can I get paid? What is the proper code? Let’s really get into that. So let’s go to the slides. Let’s take a look. What’s going on with. And how do we do it? What’s the coding and billing. Please note, there is our website. This is the network, not the insurance company, ACM phone network.
Remember we always have updates and news for you there. So what are we looking for? What do we need to do? What is. A cupping as well. Let’s define that cupping as a therapy at ancient form of therapy, where a therapist puts special cups on your skin or a patient skin to create suction.
That suction is to help with circulation, for pain, inflammation, blood flow, and so forth. And of course has become very popular. You’re seeing it all over. Let’s talk about, we know what it’s good for it. How do we use it? But can we get paid for it? Let’s talk about cutting more to define it more clearly.
What I’ve been able to research is that there’s about 10 different types of cupping, and I’m sure some of you might say, oh no, I think there’s five. This is just what I was able to research. And it shows you can have things that they call weaker, like cupping medium or. Moving cupping. I see that commonly needle cupping using moxa or needles with it empty or flash cupping, full bleeding, cupping.
You got to remember that. Is it within your scope for your state, but I’ve seen it used with herbs water and realize the cups can be made of several substances. I generally see some type of glass. I seen some very heavy plastic metals I’ve even heard. I’ve never seen it. I’ve even heard of bamboo.
And that kind of makes sense. What we want to focus on. How do we bill for it? Is there a CPT code that we can use that says it? The first thing we have to remember is whenever you select a code, and this is something that you must always do, you must select a code that accurately describes the service.
Not has to accurately do not be creative. Don’t select a code because it’s like it, like my example, if you were to use. Would you be able to code that as acupuncture? Just because you put seeds on a point, doesn’t make it acupuncture because it’s not needle. So it can’t be it’s gotta be all the way.
So don’t be creative with what you describe, do not select the code that climate is close. Always has to be exact. And within that. If there’s no code for it, there is a code, always. There’s a code called the unlisted code and it can be a modality or a procedure. So whenever you have any service and we’re talking cupping today that doesn’t have a code, that’s going to be the more likely code to use, but let’s take a look at is their way of coding.
It’s I’m going to show you something. I deal with a lot, which is dealing with audits. Many of you are insured with American acupuncture council. And remember if you’re audited who’s there. Remember, if you have American acupuncture council of malpractice, they’re going to help you with audits depending on your policy, anywhere from 30,000 to $50,000 a defense.
And this was one of the cases we had here was an office that had issues with coding. And you’ll take a look. I highlighted in blue. So here it says on 52 claim lines, manual therapy was identified as. In the medical records and reporting of the code 9 71, 4 0 is not appropriate using for the Madame for the modality to indicate as cupping.
So I want to make clear, some people will say Sam, I’m putting the cups on manually and I’m moving them around. So it makes it manual therapy. Nope. That would not make it manual therapy. It’s. And though you’re doing it manually, it doesn’t make it manual therapy. So again, be very careful and you hear a lot of people say, oh, sure.
When I use a cup, Nope, that would not be correct. And I want to make sure you can see this. This is directly from. And again, very clear that it’s not to be used for it. So is there a code for cupping? So if you start thinking of all the codes, infrared heat. Okay. Hot packs, electric stem.
You’ll notice there is no code for cupping. So we want to talk about how to do it. And frankly, let’s be clear. Is it really even a covered service? And I think that’s what I want to focus more on. How do you get. And to get paid for it by insurance. That’s what we have to have a code, but is it a covered service?
Take a look here. This is the VA and I’m sure you’re all familiar with VA claims. The VA is one insurance that will indeed pay for cupping 100%. You’ll notice here and I highlighted it where they indicate the services that can be provided along with your acupuncture. And clearly. Cupping, along with other things, but cupping is there.
So a lot of people look at the codes that are allowed under the VA. And I’ll give you the list here. Here’s the codes that the VA pays for an acupuncturist. Notice it was updated for this year. And you’ll notice that code. I put the blue arrows it’s 9, 7 0 1 6. Now I would say in theory, I think the VA is saying you could use that code.
I don’t think it’s quite correct, but let’s talk about. Should you use it? 9, 7 0 1 6 indicates something that’s called a Vasos nomadic device. And the indication for it is to reduction of a deem after acute injury lymphedema and the use of a pop. So I want to highlight you see this little, long kind of blood pressure cuff goes over the area.
That’s what a visa nomadic devices. It’s a large pressure device that goes over an extremity or part of the body that gets pumped. To prevent a DEMA post-surgical maybe prevent blood clots. It might have vibration to promote circulation and deal with lymphedema. Now I’ve had some people argue that well, could a cup be listed under that?
I would say I can see the argument, but I think this goes against the rule. It has to either fit it or not. I don’t think this would fit it. So I don’t think this is the best choice. And I also don’t think it’s the best choice, because if you use it, I will say the VA will pay it. But the VA Medicare rate is 12 to 1400.
It has a relative value of 0.35, which means it’s about 25% of the value of acupuncture. So again, not a very expensive code, 12 bucks now that’s better than zero, but is that potentially the best code? So remember an application modality, one area Vaser pneumatic says devices that provide external pumping forces to soft tissues to the lower and upper extremities.
And I would say trunk as well. So you would say with cupping, could it fit that definition? I could see you dovetailing it, but I still will stay. It is not the best. Cupping is very popular. You’re seeing it amongst sports and athletes and my goodness, the rock has even had it. And I love what he does because he has moons of followers that if he’s getting cut, the more people are likely to try.
Do I see even the person’s left, had a lot of cups place it’s really popular. It really has efficacy. I’m seeing a lot of additional practitioners from chiropractors to physical therapists that are doing it. So how do we. I mentioned the visa nomadic device. And I said visa, nomadic. I think you can argue it for the VA.
I would never use it outside the VA, but for the VA you could. But I think from a monetary point of view, you’re losing money because it doesn’t pay as well. Using 9 7 0 1 6 will literally get you paid less than 50% of what you would be paid. Otherwise when you use what’s called the unlisted modality code.
Now I want to go back for a second and I’ll go back here and show you. You’ll notice those codes are like, 9 7 0 3 9 and 9 7 1 1 3 9. So you can see they’re all on the list for the VA. In addition tonight 7 0 1 6, but those codes do not have a Medicare value, which means when there’s no value purported by Medicare, they pay at usual and customers.
So what I’m saying to you is simply. If you’re billing, even the VA for cupping, what is the best code to use? It’s going to be the enlist of modality. Whether you want to say it’s unattended or attended. Now here’s the difference. 9 7 0 3 9 says unlisted, modality and modality in this way means something.
You apply to a patient, but you don’t have to be there. Like I know when I’ve had cupping, they placed the. And they leave them there for a bit. I would say that’s an unattended, probably appropriate code, but I’ve also had cupping where the provider is constantly in attendance adjusting and moving them a bit.
That’s going to be more of a procedure or hands-on. So the more hands-on and that you’re spending time with the patient 9 7 1 3 9 would be the better choice if it’s completely unattended 9 7 0 3 9. The difference, just to give an example, if you bill 9 7 0 1 6. They’ll pay a 12 to $14 bill 9 7 1 3 9. I’m going to say payment is going to be between 30 and 45, depending on your area.
So would you rather get paid 10 or 30 or 40? I would opt with the higher one. So how do we code this though, to make sure they know what’s coming says it says unlisted procedure, which means it could be for anything. So you have to indicate cupping on the 15th. Actually, it’s not hard. You’ve all seen a 1500 for here’s an example.
Notice on this line item, it says 9 7 1 3 9. And then in the pink shaded section, right above it, you simply indicate that tells the insurance it’s cupping. Oh, by the way, what if you’re doing moxibustion how would you do that? Actually the same way you would just indicate moxibustion whether it’s fully active.
Or one that it’s unattended. My point here is that coding for cupping, the best code for you would be the unlisted code and indicated this cupping, the VA will cover it. They will pay for cupping. It’s part of the authorization. They will pay it under 9 7, 0 1 6, but at a third of the price. So I think it’s better to use this one.
Now, what about regular? Do regular plans generally cover cupping. The unfortunate answer is no, I’m not finding any type of consistent payment here and there I’ve seen it, but not enough for me to really say yes, it’s covering out. The more likely places to be covered would be personal injury more than likely.
But outside of that, if you go to, gosh, the Cigna, Aetna, the blues general, they’re going to come back and say, it’s experimental investigation, which doesn’t it. From your standpoint, it’s not effective, but you know how insurance companies are without a double-blind study. We’re not going to cover, explain to the patient.
This cupping services is going to be integral to you getting better. We’re going to apply it. This is why, and what we’re doing. And here is the cost. If you show the value and the patient sees the value, they will pay for it and it will be covered. So don’t be afraid to pass it on because if you’re not willing to pass it onto the patient, why bill and insurance, if you’re going to give it away, So I would say, yes, I don’t want to bill for it.
It takes time. It takes effort and it is effective. Quite frankly, I’ve seen some really good responses with muscle injuries that I’ve never seen with other types of modalities. Now we’ll hacky puncture too, but that cupping is really been something I’ve noticed because of the amount of use I’ve seen has really made things work better for patients.
So make it available. Billing wise, what’s the best. Unlisted therapeutic procedure or modality, identify it as cupping and then simply put your price. And when we’re talking just simply price, you’re far better to bill cupping under the unlisted code to the VA. Cause it’s a little bit worth three times the money.
So keep it simple. You know how everybody makes insurance billing hard. You just have to understand the parameters. And that’s what our program with you is to do and realize I do articles and acupuncture today, and this one date back to 2010 and actually talks about it and why I wanted to bring it up today.
That this question though, a lot recently, and it’s because it’s become popular because of the VA. Here’s the thing. You can have me as your. Don’t be afraid to reach out to the network service, because from that I become part of your team where you can call, email me, fax me. However you want to get ahold of me to help you with coding and billing, and frankly get paid my goal to make you better.
I’m your doctor of billing to make your office work better. So go to our side, take a look. I would suggest take a moment to go to our Facebook page AAC. Give us a like there and we always update and put news out. We’re always going to be a resource. The American acupuncture council of course, is your malpractice resource, but will your billing and coding and business to resources as there’s our site, there’s our phone number.
Please reach out to us. Don’t be afraid. My email was at the front end as well. What I’ll say to you all is thank you for the time and next episode, we’re going to have Poney Chiang and again, always go out and be successful. But remember, the success is more about being. Which means being good to your patients, be that person.
And I’ll see you next time. Everyone take care. So what I’d like to do with you today is to talk about coding and billing specifically for cupping. This is one that I get this question a lot is that seminar producer, as well as doing our network services, where people call them with questions.
One of the questions I get is, Hey Sam, how do I code for cupping? Can I get paid? What is the proper code? Let’s really get into that.
When we practice, we will start with the Western medical perspective and this lecture we’ll discuss facial anatomy. And then also the morphological changes that occur. The face ages over time.
Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.
Hi, my name is Dr. Shellie Goldstein. I’m an acupuncturist specializing in cosmetic facial acupuncture. And I would like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for allowing me to be here today. It’s always a pleasure. Today’s presentation is the anatomy of facial aging. This is actually very important, particularly for cosmetic facial acupuncturist, because although we are practicing traditional Chinese medicine we always need to take into account the anatomy of the face and the way that it changes over time.
So this is. Presentation is almost the foundation of our sense skills and being able to get great results. When we practice, we will start with the Western medical perspective and this lecture we’ll discuss facial anatomy. And then also the morphological changes that occur. The face ages over time.
And then we will touch on Eastern medicine, acupuncture strategies for treating the aging face. And throughout my series with the AAC, we will break these down into smaller formats and address them individually. But today is just an overall of what you need to do in order to, and know in order to understand other lectures.
When we think about facial aging, from the perspective of Western medicine, we’re really talking about this biological process that happens with the resulting of a gradual reduction and the structural component cell function and the Chinese medicine. We think more in terms of the G and the energy and the organ systems.
Whereas from a Western perspective, we’re really going to look at the anatomical features of the face. And then the morphological changes that we see as the face ages over time. And when we think about a young phase that has a normal volume, nice and full with very well-defined contours along the jaw line and the cheekbones, that type of thing.
And then as we age these regional facial aesthetics, these units that we’re talking about begin to change. And from a Western medical perspective, those changes are mainly due to a number of factors, a reception of the bone fat tissue changes. Muscle attenuation or the changes that occur with the muscles of the face.
And then the skin gets thinner. The skin gets flacid. It develops elastosis and then we have ligaments in our face that we’ll talk about. And as those shift, they also reposition the soft tissue that it attaches to. When we look at the facial planes, we look at them and two different systems.
We look at them horizontally, and then we look at them vertically. So horizontally, we talk about the upper face, which includes the hairline and the upper hairline to the inner campus area at the top of the eyebrow. And the mid face is referred to from the inner campus plane to right below the nose. The
And then the lower face is considered right below the nose to the jaw area. And then we look at them from a vertical center line as well. So we have the very center, the vertical center line, and then moving out to the center of the pupil is the next vertical line. And then the third vertical line is right in front of the ear lobe.
So we’d go from upper to middle to lower upper face, maybe. Lower phase. And then from the center line, moving out to the center of the pupil and then directly in front of me. And these are fairly standard. There are obviously some changes that occur with different types of faces. So say a Caucasian face may have a narrow or nasal base and a larger tip projection that intercampus area widens at when compared to other faces.
