Click here to download the transcript.

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.

Dr. Martha Lucas, today we are going to talk about amygdalizing, and I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for giving me the opportunity to share this information with you. You can also find information on LucasTeachings. com, my teaching website. So my practice is located in Denver, Colorado, but I love to teach.

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Teaching all over and having opportunities like this to spread the word about how wonderful Chinese medicine is. So today’s topic is something that I have called amygdalizing. And so I’m going to talk to you about telling your patients to amygdalize. Now, the amygdala is a part of our brain. It’s involved in our stress response, and a friend of mine and I have been studying the amygdala for quite a while in terms of how it is related, especially to anxiety, but anxiety and depression in our patients.

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Kathleen is one of my Pulse diagnosis students from years and years ago, and we’ve kept in touch all these years about how important the proper diagnosis is to help our patients find the cause or help us find the cause of their condition, because that’s what Chinese medicine is about, right?

It’s essentially a preventive medicine, so we want to see our patients to prevent. Conditions, in other words, keep them healthy. You all know the old story about the ancient medical doctors and how you went to see them all the time to stay healthy and you paid them, but if you turned up sick, they didn’t get paid because they’re supposed to keep you healthy.

Now, in our culture, we only we might go see our doctor once a year for our annual exam, but we usually only go when we’re sick. So it is an educational thing to get your patients to understand. You need to come see me. Let’s say they start with a symptom. Come see me. We get you quote unquote cured.

We get your symptoms to go away. We get you healthy again, and then see you in a month. That’s what I tell all my patients. I need to see you twice a week for a couple of weeks, and once a week, then every 10 days, and two weeks, and then see you in a month when you’re healthy. Because I’m getting them back to the time where I can prevent their conditions.

So I love to treat emotions. Emotions are, I, in my pulse diagnosis system, we can feel the emotions in the pulse. Like worry makes the earth, spleen, stomach, pulse go backward toward the kidneys. Part of the problem with that is, number one, it’s taking away from the kidney energy in a perverse way. And number two, it’s not connecting with the lung, large intestine, metal, and earth and metal are our immune system, right?

So people are going to show up with some sort of immune or skin or hair condition, along with their worry causing this to happen. Terms of anxiety and depression, we feel depression, chronic depression, current depression in the liver pulse, the liver gallbladder pulse. And then anxiety is felt mostly in the heart, but that combination of the liver and the heart.

So I have for years been telling my patients when I feel their anxiety to what I call amygdalize. Now, why choose the amygdala as the choice of organs for them to calm down? And remember, the master said that, and I remember this from the first week of Chinese medicine school, and I Really, honestly, at that time, I thought it was a little bit of a crazy thing to say.

I’m a research psychologist by training in the Western medicine, so to say, Oh, emotions cause all physical disease made me feel like, what? Are you kidding? But as I’m feeling people’s pulses, you can feel that back and forth movement, or the scattered of the heart pulse, is eventually causing a physical symptom.

And if you want to think about it, and when we talk about the amygdala, you will know, it’s a physical disease. The amygdala is a physical organ in our body. We’re feeling the person’s anxiety and or depression, and that’s physically in their body. We’ve managed to get this idea of anxiety and depression down to a physical problem.

Now, sure, we have bacteria, viruses, that sort of thing causes physical disease, but also your patient’s emotions getting stuck. Your patient’s emotions, like if the heart pulse is scattered, blood flow isn’t going to be very good, right? This is why our fertility patients need treatment on the heart because that blood flow is going to eventually go to the uterus.

And without that connection, people are not going to be able to get pregnant very easily. So we’re going to be talking about the physical brain and how we’re going to deal with that in Chinese medicine. But it all started with this idea about that. Emotions caused all physical disease. And now of course, I’m big on treating emotions.

I love to treat emotions. I think we all need to let our patients know that Chinese acupuncture, Chinese medicine doesn’t only treat fertility and pain. I think those are two of the big topics, but we also treat the person’s emotions and their spirit. So the amygdala is a little tiny part of your brain, but it has a big function.

It’s one of the major. are the major processing center for your emotions. It also links the brain with other brain activities like memories, learning, and our senses. So that’s why sometimes when people have a panic attack, they have all of their senses seem to be involved in that. But it’s main, going to be talking about is how it can cause disruptive feelings like anxiety and depression.

It’s inside your temporal lobe. As I said, it plays a key role in emotions and memory and learning and It’s actually a little structure, but it’s part of a bigger network called the limbic system. And we all remember that the limbic system has to do with emotions. It’s part of our, very important part of our survival, because without fear in the, what I call the old days, when we were, threatened by tigers at the door and dying in childbirth more and that sort of thing.

We had to have fear, like that idea that the hair stands up on end on your arms when we’re fearful or we are worried for our own survival. If you’ve ever almost been hit by a car, you will know that your hair stands on end because you, Your survival was threatened. So these parts of the brain, including the amygdala, what we call detect danger.

But now the danger isn’t a tiger at the door. The danger is we can’t pay our bills. We’re afraid we’re not going to pass an exam. Our business has declined. Maybe we’re having a little bit of a relationship problem. Those are now the issues that really aren’t what you would call survival. They’re not really, I’m going to die because I can’t pay this bill.

I can do other things about not being able to pay that bill. But the amygdala doesn’t know that. It, all it sees is it’s, Just processing the things that we are seeing and hearing, like literally look at the bill and the amygdala goes into that feeling of, oh my gosh, I’m going to die. So we get fear, we can get aggression.

As I said, it’s a part of learning through rewards and punishment. So again, we can cognitively train it to learn this is not a survival, death threat. And then with memory, and it also is a part of social communication, which is what amygdalizing is. When I tell my patients to amygdalize, it means that they need to just express the emotion they’re feeling, express the situation to someone.

In fact, they don’t even need to. They don’t even need feedback. It’s not I need to have a conversation with somebody about this. In fact, my friend and I do emails back and forth and we’ll say, I need to amygdalize in the subject line, which means to our friend, my friend and I, you don’t have to call me back.

You don’t have to even email back. I just am having this situation. I need to express it. I’m going to say it to you or leave a message, leave a phone message. Hey, this is an amygdalization thing. phone voicemail and just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, what’s happening because we need to express that. And the masters were right about that.

I tell all my patients, your emotions are better in, sorry, your emotions are better out than in. They’re better expressed than held in. It’s the holding in that creates the stagnation and the weakness, the deficiencies or excess. Stagnation can be. either deficiency or excess, but it’s the holding in of the emotion that’s going to lead to some physical problem or anxiety and depression, which we consider emotional problems.

So they were right about that. Now, I always tell my patients, I’m not suggesting that we all become raging maniacs and road ragers. I’m just saying that you need to say it. You’ve had a bad day at work. Your boss has been a jerk. You just need to get in your car and do the, Oh my boss, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Or you’re sad about something, I’m sad about this particular thing happening. And I always tell them if you’re sad and you can cry, or you’re crying with words processes things faster than just crying with your frontal lobe and your amygdala going on and on inside this loop, right?

That’s what worry does to the pulses, as I mentioned earlier. It’s a loop between earth and the kidneys back and forth. And that’s very dangerous to our health. So what the amygdala ization does, which that’s a phrase I’ve coined, amygdalize and amygdalization, is it helps your amygdala calm down.

It helps the neurons because what the amygdala is made of is neurons and they’re sending and relaying electrical and chemical signals throughout your brain and nervous system so that you see a threat, your bill, and then these neurons start to go through your whole brain, your whole nervous system. And It’s the protective cells for those nerves don’t recognize that this is not a threat to my life.

When we start to have anxiety disorders, PTSD, any mood disorder, panic disorder, these phobias, fearful things, these are all how These are all affected or started in the amygdala. So again, we need to be always thinking about getting that out for our mental health because your amygdala can get hijacked.

If we don’t recognize that this is not a danger to my life, then those emergency signals are just going to keep going and going and going and other parts of your brain are going to react you. to that. So you might have a startle reflex. As I said, you’re going to have anxiety or depression.

It’s an emotional hijack, if you will. So what the amygdala starts in your central nervous system is this process to protect yourself, protect your body, from a dangerous situation or from danger. So again, this helps in a dangerous situation, right? If a car is coming and your ears hear it and you’re on your bike and you’re, you suddenly get a fight or flight response, that’s going to save your life.