Whereas in Eastern Asian face is going to have a very somewhat weaker facial structure framework. It’s a little more. Delicate. It’s a little wider, a little rounder. The eyebrows are a little bit higher. The lips are a little fuller. The nasal, the bridge is a little bit lower. And then the flaring of the nasal Alia or exists more with an Eastern Asian face.
And then the Malheur prominence in the mid face. This Malheur area. Right along here is more prominent. Lips are more protuberant and then the chin is a little more pushback or receipted for a Latino or Hispanic face. Typically the bises a zygomatic distance right in here is a little wider. The maxillary protrusion is a little wider.
The nose is a little wider and then the chin is a little more receded. And then an African-American faces much has a much broader nasal. I decreased nasal projection. The Bilac by maxillary protrusion exists where the orbital is a little more pro per ptosis, a little bit lower. And then the tissue is a little plumper, a little bit softer.
The lips are a little more prominent and there’s an increase in facial convexity. So there are so much changes, although we’re still dividing them up and along the same trajectories, both horizontally and for. When the face ages it moves from when you think of a young face, it has a very wide, upper number, upper face and upper mid face, and a more narrow and pointed lower face.
And when we look at the younger face, what we see is our eye goes directly to the upper portion of the face. So we look at eyes, we’re looking at a very high cheap, but when we look at a nice wide area and the upper face and the upper mid face, and then as we age, it moves, the weight of the face actually moves.
It drops. LA drops and then turn becomes more medial. So that in this case, as with the aging face, the weight of the face actually moves down. We start to lose, you can see along here, we lose the definition along the dry area. And the weight of the face moves from say upper and outer. So it up and wide to more medially, and.
This creates a lot of changes in the face. Then what are going to look at that right now? We know we have bone and then above the bone, we have soft tissue and in order to really get effective treatment results, we really need to understand the relationship between Eastern medicine. And the biomedical anatomy with regard to the morphological or the psychodynamic facial changes that were time.
So let’s break these down and let’s look at them as they exist from bottom to top. So deep search deep to the surface. We have bone, the basic structure of our face that holds the shape of our. On top of bone, we have muscle on top of muscle. We have fat and then superficially, we have skin. So let’s look at them.
Let’s look at what happens with bone first as we age bone resorbs, which means that it starts to break down and it breaks down from the openings that exist. So for example, the eyes get a little bit wider. The eye socket gets wider. And we’re looking at this boat. This is a CT image of two females. This one on the left.
She’s between 20 and 40. This is someone who is over 65 on the right. And you can see, and the earlier one you can see a nice squared face, open eyes. Here’s the nasal bone and it’s nice and thick and foam. And look what happens over time. The openings start to open up and get white. The F as the face itself starts to get smaller.
So the openings get wider. The skull itself starts to shrink. So it gets smaller. You can actually see it starting to push down. When the skull starts to push down, what happens? You lose the form. So the mid area, the maxillary area get shorter. The mandibular bone, the mandibular area starts to break down too.
It starts to push forward to, you can actually see this rotation, this inward medial rotation of bone that you see changes in dentation. And so we see the height of the face starts to decrease the eye socket, start to expand. You get temporal hollowing. Here’s the temple there starts to break down and get hollow.
And the piriform, this is the nasal pyriform. This is the openings that we were talking about. The nasal pyriform gets wider and we get the resorbtion of the breakdown of the mandible read in here, along the base, the maxilla on the top. And then this causes changes in your teeth, changes of indentation.
It starts to push for. And then the entire face starts to rotate and protrude. And this is what it looks like. What we begin to see as eye sockets, start to increase the nasal pyriform starts to widen the mandible. And here starts to shorten the mandibular length starts to break, to lengthen and shorten as well.
The nose starts to change and the maxillary area right in here, this angle starts to get change. You start to see changes in the height of everything which pushes the teeth. When that happens, this is what so the darker areas is where the bone is starting to break down. What happens to all of the soft tissue on top.
All of that tissue starts to, it has it’s losing its support. It’s losing its underlying foundation. So in even in a healthy tissue, it’s going to start to stag. It doesn’t have the foundation anymore. So it starts to sag and drop and move medially. As we saw. On top of bone, we have muscles. Now the faces unique, the face has two site types of muscles.
It has superficial muscles and it has deeper. The deeper muscles generally attached, like on the body from bone to bone, our bone to muscle and the deeper muscles in the face are primarily located in the mid face, this mid area. And they’re designed to move bone and it’s attachment. So primarily what we’re talking about.
Is the mandible. The mandible is the only loose bone on the body. Everything else is connected. And so the main purpose of the deep muscle muscles of the face is actually to move bone. And it’s primarily for chewing for moving the mandible back and forth and for chewing. Now the muscles on the superficial muscles are a little different.
We call them the muscles of expression are medic muscles memetic, and these muscles are different than the rest of the muscles on the face and the deep muscle the deep muscles of the face and on the body, them a medic muscles are designed to move other muscles and move the skin. So rather than moving both.
Or bony attachments, they’re going to move muscles and they’re going to move school. They’re very flat and you can see them in this cadaver. There here’s a medic muscle right here. There’s one around the eyes. There’s one here in the cheek area. Here’s one right here and then around the mouth and then the participant muscle along the neck and with age rather than atrophy, they attenuate.
So what does that mean? We think of muscles atrophying over time. And it’s mainly from lack of use, but when you think about the muscles of their face, We use them all the time. We use them with our expressions. We use them when we talk, we are eyes they’re opening and closing all the time. We are constantly using the muscles of our face.
So they don’t they don’t really atrophy. They attenuate. And when we see a tango what that means is they get short. So they move, they reduce in their amplitude of movement and they get stiff and straight. And instead of being nice and flexible and moist and resilient, they start to straighten, they start to stiffen, they get stuck or they reduce an amplitude, so they don’t move as well.
And that limited amplitude of these mimetic muscles leads to a more permanent or more contrasting. Position. Whereas we, if you look in an aging person and it looks like their muscles are frozen, they aren’t moving, they aren’t moving back and forth or contracting and relaxing. They’re stuck in their position.
And when these muscles get thinner and tighter and stiffer or straighter the skin on top of them starts to crease our we start developing a facial asymmetry and when we get wrinkles. So a lot of this is combining the changes in structure and the bone plus the changes or the attenuation of the mimetic muscles of the face.
And then we see systemic changes in the integumentary system. The integumentary system is made up of three layers. It’s made up the subcutaneous or the fat layer it’s made up of the dermis, the mid layer. And it’s made up of the epidermis, which is the very surface area of our standards. What we see when we look in the mirror or when we’re looking at.
Let’s start in the deeper layer in the subcutaneous or that fat layer. We have two layers on the body, the face we have the deeper layer and we have a more superficial layer and they look different. You hear in this cadaver, we can see on the on the surface of the the left side, this is the, it’s a little lighter yellow color, and it sits on the surface.
Whereas the deep fat is a little darker in color and it’s deeper underneath the surface of this. Regardless see that as we look at the phase and as we look at the fat in our face, the fat is what provides the structure or the plumping plumpness of. Some people have more than others, as you can see. I don’t have a lie.
But they’re all of these fat pads, we think of them as being all across the face in a uniform position. But in fact, that’s not the case. They are actually separated by ligand implements. So they’re partitioned in sex, sectioned off and held into place with ligaments. As we age changes occur.
And those, the fat we call it descent and deflate, which means that it moves as it breaks down. It starts to lose its form. It lose its integrity and then it moves. And oftentimes it moves under the eye socket. And in this fold between the nose and the corner of the mouth, it’s called the nasal labial fold.
And we see as people get older, This area begins to thick, and it’s not a wrinkle it’s actually partially due to the movement of the tissue and the muscles immediately towards the nasal labial fold. But it can also be due to fat right in here that is moving from the center of the face, into that area.
And it’s also due to just simple loss of fat in the mid-face area, so that we see a flattening or a deflating. In the mid-face area, but then we also have the illusion of being thicker in the nasal Lavia. Also what we see as changes in the upper area, the forehead, the periorbital area, the temporal area.
We start to see a breakdown of fat into this area. And then some of this also lands along the jaw. And that is partially what happens when we start to lose our jaw area are the cut that we see in our general area. We may think that it’s all skin that is starting to fall down. And in fact, some of that may be due to fat, build up along this jaw area that creates that asymmetry from side to side, but also that loss of definition in the jaw area.
On top of the fat layer or the adipose tissue of the deeper areas. We see the dermal layer. The dermal is right here in the middle. And then on top of that is the. And the dermal area is where the health of the cells develop cells begin their growth cycle at the base of the dermal area. And they begin to float up their base.
Then this nutrient of hyaluronic acid and fluid proteins, vitamins, everything that we need in order to create healthy cells occurs on the German. And floats up to the top, moves up to the dermal layer, the epidermal layer, and then spreads off. So not only do we have a number of nutrients and bathing solutions in this dermis, but we also have our our rector Pillai muscles, their muscles that we feel when we get the chills and our, and the hair starts to stand up on our.
I sweat glands, a number of sebaceous oil glands, a number of different vital substances are in the dermal area out of this. It’s composed of a papillary layer, which is a loose meshwork of thin connective tissue. And then the deeper area is the thicker layer of connective tissue. And if you look in this side image, this is connective tissue.
We’ll go into this a little more deeply, but it’s a very loose matrix, a loose structure, whereas the lower areas a little bit. And then on top of that area is the epidermis. The remembering the epidermis is that theory surface layer of the skin it’s made up of a number of different layers, seven different layers.
On the very top are dead cells. They’re filled with keratin. It’s what we slough off and we fully ate our skin. And then as we move deeper to the dermal layer, the cells are a little bit healthier. They’re a little bit plumper. They’re a little thicker. They have a little more, most moisture in them. And then as they move through the dermal cells, move through the dermal layer into the epidermis.
They start to thin out, they start to flatten. They lose their moisture. And then at the very surface is the dead keratin cells. As we age a number of things happen, one is the health of the cells that are floating up from the dermal layer up to the surface, the cell health and the dermal layer starts to change.
We start to lose the water content. They start to be a little thinner, a little drier. So they’re not as healthy as they move up to the surface. Also the structure of the dermis. Remember we spoke about that connective tissue starts to lose its integrity. Collagen and elastin are the main components that hold up the integrity of the dermal layer.
When that starts to become disorganized and break down, we actually lose the integrity of that entire dermal layer. Think of a mattress that’s thick, and as we lie on it over and over, it gets a little bit thinner and. Like we lose the integrity of our mattress. Over time, we lose the integrity of that dermal layer and then cells on the top are thinner.
They are dryer though, less subtle, they’re less plump and the entire area sinks. So here’s the mattress, here’s the sinking of the skin and the mattress. And it looks like their wrinkles been. In fact, it’s just loss of college and loss of integrity and skin aging on the surfaces. Remember that connect that.
In that connective tissue. So connective tissue is throughout fascia is a type of connective tissue and it is the most abundant form of collagen fibers in, in, in the tissue of the skin. There’s fascia on the face, which attaches to the bone, the lining of the one, the periosteum, and it encapsulates and protects the muscles and the deeper layers of.
Tissue. And then there’s a superficial and that superficial, it’s like a thin layer of say sticky film or saran wrap. So it’s a little sticky and it attaches to the muscles and then the muscles attached to the skin. And every time a muscle moves, it causes the skin to move. And that’s how we get our expressions.
And then. All of these are in a horizontal plane and then running in a perpendicular plane are our retaining ligaments. There are a number of different retaining ligaments in the face. Remember they surround and encapsulate fat, but they also are like little plugs. They hold all of the loose tissue.
That’s running in a horizontal plane. They hold it all together. So what happens as they age? They start to attenuate as well. They start to dry out. They start to thicker, they lose their integrity. And as all of the horizontal tissue starts to shift, starts to dry out. Remember turn more immediately the these re retaining ligaments start to move as well.
So again, everything moves medially, and again, we start to lose our Mallory projection, and this is what we. If you look at this is on this end on the, to the left is aging as a young face from the frontal and then side view. As we age, we can start to see shortening in the far ahead, we start to lose or flattening in the mid phase and then loss of definition along the jawline, as you can see.
So let’s look at this. So here is a younger face. Nice to see the height up here. Eyes wide, open forehead. Nice and relaxed. Now look, this is what happens as we start to age, remember everything starts to drop down, move more, more immediately. We develop that nasal labial foam. We develop a long here, the repositioning of fat loss of structure.
Everything starts to fall and then loses it. Here we see this side is a younger face. B is the older face. Can you see how the mid face starts to flatten? We start to see a deeper nasal labial fold. We start to see loss of collagen and elastin, particularly in around the mouth and loss of definition along the job.
I hear it as a. Here’s a younger face. Hirsi is the older face deepening and the nasal labial fold loss of definition. The jaw line, the corners of the mouth start to turn down. This is another conversation about muscles and the effect that muscles have on the phase. Particularly the mimetic muscles.
And then in terms of treatment, how are we going to treat this? We see this changes starting to happen. We see the the changes that are starting to occur. Some that you can change. You can’t really change bone loss. These the, that have already lost some bone. It’s very hard to change, but we can make a.
And we can do that with our acupuncture treatments. So in the link shoe, there are a numerous discussions about needling guidelines specific to the layers of the face, the skin, the flesh between the areas between that flesh and the channels and around the muscles at the local level. In the link shoe, they talk about the skin, the flesh, the muscles, the tendons, and meridians all occupied different places in the body and that different diseases respond to different methods.
And when we talk about diseases in this case, what we’re talking about is. And if illness are aging is superficial, the different needling that we do, it will penetrate and injure the good flesh. If we do not treat it at the superficial layer or we miss it, then we’re not going to get the right results.
So when we treat what we’re treating, as we talk about the superficial layers, we’re talking about the epidermis and the dermis. So when we’re actually treating them, we have to angle the needle in a way that we’re actually treating the epidermis and the dermis. So we’re actually aligning that. Very flat.
When we talk about angle of insertion, what we’re talking about is relative to the skin surface. So we would lay that needle right at the surface of the skin, and we say five to 15 degrees and we can treat the superficial wrinkles. We can treat skin atrophy. Pain. There are a lot of pain receptors in the dermal layer of the skin.
And so we can actually help treat pain by laying that needle in a very superficial layer. We can use it with intradermals. A Japanese style of acupuncture is very good for addressing for our purposes. Introducing. Japanese acupuncture to treat the epidermal and dermal layer of the skin. If we want to move a little bit deeper into the hypodermis or the fat layer, we’re going to angle it a little bit deeper, not much because remembering if you actually place your hand on the surface of your skin, if you push a little bit, you’re already at the bone.
So it’s very superficial, very shallow. So we’re going to angle the needle at a 15 to 20 degree angle. We use it for skin atrophy for any type of fat atrophy or deflating. It’s really good for prevention. For aging on the deeper channels at the muscle. If we want to address the muscle layer, we’re going to name and go that needle on a 45 to 60 degree angle.
Really good for treating muscle attenuation trumps. Muscle trauma or prevention. And then for the bone, we’re going to go right or into treating the meridians. We’re going to go at the angle of the bone, which are the more 90 degree angle. So that’s also great for prevention, any Meridian problem or trauma to the face.
So here’s an example. This is a different protocol or a protocol. This is just an example of how we might use and to the muscles in the neck area at a 45 degree angle. If we’re going to treat the meridians, we might go right into the acupuncture points on the face, a shallow noodling into wrinkles and the, into the dermis and the epidermis treating the muscles, the corrugator muscle.
You can see this deep corgi. Fold, and then 90 degrees into the meridians. And this would be a before and after picture of what you can expect to see, say, and this is a 10 treatment series. So that’s it for today. There again, I have a number of different lectures for you where we take a deeper dive into the individual.
So thank you very much. Again, thank you to the AAC for allowing me to present today. Stay tuned next week for Sam Collins. He’ll be presenting next Wednesday. He’s always exciting. Very interesting to listen to. And see you again. Thank you.
Some people are feeling burnout and but yet the desire to create impact in the world and to grow your practices. And this is where somebody like Simone has some great advice in some answers for us.
Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.
Hello, and welcome to the point. I’m your host Lorne Brown. I’m a CPA certified professional accountant. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and an author as well as the founder of Healthy Seminars.com. And today we have a special guest. We have my coach, Simone Janssen on to the point. And we’re going to talk about grow your practice through empower teams.
And I know having, taking the pulse, no pun intended of my colleagues and knowing myself. That some people are feeling fatigued. Some people are feeling burnout and but yet the desire to create impact in the world and to grow your practices. And this is where somebody like Simone has some great advice in some answers for us.
Cause when it’s time to grow and serve at that highest level that, that you all want and know that you can do. You’re probably becoming aware. And if not, I’ll let you know, you can’t do this alone. The greatest athletes, the greatest people that have made impacts in this world.
Although you think they’ve done it alone, they’ve had some. They have stood on other people’s shoulders. And so yes, you may see them in the news as somebody’s done something incredible. But please know that all of them have incredible teams. But the key is how you build a trusted team of a players.
Basic that’s an extension of you, or at least extension of your vision that have your back and can rock all the outcomes that you’re looking for. Focus on the expansion that you want. And this is why I personally joined Simone’s coaching program is because I’m very aware that I have a team. And if it’s, if the clinic.
Optimal or it’s not going if it’s not growing the way I want to, or I’m fatigued. I know the first responsibility starts with me, not them with me. And I’m always a big fan of investing in yourself. And so that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to bring own in, but I brought her her coaching into my.
Because I knew I needed to up my capacity, my skill level, so I can lead this team. Let’s bring on Simone Janssen. So let’s see. There she is. Hey, Simona. Good to see you again. Hey Lorne. Good to see you. And wow. What an awesome podcast you have here. I’m excited to. I’m glad to have you on here with us.
So I want to let them know that so Simone here, she’s worked with hundreds of growth minded leaders help build the right systems and teams helping them scale quickly. Cause you want to expand and grow. It feels good when you go to flow, it does not feel good when you’re stuck and she helps you get out of their own way while avoiding burnout.
And I know from my own experience, feeling tired and burnt out, I was getting in my own way, which is why I had the. Insight to know that, Hey, I need some help. I do mentoring for people. I’ve run some great practices and businesses. It’s always good to get help. And we all can benefit from interest and coaches, and this is what Simone does.
So she’s going to talk to us a little bit about what she does and and give us a presentation. So you’ve set up a little presentation for us called grow your practice through empower teams. If we can bring up your slide deck, I’m looking forward to hearing what you have to say, and please we’re looking forward to your questions.
Yeah. Sounds great. So hello everybody. How’s it going? I hope you’re having a fabulous day. So it’s Simone here with Bulletproof startups and we do have an incredible training for you. So hopefully you have something to take notes with because we’re going to dive right in. We’re going to move pretty fast because we have a lot of content to share with you.
Let’s get to it. So as you see, the title of today’s presentation is grow your practice through empower teams. So you, as the practice owner can really get out of the driver’s seat and change. The world one patient at a time. So who this is for is really, if you are a CEO or a practice owner, and basically if you’re ready to scale your practice and you can’t do this on your own and you are ready to take your existing team and really optimize them so they can deliver amazing results for you and for your patients.
Then this is. Or if you’re just hiring your first two to three key people to start expanding, then you’re also in the right place. So you might fall into
not able to appear. We go. You might fall into one of these two categories. So if you are like Christine, Christine had a very successful acupuncture clinic was already handling more patients than she could with the addition of one grade assistant. But if she knew if she didn’t hire more practitioners, she wouldn’t be able to help more people as her client load was already completely maxed out, but she had never.
Hired anybody never really led a team before. So this was all completely new to her. So she used the same principles and practices that I’m about to share with you. And she’s currently about 300 K a month. Now, more importantly, she and her team really have the privilege to help three times the people now than they could before.
Or you might be like Frank, Frank has a very successful. Physical therapy clinic and he had already hired and trained five providers in his method, but really they weren’t proactive. They weren’t strategic. So everything kept falling back on his plate and he could never really get into growth mode, no matter how hard he tried.
So Frank came to us because he wanted some, he wanted to create some freedom and some leverage to grow his initial. And his impact using this the same kind of strategies that I’m about to share with you. He retrained his team and he hired five more providers. So he was able to serve twice the amount of patients in just the first three months that we worked here.
And he opened his second location soon thereafter. So whether this is your first attempt at hiring a team, or you’re a seasoned veteran, it could be working better pay very close attention because of this training really does have the duty to change your life and your business. So let’s look at this, what this is really.
So we’re going to talk about how to grow your practice through empower teams. Get out of that driver’s seat and change the world one patient at a time. Now we need that clear vision that brings more value and teamwork to the table. Step-by-step action plan to create highly accountable team. We’ll talk about the right communication strategies to get and keep your team focused.
Getting leadership practices in place to foster great accountability. And so that you can really be that thought leader in your space. Now this will work. Even if currently everything is always all on you. You don’t have everything, you do everything. Even though you have a team you are far from where you want to be.
Maybe your culture needs some cleanup. Maybe it needs some defining, or you haven’t been successful at hiring before.
Just a little bit about me very quickly. Lorne said something already, but why you should listen to me, I’ve been doing this for more than 15 years and through our Bulletproof start-ups system, we’ve helped hundreds of companies of all different industries, sizes kinds of mission by really by putting the right systems and structures in place that help their teams show up with their a game.
Get strategic. And take care of serving the patients and really rock all that everyday operational stuff. So that it’s not on my client’s plates anymore. Many of my clients, CRA clients, we’re getting, we’re trying to all sorts of stuff. They had heard about a million different things, but for most of them, nothing really ever quite work or really.
So because what’s, most of what’s out there, they’re actually not systems. So the different pieces don’t necessarily play together. And oftentimes that you can contradict each other. So over time I found what works best and I could create a system where all the pieces fit together without big gaps and everything builds on each other.
So you constantly don’t have to reinvent the wheel. So 3d systems might clients have. Over a billion dollars to their bottom lines over time. And just imagine how that translates into lives changed. Patients helped. So what do our customers all have in common? Pretty simple. They want the income, they want the freedom and they want the impact.
So let’s unpack this for a moment because while that sounds simple, this may not be. All that easy. When we look at revenue, a lot of our clients money is not their first motivator, but let’s be real here. If you’re not making money, this is not sustainable. It’s also the easiest way to measure business success, which is in direct correlation to our first, our third may.
Impact. So for now, just let’s agree that revenue is a powerful measure, but in the long run and even more powerful measure that we really need to pay attention to is profitability. Of course. And the other thing about revenues, it means proof of concept. It means what you do is working, which is really important.
So that’s revenue, but then freedom for most of our clients. Freedom is one of the biggest motivators when they started their business. Only, think about this only doing what you love and the rest of it, your team takes care of. And that’s often the thinking that beginning entrepreneurs have, except for most of them pretty quickly that being in business for yourself as anything, but.
Unless you figure out how to create a great leverage team and you become a respected leader for this team. So many of our clients are really brilliant at what they do, but they know they need more people on their team. And if they want to expand, treat and have more impact, they really have to get into this piece.
But whenever there’s a challenge, they keep stepping into. Working in their business versus just staying, working on their business. And you might wonder why. It’s, because most of them have not created a team that they can really trust. So how do we do that? It’s this thing that I call the holy business, Trinity, that we have to pay attention to because when your team is not performing the way that you need them to, we have to look at three really important variables.
One is the people. Do you have the right people on the bus? Two is the systems. Are you giving them the systems and the structures that they need to be successful? This means giving them the tools that help them implement your strategy and utilize their talents to help you level this thing up. And then three, of course, as leaders.
Are you the leader that will be able to challenge and support them so that they can bring their, a game to the table, help you build your vision, but you in turn have to be that leader that can really help them grow. And for any of you who are out. And you were having a hard time hiring onboarding, and really cutting down on your churn.
This part is huge. What is your RQ, which is your readiness quotient for helping your team members grow and keep raising the bar with you. Let’s unpack this a little bit more because people, and there’s a lot to be said about that, and you might think you only have control over two out of these three variables, but there’s a significant caveat.
If you don’t have the right people on your bus, all the systems and leadership in the world, aren’t going to change your outcome. So how do you know if your people are the right people? Now here’s an obvious one. If. Your culture is toxic. You have a lot of drama, backbiting, your team. Isn’t delivering, people are being resistant and sometimes outright contentious.
That’s no fun for everybody. And you and your team included, and it certainly doesn’t help you deliver stellar results. So this one is easy because everybody is in so much pain that you have to change it if you want to be successful. And if you don’t want to lose your good people on your.
If you have any left, that is so that’s, that one is pretty obvious, but then we get to the second one where things are pretty pleasant, but actually it’s lazy. So this is a sneaky one because everything seems fine on the outside. There’s no drama, generally. Everybody’s nice with each other, but for lack of better term, they are lazy.
And what that means is they’re set in their ways. They are too comfortable. They haven’t challenged themselves in a long time. And if you’re honest with yourself, their performance is lackluster and often has been declining steadily for some time. So this is sneaky because it often feels comfortable because you all have become like a big dysfunctional family and it’s not all bad, but certainly it’s not enabling you to when you are part of the problem, because.
You too have probably become too comfortable and maybe set in your ways. And if you’re being truthful here, this hasn’t really worked for some time now. So being too comfortable, here’s the issue when people are putting in the minimum effort required. It looks like they’re doing their job, but it certainly won’t put you or the rest of your team to to growth and this really the mindset that everybody needs to bring to the table.
So unless your team has a growth mindset and every person on your team has a plan for what that means for their specific role. When you’re getting ready to grow. At some point, the business will outgrow. And slow growth is often a painful indicator of that situation. So how do you figure this out as always, it starts with you, and this is really where the other two factors come into play that your systems and your leadership.
So you may have the right people, or you may not, we don’t even know that yet. And we won’t really know until we give them. We’ll give them. And you clarity because clarity is here is the key word, because without clear goals and expectations, they don’t have any clear targets. And if they don’t have any clear targets, you and they have really no idea what to measure performance thigh, you’re right.
People. Craving this clarity, they’ve been waiting for it since the day they joined your team and they will be super excited when you start sharing their brain with them because they will get the context that they need to understand the big picture and how they contribute to the overall company outcome.
And of course, that’s only the beginning, but this is really the foundation for everything. So we can’t make wine out of. And you ought to you yourself, your business, the rest of the team to make sure, first of all, that your team has the right DNA. And then you said that the right culture so that everybody has the right mindset, the right values standards, and the behaviors that will support the growth strategies that you’re going to bring to the table.
So you see, when we come back to. The main outcomes that you want for this business, which was revenue, freedom, and impact having the right people on your bus. Is non-negotiable sometimes it’s hard to make the decision around this, but without the right people, this is all a nonstarter. You will never get to the next level of revenue goals.
You will never have the freedom that you want, and you certainly won’t have the, you won’t be able to create the impact that you craving because you don’t have the support you need to make all this happen. So let’s look at systems a little bit. Yeah. Upfront, there are operational there’s. This is an important distinction there, operational systems, which is what’s working in your business or your leadership systems, which is working on the business.