So it’s protecting your body from danger by putting you in fight or flight. But now, as I said earlier, The fight or flight isn’t survival. The fight or flight is worried about having a fight with our partner worrying about our business, having to pay some bills, something, our child is a little sick, but we turn it into a bigger worry.

Again, we need to. Nip that in the bud. So then that’s when I tell my patients to amygdalize. I say that’s not a life threatening thing, but your body feels like it’s life threatening. So you need to not neglect your mental health. You need to realize that your physical body is your mental health.

So again, talking to a friend, you don’t need feedback. So what I tell my patients is you don’t need to. Say to a friend, Oh, I need to talk this over with you. You just need to tell him, Hey, my practitioner told me to do this thing called amygdalizing, which means I’m just going to talk about the thing.

I’m just going to repeat the thing so I can get it out of my mind, get it out in a situation where I get my brain to realize, Oh, actually this is a bill. I can do something about that. I can call the company. I can make payments. I’m not going to die. And we can calm ourselves down by doing what the master said, which is getting the emotional, getting the emotion expressed right in a healthy way, not being over angry, not, it.

Not yelling at anyone, not hurting anyone. We just get the emotion out by expressing it to someone. Or like I said I call it talking crying is a great way to get it out and process it if you’re a crier. If you’re a crier and you say the words, I miss him, I’m in your frontal lobe. Let’s say it’s that you miss someone.

Your frontal lobe just gets in that loop. I miss him. I miss him. I miss him. I miss him. I miss him. I miss him. But if You can’t say that out loud when you’re crying. You can’t possibly say, I miss him. I miss him. I miss him. I miss him. I miss him. Like it goes on in your frontal lobe. You’ll start to process it.

I miss him because he’s going to a different school now, but Hey, there are airplanes, there are cars. I can still see him. He’s growing up, whatever it is that you’re trying to process. That little bit of grief, but you need to process it. I remember my mother died suddenly and so when I went to see my doctor for my annual exam, she said I was crying because I just reported that my mother died a couple months ago or whatever, and she said, Oh, do you need some antidepressants?

I said, No, I don’t need antidepressants. My mother just dropped dead. I need to cry. is what I need. You put me on antidepressants, it’s going to make me stop crying because that’s what they’re really good at. You can feel that in the pulses. You can feel the liver energy go up to the heart and stop when a person is on antidepressants.

We of course need that energy to get over, over to the spirit, right? Over to the heart to keep the heart blood flowing and the spirit flowing well. I know for that from Chinese medicine. Now, if I wasn’t a Chinese medicine practitioner, I wouldn’t have needed that. I wouldn’t have known that. And maybe I would have said, sure, let me have some antidepressants for a while.

But we all know as practitioners, we have to get that depressed energy flowing. Get that grief, get that shock going because otherwise my kidneys were going to suffer, right? And the last thing.

When you feel the emotions in the patient’s pulses, sometimes get them to amygdalize while your hands are on the pulses. And I’ve done it plenty of times the other way. I make a joke in my pulse diagnosis class about how, you know what, you want to feel somebody’s anger pulse in the liver, talk to them about their divorce.

It’s the opposite too. I can tell them, amygdalize, get, and old childhood trauma. They’re amygdalizing in front of me about that and you can feel their earth pulse Sink down deep because this is something they’ve had in their system for a long time about not being nurtured So at any rate I wanted to introduce you to this technique I call amygdalizing able to tell your patients to amygdalize and If you have any questions, you can contact me at LucasTeachings.

com or my private practice site is AcupunctureWoman. com and I’ll be happy to answer your questions. I love to help practitioners be better at our craft because I really, after more than 25 years, I really do believe that Chinese medicine rocks. Again, I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for this opportunity to speak with you and, as I said Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

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So today we’re going to go over a little bit of the specialness, if you will, of how TCM looks at food.

Click here to download the transcript.

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, this is Dr. Martha Lucas, and today I am. I’m doing part two of the presentation, Food as Medicine, and I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for this opportunity. So let’s go to our slides.

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Okay, so last time I mentioned that we, that language can cause experiences, and that a part of what our medicine can do for our patients is give them advice about food. Because food, let’s face it, food is medicine that you can take. three, four, five times a day. Also, Western medicine is looking into it too, but we have a different viewpoint of food.

So today we’re going to go over a little bit of the specialness, if you will, of how TCM looks at food. First of all, we’re going to talk a little bit about the seasons, because in Chinese medicine, food advice can vary with the seasons. Spring is the season of new birth and new growth. And according to Chinese medicine, spring is about the wood element and about liver functioning.

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And we know that some places where we live have a lot of wind in the spring, and the liver is especially susceptible to wind. We know that it regulates chi, regulates emotions, and the liver is a part of our digestive system. If it’s out of balance, then we can say that it’s attacking the digestion. So we don’t only think of spleen and stomach, but also, obviously, liver and gallbladder.

If our patients or us think that If we don’t adapt to the changing climate in spring, we may get susceptible to seasonal health problems like flu, pneumonia, or a relapse of a chronic disease or allergies. How many of our patients only in spring seem to get allergies? And I’ve noticed over the years that sometimes it’s in the more windy spring.

So there we have that relationship between the liver and wind. So we would recommend that they reduce the intake of sour flavors and increase sweet and pungent flavors, because those are the flavors that facilitate the liver to regulate the chi throughout the body. So examples of recommended foods for the spring, there’s a list, would include onions, leeks, leaf mustard, Chinese yam, wheat, dates, cilantro, and you’ll notice that we have a wide variety, like wheat is one of them.

If you have a patient who’s gluten intolerant, we need to have other options for them so that they don’t feel like they are going to have to eat some. In fact, You need to always read the labels of the herbs that you recommend to people because some of them do have weed in them. Fresh and fresh green and leafy vegetables, include those in meals, sprouts and in addition, uncooked, frozen, and frozen vegetables.

Fried foods should only be taken in moderation because, number one, the liver has a harder time digesting fried foods, and of course, cold foods are harder and harder for the spleen and stomach, or your overall digestion, to tolerate. Because remember, You partly don’t get all the nutrition if your digestion is spending all of its time trying to warm up the food.

Also, because previous to spring, sometimes people spend a lot more time indoors during winter. Then they might more quickly develop a heat imbalance in the spring. So some other symptoms people might have in the spring include having a more dry throat, bad breath, constipation, or a thick tongue coating, because those are heat signs, right?

So then we would recommend foods like bananas, pears, water chestnuts, sugarcane, celery, and cucumber to help clear excessive heat. What I do sometimes is suggest that my patients do something like put slices of celery, cucumber, and watermelon rind in water. And that makes a nice hydrating drink. Plus it’s more tasty than just drinking plain water.

So sometimes you have to be a little creative because as I mentioned in part one, We’ll call it attached to their diet plan. They’re very attached to how they eat food. So sometimes they really don’t want us to be playing around with it. In summer, plants grow fast, right? People have more energy. The body’s qi and blood become more vigorous than in other seasons.

Now, Chinese medicine can say that physiological changes make the heart over function and that there’s a little too much yang flowing. around and in the body during summer when it’s hotter. According to five elements theory, an over functioning heart restricts lung functioning. It’s advisable to eat more foods with pungent flavors and reduce bitter flavors, because that’ll enhance the lung and maintain normal sweat mechanisms in summer.

Sweat is the fluid of the heart and also the bladder and the lungs, and excess of sweating can scatter hardship and weaken the mind, according to some theories. So the person can have be more annoyed, have a little bit of depression or a lower spirit, and be restless and have sleeping issues. And this would be during summer heat.

Foods with sour and salty flavors help ease these symptoms. Now, summer isn’t the same in every region, right? I am in Denver, the high desert, so our summers our whole year tends to be drier. I might give my patients slightly different advice than Some are somewhere where it’s hot and rainy, or it’s very humid and damp.

We have to realize where we are living and. and create the plan according to that. For example, if you, in Chinese, in ancient Chinese medicine, the suggestion was to eat the food you grow. In Denver, we don’t have a really long growing season. It’s probably three or four months, but in a place like Gunnison, Colorado, I think it’s 31 days.