And as your business evolves, both of these have to evolve with. So for operational systems, the most important ones are your KPIs, your key performance indicators and your SOP, your standard operating procedures. So hopefully you are super clear on your KPIs because that means what numbers define your performance.
And everybody, every business has a unique answer. But if you’re not clear about that, talk to your CFO, your CPA, your bookkeeper, whoever you have, who can help you manage your financial performance, talk to them and get really clear on this. You have to know your numbers. If you want to grow your business otherwise, what will you feel?
So your SLPs are your shared agreements and principles for how you do stuff in your company. We need a clear structure and we need to make sure that everybody uses the same structures and documents. Anything that hasn’t been documented before. Of course, this requires discipline and it’s a big step towards being a cohesive force as a team.
We all need to do things the same way. For anything, that’s a shared outcome. So we have to get really clear about what that is and we have to share it. And this may sound restrictive, but making things repeatable is part of what makes them scalable. We need to agree on what processes we use to get to our outcomes.
Sometimes it’s hard to get people to follow. And it’s yours and your leader’s job to let your team know why following protocol is so important. And look, you’ll have to say it over and over again because. If you don’t, people will just go with the path of least resistance, which is generally their own, which creates a lot of disparity over time.
So you have to tell them, you have to show them, you have to tell them again, and then probably do that another 25 times before it sinks in. But the more people get the why, like the context behind everything, the more willing they tend to be to follow along. Now the other systems, the leadership systems are how you get people to show up at their highest level, how they become high performers, how they own their outcomes, how they take on responsibility and show up at the highest level for you now to get all this stuff, to tie it together.
We want to look at this from this perspective, we want the four cornerstones to create a Bulletproof business. So the first part of it. Is crystal clear, detailed three-year strategic plan that serve as serves as your. And it gives your team not only the big picture for the company, but also a clear understanding of what that means to them, like how they fit into with what, why they’re there and how they contribute to the overall company direction.
And it what’s in it for them. So it’s the benefit of. Of doing this. The second thing is having a tight, specific, measurable operational plan that really helps everybody understand how they get from that highly conceptual 30,000 foot view of your vision down to the nitty gritty of that mean what that means for this year, what that means for this quarter, this week of this month, this week, this like today, so that the team works together as a cohesive force and.
Do it, they’re doing the right things at the right time so that they can deliver the best results. And there are many ways of creating an operational plan, but the big game changer happens when this operational plan is in full alignment with your vision when it’s based on a very clear company plan.
And when it becomes a collaborative project throughout all the layers of your team, because you need everybody to know what everybody else is. And there’s a couple of there’s the old way. And the new way of doing this the old way is delegating and people telling people what to do. And the newer way is.
Bringing in their full talent, their ideas and their inspiration to the table, because now this staff, when it’s their idea, they’re a whole lot more engaged and they’re going to do be a whole lot more likely to take ownership over the execution and delivery, which means accountability. And that’s what you really want.
So when you think about what builds that, that culture of accountability for you that you need so badly. Which one do you think works better? So this is the two principal guidelines here. And then the third one is your most important one for communication, but this is your meetings. Everybody loves to hate meetings.
But let’s be honest. It’s not really that meeting stuff is that we suck at running them. So your meetings really are the opportunity for you to focus and refocus your team. This should not be a boring redundant status update, but it should create focus, alignment, positive conflict collaboration. And really that cross departmental visibility and partnership.
So they need to be prepared. These meetings need to be prepared and really clearly structured and provide really stellar outcomes to be worth the tremendous investment and time of resources that they require. And many companies royally fail at doing this. And then the fourth thing is you are leadership practices, and this is really where the pedal hits the metal.
This is not only where you help your leaders hit their top performance, but you modeling it for them, helps them understand how they need to support their own teams. So that. This practice really cascades down through all the different layers of the company. Oftentimes the breakdown in overall team and company performance happens because between your mid-level managers and the rest of the team.
So this piece is really. Many people don’t like conflict and avoid conflict at all costs. So by the time they finally give their direct feedback, it’s often it’s too late and many issues that could have been avoided have taken their toll. So your ability to handle challenging conversation is in direct correlation to the size and quality of business that you can.
This is also your opportunity to build strong and loyal relationships with your team so that they’re emotionally connected and invested in the larger outcome. If you do this right, these practices will make the difference between having constant churn and your good team members being poached by other businesses and having a loyal, committed team who goes to the extra mile.
Whereas your. And who shows up for you if you do this wrong, or if you don’t do this at all, this can be the reason for why you will never be able to rely on your team and create the business of your dreams. Really. So we talked about revenue and freedom. What about that impact piece? Everything we’ve already talked about.
This is what supports impact. When you serve more patients, you exponentially scale your impact. When you add more people to the team you add more impact. But it’s not just about more. It’s also about the level of quality and the care that you deliver to whoever your customer is your patient, your team, your partner, your investor, like anybody who is touched by your business.
So you see part, if part of your purpose on this planet is serving your mission and creating positive impact. You owe it to yourself, you or to your family, your team, your community, and it really everybody else connected to. That you get the mentoring that you need just like Lorne was talking about so that you can be the very best leader for all these people who are, depending on you.
Everything that, got you here. And to get to that next level of business, it’s really time to kick it up a notch. There is no time like the present and we know not being decisive costs our clients a lot of time, money and impact. So what’s the fastest way and most effective way to get to your new level of.
It is invest in mentoring. So what we’ve done is my team. And I have set aside some time for you in the next few days to speak with you personally. There’s no cost for this on the call. What we’ll do is we’ll go over, what’s working, what’s not working and what may be standing in your way to really optimize your team and to get into growth mode.
So of course the slots are limited. So I would go to Bulletproof startups.com/apply right now and grab. And I will speak to you very soon. Very excited. Maybe it’s a month. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for that presentation. And just a quick question for you in your experience, what’s been the biggest issues that you have found that’s keeping practitioners from growing and how have you seen that?
They get in their own way the most Lorne. Okay, this is a, this is an easy one to answer because when I think about most of our clients, whether they’re practitioners or whether they’re in another business, but most pump people become entrepreneurs because they love what they do. And they’re really good at it.
And at some point they decide, Hey, I have to take this to another level. I want to have more impact. I want to impact more people, but that means they have to hire it. And that also means they have to start allowing that team to start actually taking things off their plate. And then, so they’re switching their role, right?
Because they come in as the practitioners, as the technicians, the people doing the work and the big shift happens when that’s not the important part anymore. It’s that mindset shift of now I’m instead of I’m contributing through. Or actually, if you’re contributing myself to, I am contributing through another group of people.
So that is letting go of control. That is really being able to share your head with people is influencing people in the positive way. It’s helping them create those major outcomes. So you go from being the doer to being the leader. And that’s a tough shift because this is your baby. You’ve been working on this for a long time for most of our clients, their results and the client experience is extremely important to them.
So they want to make sure it goes right. So that’s why, everything you talked about and I talked about is all about how did you create that team that really, that you can trust that has your back that’s forward-thinking that strategic that you don’t need to micromanage every. Because only when you feel like that, can you actually get out of the way, stop being the bottleneck and let your team do the stuff.
And look, as you get bigger, you want to make sure that you only hire people who are better than you, at least in their respective areas so that they can actually help you up level the company. Instead of having you be you who’s limiting the talent and ability. Thank you for that. Thank you very much for that.
Yeah. And Lorne, I’m curious since I was going to ask you, since, you have firsthand experience in what it’s like to go through Bulletproof startups and working with me, what’s been your favorite results so far I don’t know if you want to tell people where you came from and where you’re going with.
Yeah, I can totally address that in that, we get stuck. And so the biggest bottleneck is me. So I’m the bottleneck and that’s how I think successful people stay and become more successful is they don’t blame. They take responsibility. And so I was feeling tired, burnt out. And what I like.
Coaching and the program is now I have clarity, I’ve tapped into my vision and I’m not feeling stuck, so I’m excited to get, so I have the energy and what I find with coaching in your program and in general having mentors and coaches is the accountability responsibility, but if I could put it just as a, an easy way to understand it is we’re all living in these glass jars with labels on the outside facing.
So I’m stuck, but I don’t know why I’m stuck. If I did, I wouldn’t be stuck anymore. And having somebody who can look at my chart and read my label and give me direction. And so we started off our conversation that nobody reaches the top of the map. All by themselves, and everybody who’s successful.
There’s a team. And the idea here, and what I’m liking is that I’m investing in myself so I can be more supportive to my team. So we, as a collective, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So I’m looking for the collective for us to make an impact in the world. So we’re all making an impact and we’re using the entity, my clinic, as a view of.
To serve our purpose, our mission. And so it, it fulfills us and it financially it fulfills us and we come together for that. And it starts with me, the bottleneck, the leadership. And so I need more leadership skills. Hey Simone, thank you again so much for being on our show. We’re at our time.
So I want to thank you guys for joining to the point, and I want to remind you that next. Not next up. Yes. Next up on Friday, we have Shellie Goldstein. So make sure you tune into that.
Disclaimer: Unfortunately we have been unable to find a transcription service that is capable of transcribing a Live Stream of such specific language. There will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.
Hi, I’m Sharon Weizenbaum from the White Pine institute and the White Pine Circle. And I appreciate the American acupuncture council for having me here today. The topic of the lecture today is how to use Ma Huang safely. So I hope this is interesting to you all. So go to our first slide.
Okay. So we’re going to be looking at using Ma Huang safely in relation to some formulas and what Ma Huang does in these formulas and how it’s used differently. So we can get an idea of which formulas are really strong and bring out certain characteristics of my Hong and Richard are actually quite gentle, even though they have.
Ma Huang in them. So we’re going to be looking at first, this idea of cold damage, Ty, on Shanghai gone. So that’s on the surface of the body, this damage from cold, which is the quintessential pattern for which we give Ma Huang. And I’m going to be, I’m telling you more about how I see the use of mobile.
It’s a little bit different than, or my hometown a little bit different than the standard way of thinking about mom one time. So here are the symptoms that go along with the Mohan tongue pattern. Called damage, headache, fever, body, and back pain, joint pain, aversion to cold, lack of sweating, panting fullness of the chest.
And the pulse is tight and floating. So these are the symptoms that are listed in the Shanghai load for this pattern. And I’d like to just go over some of these with the idea. That the model long tongue pattern is a pattern in which the surface of the body is frozen shut. So just imagine that the surface of your body is frozen and therefore it’s.
So you can imagine if the surface of your body is frozen and shut, that you would be very cold. And with the Hong Kong pattern, this aversion to cold is really an extreme version of version. Like you cannot get warm no matter how many covers you put on. So you’re really cold, but at the same time, there’s this lack of sweating because the surface of the body is frozen clothes.
Now this panting that’s here is related to the fact that the surface of the body is completely closed down. The pores are not opening at all because they’re frozen shut. And it’s actually true that. For example, you got a bad burn over more than 60% of your body. You die of suffocation. So we actually breathe through the surface of our body quite a lot.
And so when the surface of your body is frozen closed, it’s difficult to breathe. So there’s. Panting. And the same is true of the fullness of the chest. It’s a deer lungs are not able to open and circulate. Now we’ll go back to the beginning, this a headache and body and back pain. This is a tie young pattern in the Tyrone channels.
Go up the back and onto the. And those are the channels that are frozen closed. So you feel really a lot of pain with a mom. One time pattern, you just feel so achy. It’s not a minor symptom, the way it would be with like a grade, your tongue pattern here, you just feel so achy. And the reason you have a fever is because all the time, the young and our body is going up and down.
So we’re always sweating a little bit, but we’re letting off body heat at the same time. And when we when the surface is frozen shut, that young comes to the surface of the body and accumulates. So you can get fever, it’s pathological heat. So it can’t keep us warm. In fact, we’re very cold so we can understand these signs and symptoms and that.
Holes is floating because the pathology and the life force is stuck up at the surface of the body. And it’s tight because it’s frozen, closed, floating can be in a certain position. Me that it’s, mostly in the term position, it can also mean in another position it’s towards the surface.
So usually with this pattern, that’s one position. Floating and tight. So if you have that image of the surface of the body being frozen closed, so imagine this is the frozen circle around your body. And so you feel all these symptoms, then you bring in my hometown. And so with montage, what we’re doing is bringing pungent warrants from inside the body.
We drink the herbs. Now we are punching warmth inside our body. And it goes up and out, punching in their bodies go, goes up and out. So we bring this pungent warmth into our body and it goes up and out and it melts the surface of the body. And therefore we swap. No. So then the sweat comes out.
And I sometimes ask my patients, do you feel, do you have a feeling like if only I could sweat, I would feel better. And usually a Moncton pattern is actually really good news because it’s so easy to treat. The person is so painfully uncomfortable and yet the herbs. So fast. And if the person, usually within 10, 20 minutes, they have a nice sweat and they feel such a sense of relief.
So anyway, so we have an idea about this cold damage that matches Mohan time. So now let’s look at as Mojang itself. And when we look at my home, we want to look at what it does in the body, but we also want to look. What’s the proportion of Mazatlan in the formula. Some formulas are long and have just a small amount of mamma.
Other formulas are short and have a big proportion of mama. What is the model and combined with that makes a really big difference in terms of the action of the Maha and what are the proportions of Maha to the other types of. And this will tell you the way and the extent to which you’re using mom’s characteristics.
Here’s my rooster out the window. Okay. So Maha Mo long is pungently and warmly stimulating upward on the surface of the body, up and out in a very warm way. Hung is also bitter and it’s bitterly descending an opening from the surface lung to the bladder. So we also have more long patterns where the surface gets frozen and it’s like putting your finger at the top of the straw and the water accumulates.
It can’t go down through the bladder. My hung is also hollow. And so it has this quality of opening through it too. So by opening the poor. You. You can then P I remember just a little story, anecdotal story that might help remember this. Like I said, I had a patient who had a urinary incontinence as a general rule, and she got a cold and it was a Mohan tongue pattern.
And her incontinence completely went away while she was sick. And she noticed that God, I’m coughing and sneezing, and I’m not. And it’s because those pores are closed and it holds that water in. Okay. So when we’re using Mont long, all the symptoms come from the pattern and they can vary a lot. So Mojang is very stimulating to the heart.
So it treats the opposite of that, where you feel fatigue and dog. With the Maha tongue pattern, you want to go to bed and just curl up and sleep. You’re so fatigued and doll. My Hong is warming to the surface, so it’s really good for cold and it’s opening to the surface. So it treats the panting and the lack of sweat it’s hollow and bitter.
So it opens the surface to the bladder to allow water, to descend. It also leads other. To the surface of the body. Okay. So here’s my hometown. So we look at this proportion of mob in a formula and we have three Leon or nine grams. And then we have six Leon of wager, six grams of Granger and 10 grams of shingles.
And then just a little bit of gun set with just three grams. So there’s the formula. So we see there’s a large proportion of third of the formula is . The other thing about mom on tongue is that it’s combined with great. So when you see mama combined with wager, this is going to be opening the surface and creating probably creating a sweat.
If it’s just a little bit of both, maybe not so much, but wager is like a potentiating or . So when you have more hung in a formula, as we’ll see, without wager, it’s not nearly so dispersed. To the surface of the body. So think of wager as potentiating model making it stronger. So the Afrikaan seed and the shadow Bansal Jamie says it’s sweet and warm, beneficially cold.
And with slight toxin, to me, the. The way that the shaman works in the montage is that while Mafong is making the the lungs and the surface of the body go up and out this we, and we’re losing liquid, right? It promotes this sweat. The sweetness brings in oyster for the lungs, and it also helps the lungs go down.
So we’re opening up the poor so that there’s breathing and then also descending the lungs. So rules, cough with reversal of the G, which is what’s happening. Then the chia is rising and getting stuck up about. So those are the primary things we want to notice there. And then 10 show you and says the seeds are more bitter than sweet.
So this gentleman, Sergeant hesitance was sweet, but also bitter, which is really why it is known to have this. Moving down. She said for the rising up of the cheek. So Shinran is in there really to help the lungs to send once they’re open. So if we’re looking at the lungs here at the top of the body, we have the rising on the left and the descending on the right.
She ran works here on the right, helping the lungs descend. And if you’ve watched my previous Videos you’ll know about this circle. So mama tongue is the quintessential model and formula it’s potentiated by Granger and it has little else to really control it. So it has this frozen exterior mama goes up and out and it’s also bitter.
So it helps descend with the Xing run. And then it dissolves the frozen. Okay. So now we’re going to look at another formula. And so maybe now you’ll notice in this formula though, there’s a lot of long proportionally given the amount of sure go. It’s actually quite a bit less than in my hometown. In addition, not only is it not potentiated by wager.
It’s also got the shirt go to balance it out. So if you think about what Shergill does, if mom’s long excites the heart and stimulates, sure go columns agitation. If mom goes up and out in order to help produce a sweat. Sure. Go. Opens up the young Ming to relieve and stops waiting. We know in, by Hutong, big sweat is one of the symptoms of
So we can see that shirk out really counteract some of the negative effects of ma Xing shotgun tongue. It’s also sometimes called mushing gunshot tongue, or
And so this is an amazing formula. I just love this formula. And so I want you to see how this formula is safe. You know what, with mom one time, not only are we worried. Someone is getting insomnia and having palpitations because it’s so exciting, but also we’re worried about their pores opening too much.
And them losing a lot of young through their pores and a lot of yen through the sweat, so there are a lot of cautions and contraindications for Mohan. However mushing. Sure. Gone Tonya is quite different. And in my experience, it doesn’t induce a sweat at all. And this formula is one reason.
I really love it. When you have some over and over again, great results with it and you feel just when to give it and you feel like you have a super power. And so I feel that way with mushing shirt on. So in this formula it’s really for when the surface was frozen and it really has just dropped into your lungs, not in a way that you’re getting better.
Like sometimes when you have a cold, as you’re getting better, you get a cough, but you feel actually not as bad as you did in the beginning. This is that feeling of. Oh, no, my condition’s gone south. I’m getting worse. It’s dropped into my chest. Really. This is going to turn into bronchitis or pneumonia.
Just draw that feeling of dropping in. And you’ll have patients where, when they get a cold, it always does that. The beginning, it’s just a cold and then they’re, oh, no, dropped into my chest. I’m going to be in this for awhile. I’m getting worse. And. And this formula mushing turn on time.
It’s, just some opening the exterior, but really opening the downward movement of the lungs and preventing them from getting hot. For me, the shirt gal is not necessarily such a cooling or it does have a cooling effect, but that’s because of. Is pungent and it opens up the downward movement of the young men.
So if you were in a room and all the windows were closed in getting hotter and hotter, and then you’re just shitting all over the place because it’s getting hotter and hotter, it’s like opening the windows and it sure gal has the quality of going down, not from being bitter, but from the slivers actually being vertical.
Slivers of the stone. It’s also sweet. So the it helps to moisten the lungs back up when they’d gotten hot. So it’s just a beautiful formula when you take it. And it’s the right formula. Again, the result is almost instant, like whenever you have an acute issue and you get the formula, it, the results are usually really fast compared to working with a chronic issue.
But so you can see that the fear, like I’ve taken mushing shirt on Tom before and with long time. Oh my God. The littlest bit. And I would get palpitations because I’m so not a mop on Tom type of person. I don’t get mop on them. Tongue types of issues, but with mushing shirt on Tom, never a problem. I think a lot of people are really afraid to use mom long at all.
Oh, I can’t give somebody a formula, but what I’d like you to see is like all mom formulas are not the same. So here we have mashing shirt on top. The right solution is floating and slippery because of that heat and the young Ming and the sweating means that the lungs are blocked. And so here we have the and there’s this block in the young, main preventing the lungs from going down and it’s getting hot and you give the white tiger, which is sure.
Go and it clears that okay, the next formula I want to look at and I put the clauses here for you, but I’m not going to read them. And if you can look at this and see, okay, how strong is this in terms of opening up the surface of the body? Inducing a sweat and you can probably see, wow, this is really strong.
So it has Mojang at six Leon or 18 grounds and wager to potential. So dodging long-term is a formula. That’s going to strongly open up the exterior of the body. It’s going to create a sweat. You have to be careful with this formula. Now it also has sure go, but it’s got relatively less usher gal and a lot more of mom long.
So this is a formula to be careful with. Now we also have in this formula, the the. Three Musketeers. John Datta. And we have gone so in my hometown, but here, we also have shown John and dad’s house. And that’s super important for this formula because not only are you inducing a sweat and getting rid of young that way, you’re also giving sure go, that’s very cooling and you have to replace.
Those that fluid and warmth it from the stomach. So Sean, John, with that though, it starts this cooking process in the stomach of bringing in more fluids, especially with gun sale. So we can see in this formula, I would love for people to be able to now look at formulas and see how strong is this formula going to be.
No. So this is a really strong open. The exterior melt, the exterior formula. And it’s like mom, Hong Kong, except not only is the surface still blocked, but there’s starting to be a lot of heat developing now in the mushing shirt on Tom, those surfaces just barely blocked. And so it’s much more that the heat is developing.
So here we have a comparison of the dodging lone tongue versus the mushing shirt on Tom.
So mashing. Sure. Gone has no Granger or Sean, John. So it’s not for water. This young John is in there for water and it’s not so diaphoretic. And the Xing ran is high in mushing shirt, Anton drains. It’s more for the lungs. So it’s much more of a young men formula mashing shirt on tongue and less for Taya compared to dodging.
So here in dodging London, lots of Granger with lots of Mohan, also shown Jong is going to be pungent and warm. So diaphoretic, the Chung drawn means there’s water. So this, there can be water swelling, especially like in the joints with touching long tongue, much more. Taitung less young men. So dodging low tongue.
We have. It’s very cool. With some heat starting to develop, and we give the blue green dragon, which is Mont long and Granger, and we give the white tiger and we melt the cold and also clear that he, while replenishing the fluids from the middle, the fluids and the warm from the middle. The pulse is same as shouting, long time.
And it’s, but it’s slippery in the right Guan because of the heat could go all the way up to the right.
So dodging lumatone indications. It disperses that coal that’s on the surface of the body and also water on the exterior, like swelling in the joints. There’s no sweating with this pattern or mushing shirt on. You might have sweating. You might not have sweating, but it’s not a big part of the pattern.
You will have pain with the dodging one-time pattern. You will have heat. And also vexation, you’ll feel agitated.
So we look at the doses of Baden comparing dodging long tongue with Mohan time.
My hometown is pure Ty young dodging, long tongue is mostly Italian and going into younger. So at our final formula, hopefully well-trained by now you look and say, wow, there’s a lot of my one. There’s also a lot of sure gal. And so then we also see there’s quite a bit of Shung John.
So this formula has no Quaker. Really inducing a sweat. It’s more just opening the pores and warming the surface of the body and cooling heat in the Shung. John tells us that it’s for water and this is called wind water. And with this formula, you get swelling and pain in the body and sometimes swollen joints that get very hot as well.
Same in the . But here, the surface is not so cold. There’s a formula family of the maid servant w way formulas where you can add a bite, you, if there’s more dampness and a thicker coating on the tongue, you can add on Shaw, if there’s vomiting and then there’s a formula. That’s a very small doses called wager R UAB E.
Two times grade your tongue with one part two parts, grades, your tongue, and one part UAV. But the main point I wanted to make here for this lecture about using Mojang safely is that this is the main servants of your way are known for their consideration and gentleness. And we can know that Mojang with sure gal without wager is very gentle.
So you don’t have to be worried here about agitating, somebody or creating too much of a sweat when you have this sure. Gout without the wager, just like in marching shirt on. So this is basically saying what I just said. Okay. So would the UAB tongue, the surfaces lightly closed? And it’s made there be water swelling, and actually it’s the combination of the Gonzo.
And the mama also treats the water swelling, and then it also starts to get hot because it’s not moving once that blocked surface starts to get hot. And we say, oh, it’s moving into young name. And so you get not only water swelling, but it starts to. Red and the water swelling is painful and we’re also, you can see where replenishing the fluids from the fluids and the young from the inside.
So we add the blue, green dragon mama shown tongue and the white tiger. And. It opens things up and clears the heat. So the water swelling goes away and the heat is clear to the person is comfortable. Again, an amazing formula when it’s given at the right moment. Okay. So thank you. Just to end with a few little farm pictures.
We had three pregnant goats and every one of them had triplets. This is a couple of. And so now we have nine baby goats. So that’s Elm and Jasmine with their babies. And that’s my daughter, the farmer with our puppy that was born New Year’s Eve here. Okay. Thank you very much, everybody.
Thank you for taking the time to stop by and say hello and spend a few minutes with me to learn about how to grow your practice. So today we’re going to talk about an acupuncturist formula to growing your practice online. And the main thing that we’re going to be talking about is how to get found.
Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.
Hi folks, Jeffrey Grossman here from Acupuncture, MediaWorks, Accu Downloads, and Accu Perfect Websites. Thank you yet again for the American Acupuncture Council for inviting me here to share with you more information and insights on building your practice, bringing in new patients and all things relating to marketing and growing and building more sustainability.
For your acupuncture practice. Thank you for taking the time to stop by and say hello and spend a few minutes with me to learn about how to grow your practice. So today we’re going to talk about an acupuncturist formula to growing your practice online. And the main thing that we’re going to be talking about is how to get found.
How to be seen and how to promote your website. So for those of you that don’t know me again, my name is Jeffrey Grossman. I’ve been helping acupunctures market their practice for two decades now. And I’ve been helping thousands of practitioners over the years to tap into marketing and business skills.
I started multiple companies. I started multiple practices and I’m I’ve taught at a bunch of acupuncture schools. So I’ve got some information that I’ve learned over the years that I’m here to share with you today. First thing that’s really important when I teach my practice management class to the students is to really learn to identify who your ideal patient is.
And this is an important piece that is often overlooked in marketing, but most companies, especially larger companies really take a lot of time by identify who their ideal patient. Or customer is, and it’s important as an acupuncturist to really get clear with this. And I know your guys might be thinking, I should know why, I’m treating everybody and, I’m I’m a general practitioner and everybody is my ideal patient while that is true.
It’s also not so true because when you have a communication strategy, That is focused on a particular type of person. Then you can focus your messaging. You can focus your marketing, you can focus your, the way your website is built and all of your marketing collateral, like your brochures on what it is that you’re trying to communicate to that specific person.
So let’s say for instance, you are. You treat a lot of fertility or a lot of migraine, or even do some sports acupuncture. Now your ideal patient is going to be different across each of those different topics. You’re going to be communicating differently to somebody who is looking to start a family or become more fertile versus somebody who is looking to when their next.
So identifying your ideal patient is an important part of how you develop your communication and marketing strategies. So that allows you to identify what blog posts you put out there, or what videos you create or what kind of lead magnets that you’ll be putting out there to attract your ideal client.