In some, again, you have to look at where you’re living And create the food plan according to where the patient is living. Now hot humidity, rainy atmospheres can disturb the fluid and electrolyte balance of the body. And there again, lead to lethargy, weakness, fever, thirst, lack of appetite, and even in the extreme, loose spleen.

stools. So again, looking at that’s dampness causing those issues. So foods that will help keep the body cool and balanced include things like watermelon, strawberries, cucumber. Again, you can help your patient just put those in water and create a nice hydrating cooling drink for the body. In general, The daily diet, even Western medicine says, should contain more fruits and vegetables, always, but especially at this time because they’re cooling and they can help provide adequate fluids to the body.

Now warm and cooked foods help the digestion work better because spleen and stomach love warmth. They do not like heat. Ice cold drinks. So with my patients, I like to start their nutritional advice in what I call baby steps. The first baby step is no ice drinks. So well, maybe sometimes the first baby step, to be honest, is no soda.

I recently, I’m working with a woman, one of my weight loss patients was drinking sodas every day. And so for her, the first step was no soda. Again, know your patient, listen carefully to What they usually eat, and so I might say in this case, no iced drinks, and explain to them that in Chinese medicine, and even in Western medicine, your digestion is warm.

It’s not ice cold there inside your body. So if your digestion has to spend all of its time warming up the food, you’re missing out on some nutrients. So even in the winter, sorry, even in the summer, it sounds like lots of people are like, oh, I could never eat soup in the Summer. Your warm and cooked foods help your digestive system work more effectively.

Whereas, greasy, raw, frozen foods can, what we call, damage the digestive system. And then the person might have less of an appetite, or diarrhea, or acid reflux, or some other stomach upset. In, even in Chinese tradition, in summer, making soups, you can add ingredients that help clear heat and reduce dampness and help the person’s digestion keep working well.

In autumn, things begin to fall fall off the trees and fall off stems, and, but mature, right? Remember, it’s always a cycle, right? help support good soil, and then the next year they grow again. In Chinese medicine, autumn correlates with the lung system. We have things that regulate the skin, respiration, body fluids, immunity, and can be res associated with depression.

The lungs hold grief, so if someone has grief or depression you always need to treat the lungs. Like Lung2, the translation of it is something like cloud break or release the clouds, because it’s talking about the cloud of emotion, and it could be some damp also, but the clouds of grief. Now the vigorous summer is over, and things are moving inward to prepare for winter, where we might even be more inward.

Right now, we’re going to adjust our nutritional advice for the changing seasons, because it, the weather can be drier, and again, the person might get things like an itchy throat, or a dry nose, chapped lips and You might see more hair loss in autumn and also allergies again. Now those can be really related to things like a dry nose.

So I have all of my, I ask all my allergy patients, do you do a nasal rinse? Because a lot of lung issues, it turns out, start up in the sinuses. So doing some sort of a nasal rinse, keeping your nose more hydrated can help with, help prevent things like the flu. For one thing it’s less, the flu doesn’t like moist, doesn’t like dry nasal passages, so it’s helpful to do a nasal rinse.

And we’ll need to promote because they’re going to help lubricate the body as the weather is getting drier. So nuts and seeds are appropriate, pear, pumpkin, honey dairy products. But again, remember too much dairy is cloying and damp. I had a patient who had, was growing these little, tiny little clear nodules on his skin.

They were so small, but you could feel them. It turns out he drank, I’m serious, like a gallon of milk every two or three days, ate ice cream every night. The worst thing you can eat according to Chinese medicine, right? Because it’s dairy, which is cloying and damp and it’s frozen. I suggested that for two weeks, he, cut down on his dairy and lo and behold, those little growths went away.

Dairy can be really cloying and then you can eat more food with sour flavors and reduce pungent flavors like onions and ginger and peppers that can lead to a decrease in body fluids. And then in winter things really. Slowed down to save energy, right? This is why root vegetables grow underground.

It’s like how animals hibernate and even humans might conserve energy and build spring, sorry, build strength wanting to move into spring. Now, there are a lot of people who exercise all winter, who go out all winter, but in Chinese medicine, theoretically, it’s when we’re slowing down and we’re trying to save energy.

So we want to enrich our bodies at that time. Maybe we eat a little more protein at that time. Beef, goose, duck, eggs, Chinese yam. There’s a list of ingredients that are common in Chinese dishes during the wintertime and winter corresponds with the kidney system. So it’s, advisable to eat more foods that associate with the kidney.

And the kidney’s flavor are, is salty. Its color is white. So we might choose foods like, for example, I have asparagus on the list, but maybe you would get white asparagus during that time.

Winter is also a good time to boost your natural constitution. At this time we can help. boost the constitution so that in spring the person’s chronic conditions don’t show up again, for example, allergies. We would be working on the person’s allergies during the winter time so that their body is absorbing the nutrients from those foods that we recommend so So that in spring, their allergies don’t come back.

So it’s harmony between food and weather on a more practical experience. As I said, this, some of this advice might seem to contradict what Western medicine says, or again, you’re going to have to be careful in what part of the world patients live in so that you know how to coordinate the food advice with the weather in their area.

Foods become a part of our body after they’re consumed, so we are treating the person’s body with food. Food is one of the eight foundations of traditional Chinese medicine along with other things like herbal medicine, body work, including things like gua sha and twina, and of course acupuncture, which is the most well known therapy in Chinese medicine, but A knowledge of food energetics can deeply supplement your ability to help your patients.

This next section, we’re going to talk a little bit more about how to work successfully with food with certain conditions or procedures that your patients are going to have to go through. Because the stronger our digestion is, the better we are able to tolerate, The food we eat, we’re better, we are better processors of the food.

If we have to have a procedure, for example, a surgery, our immune system is going to be stronger because our digestion is our earth element. It’s the core. Everything surrounds the digestion. So trying to make our patients have good digestion or improve their digestion is going to help everything, including their skin.

And remember, if they’re going to have something like a procedure, they’re likely to start worrying about it or ruminating about it. And we have to help them with that also, because As we know, worry actually makes the digestive pulses go backward and then back toward the kidney, what I call attacking the kidney.

So something like worry and ruminating, we really do need to help our patients with that. So for example, before a surgery, I recently had a patient have surgery for breast cancer, so I always tell my patients you need to come in before your procedure and then after your procedure. Before your procedure, this is what we need to do.

Build up your system, your digestion, build up your immune system, because surgery is really it’s, Even though the person may need it, it’s a quote unquote good thing because they’re having something like a cancer removed. It’s still going to potentially create some negative impact on the body. For example, stagnated chi.

So we want to get their immune system working. We want to help them with some ideas. Don’t mix food and work. In other words, pay attention to eating. Chew well. That’s how you get nutrients out of your food. Stop before you’re full. Let’s cut down on cold foods. No diet, no soda or diet soda I have down there.

It just has too much sugar and chemicals in it. So helping them work with their digestion before their procedure looking at, Are they cold? Do you need to add warm foods to their diet? Do you need to warm them up before their procedure? If they’re yin deficient, now, here’s this woman was She’s in her 60s, so probably yin deficient.

If they’re going through, they’re elderly, going through perimenopause, or they have issues with yang rising like headaches, then you need to add yin strengthening foods to their diet. Like I love sea plants for that. And so keeping them looking at what’s going on, getting their digestion stronger before their procedure.

Chi deficient patient, you’re going to, number one, recommend fresh air and exercise. Those are actually good recipes for your chi deficient patient. Obviously, they might need to start slowly, but that’s okay. Fresh air and exercise are good for them. They can make an oat porridge. You can recommend qigong to them.

You’re blood deficient patient. Now they’re going to be blood deficient after surgery. So this is why they need to come in before and after surgery. So we might have some post op recommendations for them too because they need to build blood again. So foods that are chlorophyll rich Of course, meat has blood in it for your vegetarian.

They can use things eat foods like beans. And then blood is particularly weakened by sugar. So trying to get people to cut down on the amount of sugar in their diet, plus we know too much sugar negatively affects the spleen, right? It’ll start to create dampness. The spleen is, Its flavor is sweet, but it doesn’t like too much sweet.