And. The important things to know are who are they? What values do they have in common? What groups do they move in? Where, what clubs are they part of? What books do they read? What do they do in their spare time? Where do they go? Where do they hang out? And what, this all gives you insights into where you can reach that ideal patient of yours.
And one of the places to start. Identifying potentially what your specialty might be. And when you, once you do that, it’s identifying who those. Ideal patients that you’re currently working wish with in that specialty, like your AA patients is what I like to call them. And your eight patients are the patients that you love.
And when you see them on your schedule, your energy raises and you feel really good and really excited to, to see them and you have a good rapport and a good resonance with them. And that’s an important piece of that relationship as opposed to. See patients which when you see them on your schedule, your energy goes down a little bit and you feel a little challenged that you’re like, oh gosh, okay.
I can muster up the energy to go through this. So once you identify who your a patient is, and if you have a particular specialty, that is where you start wrapping your head around. Identifying those concepts for that and identifying your ideal patient flows into this next part of creating your core message.
Now, a couple of weeks ago, I held a an extensive weekend workshop on creating your core message, because I feel like this is a. Incredibly important piece for acupuncturists to properly communicate to their audience, to the community, to their prospects, to their patients. And also once you identify your core message, that becomes part of all of your website, all of your literature, all of your marketing tools and strategy.
When there’s three steps to identifying and getting clear on what your core message is. Okay. And your core message. The first thing is what problems do your patients experience? Okay. So what are they coming to see you for? And also what problems do they have that. Keeping them awake at night, maybe fit, physically and litter too, literally, but also emotionally.
Okay. What are what problems do your patients experience am? What can you. Offer them that is unique to you and your practice. And then the third part of this is what will their life look like afterwards? Okay. So I know this might sound a little a little simplistic, but once you identify who, what, what your core message is, it becomes part of all of your communication strategies.
So if I were to ask you right now, what problems do you solve and how do you solve them and what do your patients’ lives look like afterwards? What are they able to do that they weren’t able to do? What would you tell. What would you say? And, I’d love to know that if you’re watching this video, if you do have a core message as to what problems you help with and how your unique practice helps them overcome them and what their life looks like afterwards, please put it in the chat box.
I’d love to see that I’ll respond to some of those answers and give you some thoughts about that. So here’s a couple ideas that you might want to work. So the main problem is that too many people struggle with pain and injuries. And we provide effective treatment that always allows you to perform well in life sports and work with elbow pills, surgery, and high costs.
So the first part of that is identifying the problem, which is too many people struggle with. And injuries, right? What’s unique about your practice is that you offer effective treatment that allows people to perform well in life sports and work, and their life looks different afterwards because they can do it without pills, surgery, and high costs.
Now, this is a generic core message that any acupuncturist can use, but it’s succinct it’s to the point it is. Similar to what your elevator pitch should be and sound like. Here’s another example we offer unique and individualized evaluations and treat injuries. That’s the problem you treat injuries by with TuiNa cupping and acupuncture so that your practice members CA so that our practice members can go out when their next race and feel great.
Okay. So the problem is that people come in there with injuries and what is unique? Quote unquote, about this particular practice about this particular core message is that they offer unique and individualized evaluations using Trina cupping and acupuncture. The way that their life is going to look up afterwards is that they’re going to go out.
They’re going to feel better. They’re going to win their next race. And that is one other example of a core message. And here’s one more. So this is a core message that we help that, that we’ve developed here for acupuncture. Media works most acupuncturists don’t like marketing and have no idea how to bring in new patients.
That’s a huge problem. Don’t like marketing don’t know how to bring in new patients problem. So what we do, what is unique about our company is that we offer a wide range of business marketing and website solutions. Okay. That’s what we do. That’s what we offer. And the and the way your lives will look afterwards, meaning acupuncturist that you can connect with more.
Grow your practice and make the world better. Okay. That’s what your life will look like afterwards. So just to read it one way through most acupuncturists, don’t like marketing and have no idea how to bring in new patients. So we offer a wide range of business marketing and website solutions so they can connect with more customers, grow their practice and make the world better.
Okay. So identifying what your core message is really overcoming. What problems. As your patient experience, what are they coming to see you for? And what can you offer them that is unique to your practice? Even though there might be, you might just be an acupuncturist that does acupuncture between on cupping still.
How can you make that? See. Unique and different from the other practitioner down the street. And then what will their lives look like after they come see you? Okay. So there’s a great book out there by Donald Miller called story brand. And and it talks about identifying your core message. There’s also a really good video on YouTube.
If you were to Google, Donald Miller StoryBrand there’s like a 30 minute video on there that talks about poor messages. And I would encourage you to do that once we’re done watching today. Okay. So the next part about growing your practice is to develop a functional website. Okay. These days, Your website is the place where people go to see you, right?
That’s what, any type of marketing that you do, any type of Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, video, blog, messages, communications, anytime someone gets a referral or hears about you. The first place they go to is your website. Your website is the. Of all of your marketing strategies and all of your marketing communications, because that’s where everybody goes once they hit you.
So it’s important to incorporate a few of these things that I’ll be talking about and including your core message into what what your into your website. So let me just show you these three websites here. So you’re looking at these websites here. You can notice that they are what they’re doing, right?
This website on the bottom, you can tell immediately when you hit this website, that this practitioner is helping for fertility, this website with the runners in their running shoes, you can tell. Maybe that’s about sports. Maybe that’s about getting better. Maybe that’s about, helping with sports injuries and this other website here you will, maybe that’s about helping improve your golf game, improving any type of pain or structural imbalances like that.
When we get off here, take a look at your own website and tell me when you hit your website, you within three to five seconds, can you identify, can somebody identify what it is that you do and how you help? If not, you need to absolutely get this fixed because when people hit your website, you want them to have a really clear understanding of how you can help almost immediately.
You don’t want a website like this because you hit these websites and you have no idea what’s going on. There. They look good, but there’s nothing particular about these websites that shows you that you can help with fertility or back pain or allergies or migraines or whatever that is.
Okay. So you need to have clarity. In your messaging on your website. And again, going back to creating your core message, going back to identifying your ideal patient will help you create who, the person that you’re going to be attracting because on this, over here, this website here, You can see your core message is going to be about sports and medicine and helping people who are athletes, same, different communications and who you’re going to hit over here with people who you’re trying to attract for fertility.
Okay. So it’s really important to get clear on that. And one thing too. And I’ve talked about this before. I maybe here, I’m not sure, but it’s important to make sure that you don’t use images like this. Even though we love these images as acupuncturists and, look at all that shot that’s happening with the cups.
Cool, great. Patients number one, objection is needles. And when they hit this, they see needles, they see fire, they see these really dark gross marks going on in the body. And they’re like, oh, I am not interested in that. These pictures and pictures on your website. Need to show what an outcome is, what their life can look like after they experienced your care.
Going back to these, you’ve got a baby in your arms. You’re running a race, you’re playing golf. Okay. You don’t want to have website, pictures like this. You want to have pictures of that. Happier. So that the depict, more people who are happier, more grounded so that they, when they hit their weird website, they’re not turned off or frightened about what it is that you’re offering them.
Another thing that whenever I do any website evaluations, I noticed. Is missing on most websites are calls to action. In fact, most practitioners don’t even incorporate calls to action in a lot of their marketing collateral, which is a big mistake. So on your website, you need to have something that is going to motivate people to take action.
So if they don’t schedule with you right away, if they don’t call you right away, what can you offer them? That will motivate them to click a button and schedule an evaluation with you or choose to take an, a special offer for you. Okay. So these are important pieces of helping to grow your practice online.
Other things that you should be using that are offline, that push people to online would be types of calls to action. Like we have here of offering stress reduction treatments, or evaluations and or certificates. And these are important parts of your marketing plan and your marketing strategy.
All right. The next thing to do is to make sure that you’re always staying on top of mind awareness and that you’re nurturing all of your relationships all the time with your patients. And this is important. Again, all of this stuff. Flows back to the functionality of your website. Okay. All of your marketing now goes back to this and Toma means top of mind awareness.
One of the things that I found when I was in practice was that my inactive patient file was much larger than my active patient file. And that might be the same for many of you. So by staying in Toma, you can maintain patients in care more than on your shelf in your in your inactive patients file.
So how do you do that? You can make personal calls. You can send emails, you can send personal messages, you can send out general communications online communications. You can offer some teaching opportunities. You can engage socially with clinic events and obviously to have compelling calls to action on your website to get people to take action.
Another thing that’s important is to sign up, to receive news. If people hit your website and they don’t take you up on an offer, you want to capture their email address and their name by offering them some type of booklet where they would then download, they would download the ebook lit and then they would be sent some emails on the backend that would communicate to them about what you do and give you free content and, talk about the videos about acupressure and things like that.
So you’re offering this value on the front end and of course, each of those has a call to action to get people to schedule with. Okay. So a couple of things we’re thinking about when you’re drafting emails is that you have your personal message to communicate through and to them that every email has an offer of something that you’re offering up.
Call to action. And that there’s an expiration date for your call to action. And if there, and then also that if somebody is interested, they have a way to request an appointment immediately. These are five aspects of creating, any on the anatomy of any email that goes out to your patients.
Shouldn’t have these things. Okay. Types of communications that you could be doing could be emails, newsletters, appointment confirmations. Absolutely. Discounts, promotions come in for a checkup or a tune-up or here’s a new blog that you put out and birthday emails came. So staying in communication with your patients, it’s really important.
And those are different ways of staying in Toma. Okay. Gathering your stories. That’s one other aspect. And P these are patients’ stories. This is a workshop that I did a while ago. Stories do all the hard marketing for you, and they make your prospects remember and care. And they because our brains are already wired.
Fo to remember stories because it goes back to our ancient DNA. That stories of keep, we remember stories more than we, that then if that, then we remember something that’s written. So a story when we, when people hear a story, they unconsciously. Put themselves in the place of that person. And they can imagine those benefits that were received and and and that they can incorporate that into their own lives.
That’s pretty much it for today. W just some insight and tidbits on the things that will help you be found online and it’s important. Again, core message getting that clear. Jennifer find your ideal patient and making sure that when somebody hits your website, they know exactly what it is that you do within three to five seconds when they hit your website.
One thing that you could do is ask your patients, ask your friends and your family members to look at your website and say, Hey, when you land on my website, do you know what I can do and how I can help you and why I’m even in this industry. And then also ask them, what would you be doing next? Motivate you to do next and move through this funnel, so to speak through the website.
And that would give you a lot of insight into that. So again, thank you guys so much for showing up today. I really appreciate that. Join us next. When Lorne Brown is going to be sharing some more insights from the American Acupuncture Council. Again, thank you so much. Stay beautiful. Change the world. One person, one needle at a time you guys are awesome.
Everybody needs acupuncture and go out there and make it happen. Be well, take care.
And so today we’re going to be talking about the importance of evidence-based practice. Or evidence-informed practice, which means it’s coming out of a lot of the research, which the exciting part about that is that we’re getting from the other aspect, the more Western scientific model.
Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.
Hello and welcome today’s episode of the American Acupuncture Council live stream. My name is Tsao-Lin Moy. I am a licensed acupuncturist and herbalist with a brick and mortar practice in union square in New York city. I’m very excited. Today to be welcoming Sandro Graca and very grateful to the American Acupuncture Council for putting these livestreams on now a quick Al Sandro is a licensed acupuncturist and lecture and research.
Is he’s done. He’s writing lots of papers about in particular women’s reproductive health, which is extremely important because not enough is done for women’s health. And he is also an avid speaker. And he is the director of evidence-based acupuncture and a fellow at the American board of Oriental reproductive medicine, and S and also the society for acupuncture research.
And so today we’re going to be talking about the importance of evidence-based practice. Or evidence informed practice, which means it’s coming out of a lot of the research, which the exciting part about that is that we’re getting from the other aspect, the more Western scientific model. Is now really recognizing, the benefits there’s like more concrete evidence and information.
And so we’re really looking at integrative medicine, or this is the, this is what we’ll be bridging that helps to bridge, understanding and better practice. So thank you so much, Sandra, for being. Thank you so much for asking me, inviting me to be here and asking me to do this talk. It’s always a pleasure to talk about.
I love research, but more so, it’s a pleasure because I get to contribute towards the future of our profession. Absolutely. We really need, we really and this is for the, for the public. Because we’re looking at what’s happening is, Medicare is going to be covering a lot of insurance companies are covering or not covering because there is, where’s the evidence.
And this is an area that it just benefits everyone. And if somebody is on the fence, About I don’t know if it works that here. We’ve got some great studies. And again, we were talking before the break about the one with carpal tunnel and I’m so very excited to see your presentation Sandro.
Yeah, thank you so much. I think that’s a really good point. And one of the things that I would mention is that there are actually different ways of using this information and different ways of using research. So one of them is, as you said, just having that you know the language to be able to talk to other people about what we do because not everyone knows what we know or loves acupuncture and Chinese medicine as much as we do.
So they might not have that language. But if we have another language to be able to communicate with them, then it just becomes a little bit easier to have that interaction and to get the ball rolling in terms of communication. And also, as you said, with the policymakers, obviously, But another aspect that I will bring up on my presentation as well is going to be that fact of the more you write about what you do in your clinic, because that’s research too, reporting, what do you do?
And the results you’re getting in your clinic. You’re contributing to the literature and you’re leaving something there for not just the people around us now, but also for the future for others to read what we’re doing in the clinic and taking that a step further. Absolutely mean, what would we be doing? What would we do without the sew-in aging or the link shoe, or, the golden cabinet or all of those things where this is very traditional practitioners, we’re recording all of their cases.