And then looking for people who have phlegm, right? Now they might have acne, right? Acne is absolutely can be a damp issue. It can be a heat issue. That’s why we not only need to treat it topically, but we also need to treat it internally. So you might have them reduce things like dairy products if you know that they have too much damp in their bodies.

Foods that can resolve dampness are adzuki beans, barley, celery, radishes, seaweed, and garlic. And remember, some of these foods have more than one property. Most of them do. Looking at that helps. If a patient’s going to surgery, they’ve had surgery, they’re going to have chemotherapy, they’ve had chemotherapy, food is a great way to help treat them.

Boost their immune system for chemotherapy, you always need, also need to make sure that you’re helping reduce the toxic heat that’s affecting the kidneys. And then, boost their immune system, get their, reduce mucus, if they’ve had chemo chemotherapy. Analgesia, which they have for surgery.

You want to help the liver process all that. So there’s a lot to do post surgery. Boost their immune system with cruciferous vegetables. Garlic has antibiotic activities and inhibits viruses. So that might be helpful for them after their surgery. Deep water fish are rich sources of omega 3 fatty acids.

And seaweeds, of course, for overall. Immunity boosting. Almonds have a lot of amino acids and essential fatty acids. Ginseng and chicken is a great combination for people recovering from surgery, childbirth, or prolonged illness. And then improving the digestion, you can use things like ginseng licorice tea.

And ginger is, of course, great for the digestion. Oats strengthen digestion and build qi. Omega 3 fatty acids are important for immune function, brain development, and treating malnutrition. And then also another source of omega 3s is alpha linolenic acid. And this is in vegetable oils, flax seed, pumpkin seed.

A lot of things we can do for our patients. after and before surgery. Have them add dark green vegetables. The western diet really doesn’t include enough omega 3s, so anything we can do to help people get those into their bodies is important. As I said, sugar, they need to cut down on that. Especially processed sugar.

Natural sugar takes longer to digest in the body, just like whole grains, but we need to have them reduce their sugar because it can actually damage the digestion and the immune system. Also, too much processed sugar contributes to herpes outbreaks, PMS, nervousness, and irritability. So the best source of sweetness for our patients are foods like sweet potatoes, natural sweeteners, instead of allowing them or giving them good advice on why not to eat too much processed sugar.

And then the post surgery diet can include a lot of things I’ve said, grains, vegetables, seaweeds supplementation with fish for essential fatty acids and then a little more So we can get the toxins out of their body. And finally, to treat arthritic or rheumatic conditions, avoid excess meat or protein, alcohol, tobacco, coffee.

Again, refined sugar, all of those can lead to having a little more pain. And Some say nightshade vegetables can increase pain, and then I have down eat fresh goat milk because it’s a more digestible fat and has a broader mineralization, but barley and wheatgrass, anything that’s anti inflammatory and detoxes, for example, I have that.

arthritis and rheumatic conditions can be treated well with the post op diet that I just mentioned. So there you have advice about using food as medicine. It is one of the basic standard traditional Chinese medicine therapies that we can help our patients with. And again, this is Dr. Martha Lucas, and I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for allowing me to share this information with you.

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As that’s pulse diagnosis. Now, with my system, it’s very important that we feel a flow in the pulse. So when we have our fingers on the patient’s pulses, both left and right, we want to be able to feel a flow of sine waves.

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Hi, this is Dr. Martha Lucas, and I am here to talk to you a little bit about pulse diagnosis today. I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for this opportunity to talk to you to speak with you because if you know me at all or have watched any of my presentations here, you know that I think the most important skill that we have in Chinese medicine is the correct diagnosis.

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And for me, As that’s pulse diagnosis. Now, with my system, it’s very important that we feel a flow in the pulse. So when we have our fingers on the patient’s pulses, both left and right, we want to be able to feel a flow of sine waves. So for example, here, we would want to be able to see a flow of sine waves.

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Going from this way, and then on the left side, we want it to go this way. And as a sine wave is up and down, right? Yang rising to the peak, and then the yin down. And between these, so between our left and right pulses, we will see the sine waves connect in what looks like the infinity symbol.

These connect this way. around and over and up. So we get the infinity symbol from these wrists. Infinity coming over like this. Sine wave. That’s how we know that all of the organ systems are connected. connected and flowing with each other because good health is the flow of energy, the flow of yin and yang from organ system to organ system.

Now, if you’re not paying attention to the flow, let’s say you never heard of that before, things, yin and yang do the tai chi symbol, they flow with each other, but you’ve never thought about that in the pulses. Do what? You take what you think is slippery away, or you take what you think is wiry away, and then you say, Oh, good.

It doesn’t feel wiry anymore. That’s not really a sufficient goal for treatment. Sure, the acupuncture needles did something. They, theoretically, what they did, if it doesn’t feel wiry anymore, was, They opened up the channel to more energy flow, which is always a good thing. Or if you feel like you felt slippery and that went away.

Then again it opened up the channels for flow. I always pick on slippery and wiry because the name of my book is Pulse Diagnosis. One of my books, pulse Diagnosis Beyond Slippery and Wiry, because I feel like in a lot of schools, especially the school I went to. We all knew how to feel slippery and wiry, but there’s so much more than that, and so many depths of pulses than superficial, middle, deep.

We can feel the depth of even pre birth emotional issues in the pulses, so we know that We can feel the person’s whole life from the very beginning to up to the end when yin and yang start to separate, which looks like this, right? The yin is going, the organ systems are getting empty. They can’t hold the energy anymore.

And so that allows the yang to just rise up uncontrollably. So the pulses literally start to separate like this. And it’s interesting that students sometimes in my. Intern courses will bring, I always tell them, bring in their toughest cases. Oftentimes it’s somebody who’s a little bit older, maybe they’ve got some cancer going on, and they’ll say, feel how this person’s 84 years old and feel how strong their pulses are.

And I will point out to them that isn’t a good thing. That’s not a healthy, strong pulse. It’s yin and yang starting to separate like that so that the yang is hitting your fingertips very hard because it doesn’t have any control. Core down there. So there are many beautiful things to learn about the pulses.

These are what has kept me interested in Chinese medicine for 25 years. In fact, I recently took a little trip to the town where my mentor lived and took it. It’s now a barber shop, but I took a picture of the little building and I’m going to write a little newsletter about how that What is now a barbershop was really my beginning in Chinese medicine with my pulse diagnosis mentor Jim Ramholz more than 25 years ago and how that has just kept pulse has kept Chinese medicine alive for me.

So I wanted to tell you a little bit today also about a recent situation where I Balance the pulses, but I did not use acupuncture because, I like to tell people Chinese medicine is a complete system of medicine, right? Acupuncture is just one of the therapies that we use. It’s probably the most well known therapy, the most very much.

well studied in terms of research studies therapy, but it’s not the only therapy we can use when someone comes in and we need to give them some treatment. And you all know Gua Sha, Tui Na, all that, but with this particular case, I used a combination of just touching the person while I had my hand on certain points.

on either the left or the right wrist, depending on what I was trying to change. And some moxa. So just stick moxa. I didn’t use a moxa bong. In this case, I wanted to be able to move the moxa around to different places with my hand on the pulse. And so I use stick moxa. So this person someone I’ve treated for a long time.

She initially came to me many years ago, probably. 20 years ago because she wanted to get pregnant, she ended up adopting a child, but that child is now in college. So I know it was a long time ago and she’s gluten intolerant. So she was, she, I’ll never forget, told me that if she goes to a restaurant and a piece of wheat has touched the plate on which she ate, she would have some sort of a gluten intolerant reaction.

So in her case The diagnosis of gluten intolerance and her experience with it was intermingled with fear, right? And fear we see in a scattered kidney pulse. The kidneys look, I draw them like little dots on the piece of paper, which means there’s no form to it. It’s just, little pieces of energy that are just scattered in and among the kidney position.

So in this case, we had a few things to deal with, but for example, this patient never traveled because she was so afraid of gluten. We, I, she ended up being able to travel. She got I think a scuba diving certificate. So she was able to travel and do that. And her life, she still. She doesn’t eat anything with gluten in it, but you can tell that her life was more robust.

She had less fear, et cetera, et cetera. Of course, adopting a child added a good deal of joy to her life. So I would see her on and off after that. But she recently came in just, she looked, she almost looked like a ragdoll. Her spirit was, Not really even there. I thought she looked a little gray.

She was very thin. She’d lost 15 pounds very quickly. She was just basically an emotional wreck, which is why her spirit looked so dull and just almost not there. She looked, she might have, you might say, like an empty vessel. She had a number of emotional. Her daughter went away to college, but that was about a year and a half ago.

She claimed that it all went well, but she had gotten a divorce prior to that. There was divorce, there was the daughter going away to college, which again, she claimed she was totally well adjusted to, but I have my misgivings about that. But she had most recently had a very Separating interaction with her parents and her sister, and her parents are aging and need some care, and so there was the burden of the guilt of feeling like, oh, I’m going to need to take care of my parents.

And now I’ve broken up with the more or less. Plus, she also had a relationship breakup. And because of all this emotional burden, and, she was not able to eat. So that was where the weight loss came in. Everything she ate, even the things she knew were quote unquote safe to eat, she couldn’t eat, lots of vomiting, and panic attacks.

The day she came to see me was in the afternoon. She told me she’d had five panic attacks that day. So I thought, alright, just looking at her, I, and I’m a good and gentle needler. And she is one of my less is more needle patients. I’m sure we all have some of those where you’re, you take the pulses and you study the, I study the pulses to think, what are the four to six needles I can use with this person that’s actually going to change the pulses back to normal and back to balance.

So she’s one of those. But I just said to myself that day, I’m not going to do any needles. So I said, look, let’s get you up on the table and see what’s happening. One of the things that was happening was that her heart was completely blocked. So the liver came up toward the heart, but there was just a big block there.

No movement in the heart pulse at all, which made sense to me because she had just separated herself from some people. It didn’t really go well. She had a breakup, et cetera, et cetera. So the heart doesn’t want to, feel any of that kind of energy. Remember, all of the organ systems are set up to protect the spirit.

So the I, so I had my hand, that’s the left side, right? The left pulses. So I had one hand there, my pulse taking hand. And all I did was put my right hand over her heart. I didn’t put it on any acupuncture points. I just thought, I’m just going to put my hand here as a comforting, comforting.

Motion and lo and behold, it was just unbelievable, the heart pulse opened up. So I thought, alright, so the heart is feeling, it needs to be open, right? How are, how is this energy going to get over to these kidneys, like I told you in the figure 8, if this isn’t open, if the heart isn’t open, the heart’s small intestine position.

I was very thrilled about that. So I just kept that position for a few minutes, just, letting her calm down, letting her breathe, letting her spirit be open, feeling the liver calm down, feeling it get much more smooth, then the kidneys can come in, right? Because the kidneys want to protect themselves against getting stolen away by perverse liver energy.

So I thought, all right, once I get that open, I went over to her. took her right pulses, right side, because of course, she’s got that gluten intolerance, digestive issues. And so in this particular case, her spleen and stomach pulse was empty. So it went down like this. It was, I draw it like a down arrow. So from childhood, she had issues around nurturing.

And and that ended up as gluten intolerance. So in this case, I kept my pulse taking hand on that, those fingers on that pulse and put my hand just on her abdomen. So I spread it out between REN8 and REN12 because I wanted to get as much of her abdomen as I could. And I let that fill up.

I let that particular, the earth pulse, the spleen stomach pulse start to fill up a little bit. So she had some energy to live, right? That’s our nurturing part of our pulses, the earth. So we needed to build that up so she had some energy for actual living. So I got that going, spent a few minutes with my hand right there and then I went back to the left side, tested out, made sure that the kidney, liver, heart positions were still open and flowing.

So I knew I could get some cross pulse flow going. And then I decided I was going to use some Moxa because I thought let’s get some heat back into the system, rebuild the digestion. I think that’s one of the things Moxa is really good for. And I love doing it over REN8, of course, because then we’re really building up the, her basic core, which I think had been damaged by all of this emotional stuff.

So I did Moxa. There for a few minutes again, constantly checking the pulses to see how they were changing. Then I went down to Kidney 1, excuse me, I did it on Kidney 1. And and just generally around the kidney, Kidney 1, Kidney 2, Kidney 3. Again, I wanted to build that energy up, getting it going.

Forced up through the system because remember in the pulses, the kidneys fund everything. In the, in pulse diagnosis, we know that the kidneys Sorry, the kidneys fund everything. So all the energy to all of the other organ systems is coming from the kidneys. So I knew I needed to get those built back up.

So the getting the heart built up, getting the earth rebuilt is going to start from the kidneys. So I worked on the kidneys. I went back up to the abdomen again, did more moxa around. Ren8, Ren12 to rebuild that up. And then I finished the whole treatment by once again putting my hand on her heart area to get the kidneys and the heart flowing together.

And, oh my goodness, after the treatment, she looked So much brighter. Her spirit was alive again. Of course, she felt better. She felt calm. I was a little nervous about the panic attack part. For one thing, I didn’t want to put needles in, leave her in a room when the patient had just told me that she was possibly gonna have a panic attack.

I felt really good about that treatment. And the reason I wanted to share that story was because it goes to show we don’t always have to do acupuncture. The pulses will respond to other kinds of energy. So use all of your skills. If you’re thinking, Oh, today we don’t want to do any I don’t want to do any needles today.

Always take the pulses. Make notes about what the pulses are doing, draw a pulse picture, and then you will have that to compare with at the end of whatever it is, the treatment that you give. In one of my internships, we just did, I did gua sha and some spinal work on a man that one of the students brought in, who came in super crooked and a lot of pain.

He could barely walk. And at that time, again, I felt like, all right, let’s take his pulses because it’s a pulse diagnosis internship. But we just worked on his body using physical medicine from Chinese medicine, instead of using acupuncture needles. And again, we saw a great change in not only his physicality and pain and ability to walk, but in his pulses.

So I just want to encourage you that no matter what. Whatever therapy you use, your pulse diagnosis is your way to get down to what is the cause of going on with the person and how is your treatment working or not. Because remember, if the pulse doesn’t change, then you need to change your treatment plan because the pulses will always respond when you are on the right track.

with your treatment plan. So that’s just one story that I thought just really struck me as let’s use all of our skills. We don’t have to just use that one therapy acupuncture, but we always have pulse diagnosis as our best. basic line of treatment. It tells us what’s going on with the person and their body gives us that feedback of what worked, what didn’t work.

And then we just keep going until we get those nice sine wave, very smooth, balanced, yang and yin connecting each other. So if it’s Martha, again, this is Martha Lucas. If you would like more information about my courses or my post diagnosis internships, you can go to my website, lucasteachings. com. My private practice site is acupuncturewoman.

com and you can email me with questions at drmlucas at acupuncturewoman. com. I am always happy to help someone become the best doctor Chinese medicine practitioner that you can become. And so once again, I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for letting me talk with you about pulse diagnosis and good luck in your practice.

 

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Lovingly call a slippery and wiry school where all the patients we saw in clinic had slippery and wiry pulses, or thin and wiry.

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Hi, I am Dr. Martha Lucas, and I am here with part two of Pulse diagnosis Beyond Slippery and Wiry. I am located, my practices are in Denver and then in Littleton, Colorado. I. Work at a regular internal medicine, modern medicine practice. They asked me to come there many years ago to what they said was help them with their diagnoses, which I thought was pretty cool.

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I also, I. Teach Chinese medicine classes. I’ve been in practice for more than 20 years. The name of the course is, or the name of these webinars in my book is Post-Diagnosis Beyond Slippery and Wiry, because I always say that I went to what I call a slippery. Lovingly call a slippery and wiry school where all the patients we saw in clinic had slippery and wiry pulses, or thin and wiry.

Occasionally we could say thin and wiry, but that was pretty much all we learned, and my school did not have any courses on pulse diagnosis. I was very lucky and. In my very first semester of school, my mentor, Jim Ramal, offered a full semester long course in pulse diagnosis, which I was so excited to be there that I took the class because I had previously been, or still working in Western medicine as a research psychologist, but was very curious about what else is going on besides my patients were cardiovascular.