And then from that, tome of information gathered. That they were getting results that then ended up being prescriptions and points to use that they could pass down. This is thousands of years, so there’s no reason why, we shouldn’t be continuing to contribute. And then with modern science to take advantage of, that aspect of.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll talk a little bit about those different aspects during my presentation. So if we’re okay to go and then I’ll obviously I’ll leave a little bit at the end as well for us to talk about it, but I’ll show you how I try to put those together. Hopefully what do you will take from this and thinking about my main role, in terms of research with evidence-based acupuncture and being that idea of ancient medicine, modern research, and the evolutionary thinking that hopefully for all of us to continue to carry our perfection forward, this is almost like a little bit of a disclosure as well.
So what I do, as you said, I’m on the board of directors of evidence-based acupuncture, I’m a fellow of the born. And on my, for full disclosure to pay jobs. I am a lecturer at the Northern college of acupuncture, and I’m also a researcher on the Cochrane review group for acupuncture, for IVF. My main work is and research and passion is on PCLs polycystic ovary syndrome.
And I am a member of the SRM of Astra and the androgen excess society for PCLs. So that’s really the. My passion lies. And I want to say big, thank you. And this is not just a, a token of gratitude. This is really a big, thank you for you inviting me to be here because I’m a doer. I like to put the M get my feet down and could do some work.
And this is a paper that came out only. Last month was the end of March that was finally published. And this is a survey of clinical practice. And this is really asking the practitioners what they’re doing, how they are doing. Really proud of this is my first author paper as well. And working with such a great, an amazing group of people that are, really motivates me and to do more.
So what this says, and this is why I’m really saying a big, thank you, is that practitioners that were in the survey actually said that they favored knowledge obtained from webinars and conferences. Ah, nice webinar talking about research. So I hope that this reaches as many people as possible and the message for our side, because as I was talking just before we started, I don’t spend as much time in the clinic anymore.
The message for academics and clinician researchers is to hear what the practitioners are saying and saying that they still want this dissemination of knowledge. They want to know about this, but beyond those traditional publications on the journals and stuff like. They do want to know more about research literacy and special interest groups, like for example, da Borum or the obstetrical acupuncture association that I’m connected with as well and the AAC as well.
Like it’s the associations needing to link with the practice. Just a quick acknowledgement, because again, we like doing this and TCM and here I am saying that I would not be here if it wasn’t for the passion for research from professor Ian McPherson, who unfortunately is no longer with us.
And he’s there with the person who was my supervisor for my MSC. That’s Dr. Lara McClair. And I just want to say that yeah, Lara was spot on when she wrote that for Hughes retirement. When she said that he inspired thousands of us to become researchers, that I’m really proud to be one of those and to continue that work.
And obviously Dr. Mike Armour, who we saw the name on that publication there, who’s really helping me. And in this new career, for as a researcher. So I’ll start this with a little story and. Because my granddad was a great storyteller and I always look at Dr. Leon hammer and think about the great stories that he always shares with us.
And this really connects and links for me in terms of research and why we’re doing this rather than just being in clinic and keep doing the same thing over and over again. So he wrote this paper in 2002. So that’s 20 years ago. And look at how relevant that is. He started with the paper could be some not, but a small story.
And he said a little girl once asked her mother why she cut off the end of the roast before putting in the oven. And the mom said because that’s the way that my mother, your grandmother used to do it. We’ll have to ask her. So off they go to grandma’s house and only to find out that grandma actually did it because her mother had.
So the three generations are to go over to great-grandma’s house. And I love his wording was there to seek the wisdom of the ages. And when they posed the question to the great grammar and the great grammar just said, why? Dear the pan was too small. So that story just continues and it’s a great article.
If you have the time to read it, it’s amazing. And he just talks about that. Chinese medicine needs a new pond for a roast that has grown since ancient times in size and in shape and what we can talk about now, he says then at the end there about the. Pulse is no longer a sign of internal cold in our time is a sign of overworking nervous system.
And I always think about this and going, this was written in 2002. How would this tide pools will be described in 20, 22 after all that has happened recently? So it’s really interesting to see that sometimes. And this is no disrespect to our practice, but some is there. More cases that we’re just doing things because that’s what we were told.
And then when we asked the people who told us they were doing it as well, because that’s what they were told. So that’s what really motivates me. And at the time when I was getting this information together, I would, as I was at a webinar, there you go with Elizabeth and she said this is word by word, what she said, Chinese classical medicine is not yet finished.
We have to continue to edit it. And I thought, huh, that’s really interesting. And bearing in mind like me. So I’m Portuguese. I speak English. I know a little bit of Chinese from learning. Elizabeth Tasha is French. So she’s speaking in English and she’s talking about Chinese medicine as well. So for me, the language is very important and she said that it’s not to invent, but to discover new ways to express, it’s not because it’s not in the classics that it’s not interest.
And then this was the sentence that really, I was talking to her, like emailing back and forth after this webinar, because I thought this was really interesting. There are a lot of things that we are yet to develop. If we want to continue to practice a living medicine and not a dead. And again, I really liked language and that really stayed with me.
And this is the work that I was already doing, and that I’m really passionate about doing now, because it depends on how we see things, order and chaos could be different in different ways that when they are in front of you, So I do love the classics. I read them when I was studying and I still do when I have the time, you always go back to them, but now I just do more work in research and I love research.
And I think that it’s really important for the continuity of our medicine. And just like Elizabeth Kasha said to continue to practice this Olivia. So you might be wondering, and if you’re one of those purists that would say that, no, this is, ancient medicine. We need to stick with the ancient medicine.
I thought that too, and I was able to see things from a different perspective and I always bring up this study because it, I came across this just by pure accident. And again, it’s just one of those things Dr. June mouse was involved in this, as you can see in the name. And it just really caught my eye because when considering barriers for occupants to use.
And bearing in mind, this is a hot topic, right? Like it’s breast cancer survivors. So it’s really, it’s charged and it’s emotional. And I would always think that the main thing would be because I don’t use acupuncture because it interferes with the treatment that’s that was my perception would be, that would be the top thing.
So when I started reading the paper and realizing that lack of knowledge about acupuncture was actually the main reason why these people weren’t getting acupuncture was just mind blowing. And knowing that interfering with the treatment, not based on science, the side effects, painful, difficult time finding an acupuncturist.
I thought, I always thought those were going to be way up higher. I did not think that lack of knowledge was going to be an issue. And since it is, then we need to get this information and try to make sure that people know about acupuncture, but that they know about it from reliable sources. And if we can’t communicate with them in terms of the classics and old language that is harder for them to understand, let’s bring a language that it’s easier for them.
So that’s I want to like interrupt you just for a second about the cancer research, because I mean our the information okay. That is one of the very, if I remember correctly, the th the evidence and the efficacy of acupuncture for nausea. From chemotherapy, that was one of the burbs studies for nausea, for pregnancy and chemotherapy.
That was really validating okay, this is why acupuncture works. So the surprise that in the area among, breast cancer, that is still not this is a great thing to do that, it’s a, non-drug, it’s, easy to. Very it’s not going to injure you in any way.
That’s the surprising is that it can really help simple, very simple thing to be doing to help somebody. But so you can see how important it is that to language is, so this is going to be teamwork, right? So it’s going to be the patient needs to know the clinicians that are already looking after that patient.
They need to know as well. Practice. I think that we all have to be ambassadors for our medicine, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And we need to, and once we are called up to be on that team, we need to be able to talk to them because if they ask us, what did you just do? What treatment was that for that particular patient, we need to use a language that they can understand this.
Otherwise, they still won’t know what, when damn cheap Schwab, they won’t know what that means. So how would you want to work with someone that you can’t understand? So it’s being part of the team and what language you’re using to make sure that people can go actually allowed something here.
I always say this on my presentations in we do the. Practitioners graduated and they start going into their own practice. And what they do. I always say that do not ever let any patient leave your clinic without them knowing a little bit about what you did, because you don’t want them to go and talk to someone else and go, Hey, I went for acupuncture and it was brilliant.
And that person is going to ask him, oh, acupuncture, I’ve heard about that. What did they do? Oh, I don’t know. I was just lying there and they put in some needles. I don’t know what kind of advertising. It’s not really, that’s not really great word of mouth. Is it? I was lying there at then. It’s, people, patients that are informed make better decisions about their health, right?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So that’s really good. And thanks for bringing that up because that’s one of the aspects. So that was a little bit of about. How it relates to our practice and to the people around us. So more specifically now I’ll give you an example of B for me, how it’s start. Was I looking at points or IVF?
So I was getting people into the,
and Nick and they were going, and I remember clearly the very first time of looking at a re what’s, this thing, all about this, Paul, all those protocols. Points are to use this right? So it helped us. And it was interesting for me, need to go. It wasn’t available in the classics in this detailed way for this specific issue that is so recent.
And this kind of gotten me thinking and from then on, it was like, okay, so what else is actually been written and in research and what else can I, what other information can I get from these papers as well? And to take that con the continuous from the policy protocol and how things changed here we are.
Now, all these nipples protocol was published in 2002. Here we are now in 2019 with a systematic review and meta now. Telling us more about three or more treatments, the use of a modified protocol. We know the C MoPTA credenda migraine. The acupuncture protocol is even more used now and how we’d adjust to the changes on the IVF procedures as well, because the IVF procedures now are not the same as they were when the policy protocol was designed.
So again, it’s a living medicine, so we’re all learning from it. Yes, exactly. Am I just want to point out that, protocols are. So really a guide. They’re not because of course each we’re still practicing patient centered medicine. And, radically personalized. And so this two ideas about the idea of improving blood circulation, calming the nervous system down, right?
So those are these points elections, but they’re not the only thing. And then there are many practitioners that do, assist with reproductive, with the IVF protocols, et cetera, et cetera that are going to tail. To their patients and use some, maybe all maybe less. But yeah.
So with protocols, I like, okay, it’s not with everyone. It’s got it. We still have to personalize treatments. Absolutely. Yeah. And I’ll show you a good example of that then towards the end. Cause I have one again, because I have more experienced with the IVF side of things and how important it is to have, as you said, like that protocol, that set of ideas, but then how.
Also work with that and add more related to that person in front of you. So just to summarize, and I will talk a little bit more about these points, just more specifically, but research literacy. So knowing about research, why is it important if anyone was to ask you. Through the main points that I would say to someone best practice.
So we spoke about this just now, knowing what is being done, what has changed, what are other peoples in other parts of the world doing and how is it working for them? So in other words, is it informing my practices? Professional credibility. When you’re talking to someone, if you’re able to talk to them in a language that they understand, it’s easier to have a conversation.
So it’s not taking anything down from the classics or from Chinese medicine. Language is just adopting that if I was speaking Portuguese only because I was in Portugal, we wouldn’t be able to have this conversation. If the classics weren’t translated from Chinese into English. We wouldn’t be able to read them when we were in college and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
So it’s the credibility of, oh, I understand what you’re saying. And we’re having a conversation and then linked with that is engaging with other healthcare practitioners, because we want to be part of that team that is looking after the patients. And that is pretty much how evidence-based acupuncture was born.
By the way evidence-based acupuncture was something that was set up by a medical doctor who did acupuncture. And in his own words, it was just getting the same question all the time when he told people to in his office and they say, oh, I think you should get acupuncture. People who go but you’re a medical doctor and you’re telling me to go and get acupuncture.
Do you believe in that? I knew would always say the same thing. It’s nothing to do with belief. It’s to do with it works. So I’m telling you to go learn. Belief has nothing to do with this conversation. So the EBA has this one sentence thing that you see on the website and on our forum. It’s the goal is to construct a successful evidence-based explanation, and that will help us to communicate.
Acupuncturist evidence effectively and support the public clinicians and healthcare policy makers. And that’s really important because those people are the ones that will decide what type of medicine and who gets to work, where, and that is using the language of science. The healthcare policy makers was something that we added more recently in the last few years.
And it’s been really interesting for me to look at that group specifically because. They might not have any medical background at all. They might be coming from a law background or, anything else, not necessarily a medical background. So not only they wouldn’t know about what we would call biomedicine or Western medicine, they definitely would not know from Chinese medicine eater.
So really important to have a language that we can talk to them about. And that’s because the public. And these, everyone is reading stuff from all the way from, as you were saying, these great papers coming out in terms of acupuncture for cancer. But the other side of the spectrum has stuff that is not accurate at all.
And we just can’t change it because it is the way it is. So there’s a big wide spectrum of information that these people are accessing. And I would prefer them to get this information from us. I added a slide because he asked me to, because he wants to talk about this one. And I really liked this one and seeing the stuff that came out of acupuncture research that is so much part of our day-to-day life.
And that’s sometimes we might not even realize that it came about because of acupuncture, research, neuro imaging research, you were talking about the. The paper and talking about how MRIs have been used and gave us so much information about what’s happening inside our brain, when we’re getting acupuncture biomedical knowledge of connective tissue, Penn level Lily Helaine Lowe’s event, like a it’s all, acupuncture is definitely so fascinating that as it looking to see how it works, they find so much more and it actually does advance.
The Western medical model. It’s yeah. So you see it adds onto it. Yeah. Insights into therapeutic encounters. Again, professor you McPherson wrote a lot about this as well and how, and even, yeah, Vitaly not, but I’ll put this out there as well, how the encounter actually matters. And that should account for when you’re doing the research tens machines, the anti-nausea wristbands, all of this stuff is there because of this work that is being done.