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Patients who had just had bypass surgery and researchers are curious and I just wanted to know, hey, your engine just got fixed, but what else is working to keep that engine working well? So that’s why I started to study various energy medicines and ended up in Chinese medicine school. Just because I had, as a regular person, taken a color puncture course, but needed to know why certain colors, why on certain points, which I knew nothing about ’cause I was just a regular person, but.

My mentor made me fall in love with his method of pulse diagnosis, and and I never looked back. I continued in school, became a, obviously became a practitioner, and my specialty is the diagnosis. People come to me for. An in-depth diagnosis because guess what? Your treatment is going to be more effective if you actually give a correct diagnosis, and I would like to take that sentence.

I had acupuncture and it didn’t work out of the English language because either the patient didn’t work at it. They expect you to cure their five year long back pain and two treatments or. The diagnosis wasn’t right and then the treatment just didn’t work right? So I want to very much thank the American Acupuncture Council for allowing me this opportunity to go on and on about Pulse diagnosis, because as you can tell, I’m super excited about it.

And you can always look me up@lucasteachings.com or my private practice site is acupuncture women.com, and I am always happy to answer. Any questions that you might have. So let’s go to the slides. As I said, this is part two. So I asked this question, what is this thing called the normal pulse? Because in part one I talked about how even historically, and not only in Chinese medicine, I.

Doctors talked about this thing, taking the pulse during healthy times, and they talked about what a normal pulse is that practitioners need to know how to feel a normal, balanced pulse as well as morbid pulses or imbalance or the pulses of a person who has an illness. And we are going to talk about the normal pulse.

Jin we said it is imperative to know the normal pulse or the pulse in the healthy person before the morbid pulses are to be learned because a morbid pulse is in fact. The abnormal change of a normal pulse? My school never told me what normal was. They talked about I think my school might have been a stomach cheese school that they said, oh, a normal healthy pulse is slightly slippery and somewhat wiry.

Oh my goodness. Could that be more ambiguous? What? What do you mean slightly wiry or slight, somewhat slippery. That’s wrong. That is not what a normal pulse feels like. What a normal pulse is a sine wave yang and yin. So yang rises, yin falls, and then they connect each other. So it’s a series of sign waves, yang and yin yang and yin.

And it’s symmetrical. So the yang isn’t founding up, and the yin is this little tiny thing. It’s symmetrical, it feels smooth, it’s connected. The yang and the yin are mixing, which is what they do, right? They mix with each other to create a wave that they’re each supporting each other. So that’s what normal feels and that’s the goal of every treatment.

The person comes in, you feel they’re outta balance pulse. You determine what you need to do with whatever you’re going to do. Acupuncture gua, una, herbs moa, and then you do your treatment. I recommend a little bit of treatment, refill the pulses to see what happened or what didn’t happen. A little bit of treatment.

Refill the pulses, so it’s a kind of a little puzzle that you’re trying to fix. So any break in symmetry from that normal sine wave yang and yin yang and yin is pathological. If the body isn’t able to self-regulate itself anymore. I. Without help in a perfectly healthy world, the body would self-regulate.

You’d have some outta balance. Let’s say there’s a cold or something and your pulse gets a little bit outta balance, but then your body regulates itself and it goes back into balance. If that. Doesn’t happen. If it can’t return to the normal sine wave, then we need to see people, which is why I recommend what I call maintenance treatments, which is, okay, we got you back into a healthy state.

I’ll see you in a month. And I always tell people, don’t go back to square one. Don’t not go back to square one and call me and say, oh my goodness. Because that would be. Your body is going back into the old pattern of imbalance, instead of staying in a more balanced state.

And believe me, we can retrain a person’s body to learn how to reregulate itself and get more balanced. Are we all ever gonna be perfectly balanced like we were in utero? And sometimes, not even then, frankly, depending on our parents’ health, depending on our parents’ relationship, et cetera. But we can get closer to it.

We can go out of a sickness state into a wellness state more quickly or out of an emotional state, into a calmer state more regularly when we, as the practitioners retrain the person’s body to remember what normal feels like. Because when all of our energies are substantial in communicating with each other, then there is not what we call a pathological pulse.

So we can deal, we can literally watch the health issue go from healthy to unhealthy to back to healthy, as I said, the front of the position. The uprising part is young. That’s the functional aspect of the organ and the back or the downward flow is the yin, which is more the physicality of the organ. So again, using this idea, we can see is this person’s problem more a function or more of a physical?

Problem the large intestine and constipation, we would maybe be able to determine whether the constipation or change in bowel habits is due to a weakness in the large intestine function handling a typical food load, or whether or not it’s over that physical organ is overburdened or both. Other interesting qualities are the co-sign.

So in my way of my system, we have the sine wave, which is normal. We have the co-sign wave, which is the opposite of a sine wave. So it starts more in the yin part and goes up. So that’s, and you, when we, when I teach this in classes and you get to see it like depression is a co-sign in the liver.

Position. Once you see a co-sign, then you are able to recognize it more and more. As I say, it’s often seen in the liver, but it’s seen in other positions as well, and we need to know what level it starts at. If the co-sign starts at the deep level, it’s an older issue with the person, an older emotional issue, or an older.

Physical issue, maybe even they’ve adapted to it. If it starts at the top level, it’s more current, something that they’re dealing with right now. For example, taking that depth idea, sinking or emptiness or you don’t feel anything, it’s empty in the spleen, stomach, the earth position. That can mean early childhood trauma.

It can mean what? What is called the relinquishment wound by psychologists, which means. The person was separated from their mother right at birth. For example, my oldest grandson was a preemie, and so he was, had to be taken out by emergency c-section, and he was taken away from my daughter at that moment.

All right? So he would have a tendency to have what is called the relinquishment wound, and sure enough, because. Spleen, stomach, lung, large intestine, rr immune system. What did he have as an early young one? Immune system issues. What did he have as an early, young one? Skin issues. So these were predictable according to his, preemie experience leading to immune problems may be seen. And he recently got diagnosed with asthma. So all of that, and he’s, thank God, and I also thank Chinese medicine. He is what I would call a very healthy 17-year-old, despite the fact that he went through some early life problems with strider and with rashes, and now has asthma.

But he’s a track runner in cross country. So Chinese medicine, I. Really as you if you couldn’t tell. Really love it. And then other interesting qualities are nodding. This movement is a three dimensional movement, so it comes up in the pulse. You can feel it, touch your finger, and it stays there. You probably heard about it in school as called the spinning bean pulse.

What you would feel in the beginning as you’re learning how to feel an knotted pulse is just it hitting your finger and no flow. It’s not going anywhere. That’s what a tumor feels like. That’s what a cyst feels like. That’s what a fibroid feels like, because what is that diagnosis? It is stagnation.

Stagnation in one spot, right? That cyst is in one spot. That fibroid is in the uterus, the nodding movement is eventually you’ll, if it’s growing, especially, you can feel the spinning at the top. You can feel the movement at the top, but that knotted movement is you feeling a localized stagnation.

Sometimes you feel it after people have a surgery because they just had localized. Trauma, localized damage in their body. You might feel it in the lung pulse because the person has some sort of mucus blocks in there. So that’s what nodding is. And it might seem like a pause because it’s not flowing.

It seems like a pause because it’s rising up. And you feel it before you feel the movement on. Some people think of this as an intermittent pulse, but sometimes you need to be a little more discerning to see whether it’s an actual or not, and. I’m talking to my patients while I’m taking their pulses because when I feel something, as I just said, it can be more than one thing.

So to asking the patient, how’s this, how’s that? Have you ever had this? Is this happening? Is that happening? Then we, I. Are getting down to the nitty gritty of what’s going on. Like the person says, oh yes, I’ve just been diagnosed with colon cancer. That’s why I’m here to see you. Then we might feel that in the right distal position because that’s the lung large intestine.

But we also might feel it in the proximal position because we are feeling the physical organ, the pulses can be a model for the whole body. What’s deep inside and what’s more on the surface, and where it is not only located in what we learned as the traditional pulse positions, but also where is that organ in the actual body.

So we are doing a lot of observation along with what we might call clinical findings, what their doctor has told them they have. So we we might think we’re looking at energetic qualities, but actually we are looking at impulse diagnosis at the physical body, the emotional bodies, and the spiritual bodies.

For example, we don’t ever wanna see a scattered pulse, right? That’s someone who’s living in fear, right? And fear and anxiety are almost the same thing. Fear is a little more dramatic than anxiety, but this person is in constant vigilance. Their kidneys get overloaded, get what we call scattered.

We don’t ever wanna feel, scattered kidney position. And then everything gets more tight after that because the kidneys aren’t flowing, they’re scattered. The sympathetic nervous system is showing up in the pulses because their muscles are getting tight. They’re. Central nervous system is overloaded, so it feels scattered little points of light under your finger instead of a nice kind of flow.

So this patient might think of everything as threatening, and that’s because they’re not centered, right? Their pulse. Can’t moderate itself back to calming the nervous system down and regulating and centering them anymore, they’ve become in that pattern of fear, anxiety, nervousness, and what we do is help that get regulated back to normal, back to balance, back to flowing back to the kidneys, being not scattered and supporting all the other organ systems.

So we talk a little bit about the pulses in cancer development, since we’re talking about nodding in tumors. In a healthy person, we know about the microcosmic orbit, right? Think about it. It’s a sine wave, and what happens when you do a sine wave? The other wave. So sine wave. Sine wave, which is how we communicate left and right, is the infinity symbol, right?

Sine wave this way, sine wave that way. And so we want to support the lower Dante N. We want to facilitate that connection. Some people call it the Tai G connection between yang and Yin and. There’s this story about how monks used to click their teeth actually pumping the salivary glands to catch and contain the fire element Ming Mu, to generate the saliva and swallow it, guiding it down.

The Ren Ma, back to the Dante. And so this idea of preserving your Ming Man fire has been around for a long time. And there are various ways that people in the past have done it. Now a blockage in the diaphragm, what we would call a dmai block, may prevent that saliva from getting down to the Dante.

And it’s the same way energetically, if the dmai is blocked, the vertical flowing channels are not communicating with each other anymore. So if you are, for example, treating a fertility patient and men and women, and you’re. Tonifying, the lower, their reproductive system in the lower J and also trying to help their digestion, but their dimmi is blocked and you don’t know it, you’re not helping them because where’s that energy gonna go?

How are, how is digestion going to communicate with the reproductive area? How is the middle or the upper going to connect with the lower? It’s not because those organ systems are dissociated when there’s a DI block, we need, that’s an example, a simple example of something that we need to be able to feel in the pulses so that we can reorganize those systems so that they’re flowing into each other.

So I recommend taking the pulses with your non-dominant hand for one thing with your right hand, I mean with your dominant hand. It happens to be my right hand. I might take, be taking notes. I might be writing down something that the patient says, and I’m also going deep to superficial. So feeling the Ming man feeling the kidneys.

Feeling what’s going on in their core and then moving up to what’s more current. And for example, a short kidney pulse that can be a blocked dite. Usually a blocked dite feels a little stronger than just a weak kidney. But if the, if there’s a short kidney pulse, a short proximal position, pulse, the kidneys aren’t flowing, that’s the bottom line.

If it’s short, they’re not flowing. They’re not supporting the other organ systems. A short heart pulse. Liver attacking the heart, maybe liver attacking the heart, and the heart is. Stopping that because it’s trying to protect the spirit. Is it old trauma that’s causing that? It could be. These are all things it could mean, and this is partly why we need to communicate with the patient.

I said in part one that like the great sociologist, Andrew Greeley said people will say anything and he was talking about surveys, how you can’t believe surveys. Because people will say anything. Same thing with po with the person’s body. They, I’ve had so many patients that I have felt some sort of old unresolved emotional issue or trauma.

I don’t use the word trauma in the first treatment, of course. And they’ll, I’ll ask them, oh, do you have anything unresolved? Something from the, and they’ll say no, I don’t think so. And then the second or third visit, they’ll say, I was thinking about what you said, and you’re right, I had blah, blah, blah.

So it’s. I just helped that patient know themselves better. I just helped that patient understand the cause of their fibromyalgia or their stomach, their digestive issues. So we are helping the patient know themselves better and understand why. Understand why they are having this particular illness or symptom.

Knotted left kidney pulse in the system I’m using in teach, the left kidney position can be the uterus and the prostate. So if it’s knotted in there, maybe it’s uterine fibroid, maybe there’s some prostate inflammation. A knot at the top of the stomach and or large intestine position is thyroid. In Chinese medicine, we don’t have a thyroid organ, right?

We don’t talk about it. We don’t have, certainly don’t have a thyroid channel per se, but where is the thyroid? It’s near some channels where it’s blockage it’s having little nodules or it’s inability to function well, can be felt in the pulses, and then the gallbladder and San Jal positions, especially at the sensory level.

Can show brain or central nervous system activity. In fact, gall bladder and Sanja channels are very good channels to treat the brain. So let’s talk for a minute about a couple of case studies. So a large gel pulse, right proximal. Remember, we’re gonna look at the positions in some unique ways. This can be, as I said, something going on with the brain.

Or. Something going on physically, right? A patient who has IBS, you might see that big movement in either the middle or the lower gel, but sometimes it’s nervous tension going to the brain. It might have some heat and dampness in it. So we’re looking at things in a unique, more detailed way. A young woman after a C-section, and she has a very stiff and painful neck.

All the tests come back normal, right? She doesn’t have any spine issues. If her pulse in the small intestine position is. Empty. Okay. Of course, her neck is full of muscle tension and knots and inflamed trigger points because there’s no oxygen and blood flow in the small intestine channel. So you know, you might be thinking, oh, wait a minute.

I should be feeling a choppy pulse. No. Remember, sometimes back problems, neck problems, muscle problems are hidden. Because it’s severely depleted, cheat, in her case from childbirth. It’s the hardest thing a woman’s body is ever going to do. Build. Then deliver another human being. So we, this is what I’m saying, we need to be open to what’s going on in all of the channels near where the person’s symptom is.

Or they may have a short wry movement going from the stomach backward. That’s what worry feels like. And we never wanna have worry in the pulses because not only is it not going forward to. Help the lung, large intestine and the immune system be strong, but it’s going backward and attacking the kidneys.

So case study examples, block dite, like I said, fertility example. The person has fallen, they’ve been rear-ended. They’ve been in some sort of accident. And by the way, falls include things like ski falls and sports falls where the person falls and gets right back up. They look down, nothing’s broken, they’re not bleeding.

The Dai still gets blocked. So again, it’s important to know what the person’s history is, what their activities are, if we’re feeling the Dai block, because our treatment is not going to be as effective as we want it to be. If there’s a Dai block. I mentioned a little bit about earth and metal connection.

That’s the immune system, right? So the spleen, stomach, lung, large intestine, they all need to be flowing with each other. So that would mean the kidney position, earth position, metal position, all Y and yin yang and yin. So we can have a strong immune system. Let’s say the person comes in with acne, maybe that is liver stress shooting out.

To the skin, especially on the forehead. Stress, acne especially shows up on the forehead. So again, with acne, we can’t just look at hormones, we can’t just look at heat. We have to look at other possibilities. Of what’s causing this person’s acne. And then the separation of yin and yang, they call that the end of life, right?

That looks like you. What it looks like in the pulses is you only feel yang. And when you go down into the deep portion, it’s pretty, pretty empty. That’s ’cause the organ systems are getting weaker. They’re not able to hold energy anymore. And so what happens? There’s no root. So the pulses just go up y yang, young.

So you know, that’s I treat internal medicine, that’s my specialty. So I always say practitioners who only treat pain are fairly lucky ’cause they’re probably never gonna have to go through the death of a patient. But I went through the death of a patient my very first year out of school. I just had one pass away last year.

It’s when you treat internal medicine, you are going to eventually, as your patients get older and older. Feel that separation of yin and yang, and I don’t like it, but I, it’s a hint of what I need to do. Try to get some of that connection back so they have more of a flow in their pulses. And I’m always optimistic.

I am really, no matter what the person comes with, I at least. I am optimistic that I’m going to be able to maybe slow down the progression of the disease, slow, slow down their symptoms, take their symptoms away, make them feel better quality of life. Always super, super because I get a smile out of the pulses every day.