Hooray to us, and the new thing that you seeing more and more the comparative effectiveness research in terms of really trying to get that pragmatic approach to what we do in clinic and trying to put that into what is happening in research as well, and the amount of stuff that is out there.
And again, I won’t go on too much about this because we all know about this. John puts this amazing stuff together, compiles all this information. There’s almost 16, probably. Now this was in February 16,000 of Cochran’s central register of controlled trials. We should not discard this information.
We should use it. And that information is of good quality. This is something that we hear every once in a while about there’s a lot of research, but is it of good quality? We now have information showing that it is it’s the last 20 years. Yeah. Twice to fold higher rate than biomedical research.
The quality of that research is better as well. It has improved on journals and we have the papers to prove it as well. So this is good information to have on your website and to have on under your belt when you’re talking to other people. If they say, oh, there is stuff written, but it’s not a good quality.
Actually let me show you. And this is, I always go back to this amazing sentence that John said when we had our conference about the research is out there, but who’s reading it. And I guess that this is why I’m here doing this with you. And this is why we have our goal with EBA to get people, to talk with different languages and understand different languages and ultimately whatever floats your boat acupuncture.
So I’m asking you to be the change, you all listening to this, you and I say this, that you spend more time in clinic than I do. So you matter. And here’s the example that I was saying to you about the IVF work. So we’re looking at this from 2012, the Delfi consensus put together. So this is asking practitioners about information, about what you’re doing in the clinic for your IVF treat.
That information is, can even see that Shane Littleton was involved in this professor. Carline Smith’s name is Derek says on grant. Anyway, the names you’ll recognize the names anyway, but this was asking to practitioners, tell us what you do in the clinic. All that information goes towards an RCT. It doesn’t always have to be an RCT, this group is really reliable and really good at putting this research together.
They were able to put it in RCT together. That goes into a secondary outcomes of that RCT. So more information from that in terms of anxiety and quality of life for women undergoing IVF. And sometimes the clinics are really interested in this quality of life, anxiety for those people going through IVF.
Then all that information that started with the clinic remember goes into a systematic review and meta analysts. That gives us a lot of information. All of that goes into information for the Cochrane review, which is more likely to be something that, again, healthcare policymakers and medical people will be reading about that.
Remember how it started with that email in your inbox. Hey, do you have five minutes? Do you have 10 minutes to help us out with this? So what I want to say is that, if acupuncture is helping with anxiety over IVF, then. It’s obviously going to also help with anxiety over climate change, anxiety, over whatever anxiety.
And we see, move that there is this opioid crisis for pain. Acupuncture is great for pain. It’s great for helping people get off of addiction. But also if it’s great for anxiety, then we’re also gonna be looking at the future where so many people are on anxiety medication. Which are also very addictive.
And so just by, I’m just like adding into this. Just because one research area is about they’re a little more granular. The information then, gets applied in other areas as well, which is a very easy bridge, especially when it’s addressing those biomed those Mo biological mechanisms, that are showing up for things like anxiety, depression, and all of that. So this is a really big. And a good add on to that would be also to say that if you are, which I’m going to go into now auditing your clinic and showing and putting out there what’s happening in your clinic, you might actually be finding new trends you are now seeing in clinic a lot more patients complaining with X condition compared to what you were before.
And once you write about that, maybe someone in. Austria is going to go. Oh, actually it’s funny. You mentioned that because I’ve been noticing that too. And then someone in New Zealand is going to go, oh wow. It’s not just me. These guys also noticed that, right? Oh, there’s definitely, I’ll tell you in my practice over the last couple of years, anxiety and sleep problems.
And then looking at other research, there was, increase in writing of prescriptions for anxiety medication. Like even looking outside of. Who’s coming in your office, you start to see other, trends that are in the media and being reported, you start to look at, oh, cause I look at it when a patient comes in, I’m having a sleep pro and I’m like, wow, it’s all happening.
And then all of a sudden you see so many people. Are experiencing having these things. And once it that’s what I was saying. Once you start, if you keep this in your clinic only no one will know. Then you’re going to beat the best, kept secret. If you find a prescription that is really good for that particular condition, and you don’t tell anyone again, let’s go back to the beginning and think, is this a living medicine?
Is that going to, is that going to be the secret from your practice? And no one will ever know. So I know I’m exaggerating, but I’m just giving the example of why it’s important to audit your clinic. Just show what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. And then when you look at the outcomes, you might be helping practitioners all over the world to access.
Improve the type of treatment that they’re giving to their patients. So on-screen now there’s just a few examples of how you can do it. My mom, a lot of people know about it and a lot of people use it, which is great. There’s one which is online now in the U S you might’ve heard about it because I can track are actually involved in the study going on in the Northwest as well.
So yeah, you will hear more. About them because they’re online. So it’s just a little bit easier to collect this information from the patients as well. So that would be my thing. And for those who are interested in getting to know more about how to collect that information, then write it down in a case report.
And here’s what you have to do. Basically just look up. Care, which is case reports and then start collecting the data from your clinic. There’s actually more specific into Chinese medicine. It’s called Karch. And a lot of people will know about it even for N of one trial. So when you have just a one person this information is out there, but I would go back to what John Weeks would always say, it’s out there, but who’s reading this right.
I’m always in there. I’m in there. Yeah. Yeah, jumping in and I go if this herb is doing that, I’m going to look in the other categories. And I also look at the foods, what’s in the food medicine, there’s so much there. So this is really, I’m really excited about, you talking about.
Big point of interest for me, because it’s important that, a lot of practitioners may not do continuing education or, they may get a little bit I don’t know, stale with their treatments. And so I think this is important, very important to be up to date on what’s out there and also really again, to be in back.
For our medicine to be able to talk about it intelligently. Now, when I was in school, we didn’t have as much, I was in school, graduated 20 2002. So over 20 years ago there wasn’t a lot that was out there. There was the IVF study coming out of Germany. There was the study for the nausea and I think there were still working on the.
Down at NIH, right? So there wasn’t really a lot. And then you’d have to have things well, actually coming out of Japan, there were things, but they’d have to be translated. So what we have now, and also the internet was, very much in its infancy. This is, it’s so accessible for practitioners to do that and good good clinical practice.
To double check. Yeah. And this is we didn’t, people are going to be watching this and thinking that we arrange this, but we didn’t, and this is a great segue into this because what’s on screen now. It’s only part of the slide and I, this is actually a sentence from the paper itself that I’m going to show you.
And it’s something that adds on to exactly what you’re saying and what still to this day. And I hope that this will help to change that. Turns people against acupuncture research a little bit while clinical trials provide valuable data about if efficacy of interventions, findings often do not translate into clinical.
That’s something that you see and you hear, I would say that too, like maybe 10, 15 years ago, but then after learning and after doing my MSC and getting more into research, I don’t anymore. And talking about the timescale that you are giving this sentence is out of this paper that has just been published recently by a good friend of mine.
Beverly Devela. She collected information over 15 years. 15 years of information. Now, anyone can come from anywhere saying that, oh, there’s not enough evidence about acupuncture, or there’s not enough for us to base our decisions. That’s 15 years of information right there and published for everyone to see.
So in looking at this and saying these are sentences from the paper itself and that key punchline on, in day-to-day clinical. Practice not appears to be a safe, effective intervention for breast cancer survivor. This is really important for us to know and to have this, to be able to say straight away.
Actually, and what I’m going to emphasize too, is the beauty of doing the research is we also have thousands of years of, knowledge about the, how it was used. So we’re not, it’s not just being made on. We’ve got these, it’s not made up something it’s really based on, okay, this is what they say, this is what was going on.
And this is why they continued to do these practices. Now we can take that and look at it. So this is the point. So it’s the only 15 years ago, 15 years. Thousands of years of evidence that’s in, in these records and then really looking at them. So it is actually like we’re doing like a little bit of a retrospective, right?
Look at everything that’s been done and then designing. Different kinds of research based on what’s showing up in, in health for us and how, and like how we can actually use this and integrated with what I consider like the traditional model, right? Like where that fails.
There are these other things, and there’s no reason why we can’t do both. It’s not an either or and it’s and again, as you, we see that a lot of the acupuncture then informs better practices in a Western medicine model, like areas for growth. Yeah. Yeah. And this is again very timely for you to say this because I’m going to give you the two examples, just because we spoke about a discount at the end of the presentation.
This is just out in the last couple of weeks. Good friend of mine. Good colleague, Dr. Mathias, zoom or Martinez works. Mathias is a medical doctor who was also trained in TCM. He works in oncology and. And he wrote this case report about what are the patients? So this is like debunking a bunch of stuff against occupants in one paper right there, right?
Is a medical doctor trained in TCM who uses it in the oncology setting. And as now published a case report, which I’m asking you to do more and more showing the difference in one patient between getting acupuncture. This is one treatment, just one treatment. The difference between getting one treatment of acupuncture and the oncologist.
Like amazing stuff. And I just put another one because again, to link it back to the states as well and see, cause people would be familiar with this they’re obscene and Valerie, Valerie actually sent me a message before this. So if she’s watching hi and yeah, just publishing a case report and showing what’s happening in your own setting.
Again, hospital setting, acupuncture being used and how it’s helping the patients, but it needs to come from you. It doesn’t have to be a big, huge RCT a case report will do with. So here’s my plea and my punchline and my please. And then you can stop and you don’t have to listen to me anymore begging you to write research.
So here’s a time I’m V I’m more visual. So I like this and this makes sense to me. So I hope it makes sense to you as well. We started with the classics. All of this was written. Back in the day we read them. We learned about them in school. The first book that I read about Chinese medicine when I started studying in Portugal was Giovanni’s book translated from Chinese, some Chinese terminology there as well.
It all starts to make sense. Then you go into what brought me into research occupants or research the book. And again, the names they’re amazing. Rosa Schneider just, really inspirational for everyone. That’s how I started. And that’s what I read about. And it becomes the classical book now in terms of where it all started.
Now we have all this information going into Cochrane reviews and going into research and starting to be part of the research literature. My question then is who is writing tomorrow’s classics because yesterday’s classics have been. But in 200 years, in 2000 years, when they look back, what are they going to say?
That those guys in 2022, what were they writing about? What were they doing in their clinics? So this is why I’m asking you. To do it and to please make it your turn now of writing the stuff that you’re doing in the clinic and telling more and more people so that we can adjust and adapt the trials as well into being more like what you do in your own.
So that’s the end of my presentation and my begging for you to write what you’re doing. Oh yeah. I, and I have to say, I love that book. I actually have four different copies of Sue and aging and link shoe because each translation is slightly different. And I also had the pleasure of studying some with Elizabeth shot, the LA she’s amazing sense of humor.
And what I would say is that it’s also important to reread the classics, especially after you’ve been practicing, because then when you read it again, you go, oh, so a lot of this is you need to read over and over because and research and read papers because you’re at one level as a practitioner and then you get some experience and then you go back and then you can catch the deeper meaning and then also apply it.
So it’s always, so this is not, it’s like review, do that retrospect review again. Go back and you’re like, oh, wow. I didn’t know this before. And our information comes from many different places. I find my patients are fantastic for reporting stuff back to me which is also important.
So what I want to ask you Sandra, how what can we do to help you? Can we where can we find you? How can we follow you? Listen to more of the stuff that I have to say. Ah, yeah, I wasn’t expecting that. Yeah. Okay. So look as an individual, obviously it’s my pleasure. And it’s my passion to to the research side of things.
It’s just how I get to write. So some people would write books for example, which are very valuable. I, that my passion is that, writing these papers and putting it out. Sharing this information with people. So on a personal level I’m working in research. I’m I love lecturing. I love teaching.
I love learning from the students as well. So people can find me, Sandra grass online that they will be able to find more information about me. And the main work that I would do that would be more visible than for people would be through evidence-based occupants. And. Thankfully, we have a lot of people helping and supporting it’s a nonprofit organization.
So evidence-based acupuncture.org is where people can go and check it out. We have a forum as well, so we don’t do discussions on social media anymore. And we just take that to a private place where we can all talk as practitioners and as colleagues and outside of the eyes. Are there any. Censorship of social media type thing.
And without any distracting voices, either from the outside, so just for us to talk on the farm and share ideas and yeah, EBA connect is the way that people help and support the work that we do with EBA. Awesome. Awesome. Fantastic. Thank you so much. For coming on and sharing all this great information and also really helping people to really keep their practice from going stale.
And then also, be better practitioners, better, clinical practice. And then, this is how we bridge to other professions and become part of the team. And keep keep us professional, right? Yeah. Share what you’re doing in the clinic. Like it’s amazing.
I really appreciate the opportunity of coming here and being able to talk about this. I know I speak a bit too fast when I get excited about it. But it is really I’m learning so much every time. To find out from other people in their clinics, what they are doing and how can that influence? You said it yourself.
The study was from Germany and then you were reading it and then someone else, the paper I showed you, the survey of practice was actually in Australia and New Zealand, and now it’s everybody else in the world is reading it. Mathias wrote that paper from the hospital, the oncology. In Austria and now everyone is reading it.
So I think that it’s really important for us to stand proud of what we do and, have it on our websites. Haven’t, especially have it published and be able to talk about it in terms that other people can understand. And as I said, like the case reports would be, as you can see, the example would be the best way to put it out there and publish it for everyone.
Awesome. Thank you so much. Okay, so here we go. Hopefully you will join us next week. We are going to be having Jeffrey Grossman will be coming on and presenting for the American acupuncture council. And all right. And again, thank you for the American Acupuncture Council for putting this production on.
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