I. I’m one of those people who’s really lucky that as a woman of a certain age, as I like to say, I still love my work. It still makes me smile every day. It makes my patients smile every day. They’re always interested when they’re like, oh, you’re feeling something, aren’t you? I appreciate your listening to this part two of Pulse diagnosis beyond Slippery and wiry, and I will hopefully see you for part three.

Again, I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for allowing me to express my excitement to you about Pulse diagnosis, and hopefully I’ll see you next time.

 

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In a very blessed way, my pulse diagnosis mentor, and then I became in love with the way I take pulses and frankly, that’s what’s kept me interested in Chinese medicine for the last 25 years.

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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, this is Dr. Martha Lucas, and today I am going to be talking with you about pulse diagnosis. I have a special system that I’ve been using for my whole Chinese medicine career in my offices in Denver and Littleton, Colorado. I am a research psychologist, so I started out my. Quote unquote medical career in Western medicine doing research in hospital settings.

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But I was immediately curious as researchers tend to be about what was operating with the patients I was seeing other than. They just had cardiovascular bypass surgery, so I knew the engine had been fixed a day or two before, but I wondered what else is operating for their healing. So I started to study various energy medicines including reiki, tonal alignment, and then I learned something called color puncture.

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Which as you would imagine, is based on acupuncture, which is based on Chinese medicine. But the teachers didn’t talk much about the theory of why you did certain colors on certain points. So I went to Chinese medicine school. I. To learn that I didn’t really intend to become a practitioner of Chinese medicine.

I just wanted to learn why I was doing certain things, because I couldn’t imagine my patients asking, oh, Dr. Lucas, why are you doing blah, blah, blah? And I say, because Aquila said, Dr. Mandel says so there I met very. In a very blessed way, my pulse diagnosis mentor, and then I became in love with the way I take pulses and frankly, that’s what’s kept me interested in Chinese medicine for the last 25 years.

If I was doing prescription Chinese medicine, I’d be bored. So my goal, part of my goal in my practice is to help as many practitioners as want to be most excellent diagnostician. So we are going to be talking about pulse diagnosis. I. And I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for allowing me this opportunity to do this show.

This will be part one in a series about pulse diagnosis. So let’s go to the slides. I, the whole presentation is called Pulse Diagnosis Beyond Slippery and Wiry because. I always say I went to a slippery and wiry school where everybody’s pulses were slippery and wiry. That’s what the teachers all knew.

And occasionally we could say they were thin and wiry, but that. That was about the extent of our experience with Pulse diagnosis. So I am excited to show people that there is so much more in Pulse diagnosis than just three and wiry, which is why I call my book and this presentation beyond slippery and wiry.

I am fascinated and I hope we all would be fascinated by the history of Pulse diagnosis. In fact, it has a very storied history, so I really don’t understand why in modern schools they’re not teaching it as our. Primary diagnostic tool. As I said, I was lucky to have a mentor. My school didn’t teach pulse diagnosis.

I think the theory teacher talked about it for about a week. Maybe occasionally someone would say, oh, let’s go around the room and feel everybody’s pulses. And guess what? They were all wiry, where students were spleen deficient, et cetera, et cetera. I the old pictogram actually is an image.

It’s the classic pulse taking with using three fingers. The other diagnostic methods or examinations are used in modern medicine as well as Chinese medicine. There’s an inspection, but in modern medicine, its imaging technologies. Our inspection tools are our pulses and our eyes, our fingers rather to take the pulses in our eyes.

There’s listening, obviously, or maybe not. So obviously the DOT MDs listen, they want to hear what your chief complaint is. We certainly listen to our patient’s chief complaint, but. As the great sociologist and survey master, Andrew Greeley said, people will tell you anything. And so that’s why he suggested we shouldn’t believe surveys.

I believe in pulse diagnosis that people will tell me anything or they’ll tell me nothing. How often does somebody tell you their digestion is great or. With women, oh no, they don’t have any PMS. Their periods are quote unquote normal. So I have learned for many years that people will just say anything and that it’s our job to really figure out what’s going on with people.

I know you’ve all heard someone say, oh, I’ve had acupuncture and it didn’t work. There are two reasons for that. Number one, the patient didn’t work at it. They had back pain for a bunch of years. They come in, they’re hoping you’re gonna make it better in one or two treatments, and so then they tell their friends, oh, I had acupuncture for that, and it didn’t work well, the patient didn’t work.

And then there’s the other reason, which is an incorrect diagnosis. A non a, not a total diagnosis that the practitioner just touches the pulses for a second and sees their wiry, and that’s their diagnosis. No, that is not, that’s not what you would call an adequate diagnosis. So that’s our inquiry part.

We can question the patient, but as I said they’ll say anything. So I feel like. We need to have a tool that even while they are talking with us, we can have our fingers on the pulses and we can be talking with them about what’s going on. For example, I have a patient who’s struggling with Lyme dis he is struggling with the treatments for Lyme disease, and right now he’s taking three different antibiotics.

That’s the protocol of either one or two doctors that he’s going to see, and of course, he. Tells me yes, he’s doing well because he can tell there’s die off and this other stuff. And I’m feeling his pulses and I can tell that his digestion isn’t right. And finally he admits. That he’s having some watery diarrhea.

And I explained to him already about the cold energy of antibiotics and how your digestion loves warm energy. And so he should be expecting maybe some negative side effects from the antibiotics. And of course, he tells me he’s. Pumping lots of prebiotics and probiotics, which also by the way, can have a negative effect on digestion.

Because I could tell that the digestion was struggling with the cold, I just put a Ong on Ren 12. No needles yet and put my fingers on his pulses and immediately could feel some young coming back, some more fullness to the pulses. And this young man has been seeing me and another practitioner who was trained in pulse diagnosis by me for a long time.

So he loves to talk about it, he loves to be educated about it. He’s very curious about how his kidneys are doing, how his liver is doing. And so it’s. I like educating our patients as well because an educated patient is a better referral source for you because they can say, I saw Dr. Lucas, she did blah, blah, blah.

She said, this is why this is happening. And then she treated it instead of, oh, I’m getting acupuncture and I don’t know what they’re doing. And it’s just a magical tool. It isn’t. It is not a mystery. It’s a medicine. And pulse diagnosis is not a mystery either. It’s a diagnostic tool that can be explained.

So for us to be able to decide what’s going on with the patient is the primary goal of every treatment in Chinese medicine. And we also have smelling right in, we would call these in modern medicine, more like blood tests and urine tests. My very first kidney disease patient, I could see. Smell. I could smell his kidney disease and he hasn’t had that smell since I think two treatments out.

So we’re all trying to do our diagnostic tools. And then the art of changing yin and yang. I call it balancing like my kidney disease patient. I balanced yin and yang. He came to me with priapism, and when I explained to a few students that I was doing some kidney yang points, they couldn’t believe it.

They’re like, yang. Oh my gosh. That would create an erection. Why on earth would you be doing kidney yang points for priapism? Because I was balancing. Not only kidney, yin and yang, but the whole system of yin and yang. So in the old days they used to say that the diag, you diagnosed the causes of illness according to what they called the complicated pulse.

And I just taught a seminar in cosmetic acupuncture, and we were talking about pulse diagnosis, and the students were saying, how, oh our teachers told us it’s too complicated. It would take a whole. 30 or 40 or 50 years longer than we’re gonna be in practice to learn it. And that is totally wrongheaded.

That is absolutely not true. You can absolutely learn how to be a good diagnostician. And the process back in the day was called ology, and this was as early as the inner canon talking about the normal pulse and the morbid pulses. Now, why is that important? Because if you don’t know how to see a normal pulse, if you don’t know what normal feels then you’re only ever going to be feeling.

Out of balance pulses. So part of what I like to teach people is the goal of every treatment is the normal pulse and how that feels. And I love the whole history of it. I love the original names and labels of things like the lung, great abyss. And honestly, if you think about the names, the original names.

It can also help you think about what you’re feeling in the pulses large intestine Union Valley of the Hand, young Ravine stomach surging young, like I just said, with that case study of the young man suffering through his medical treatments for Lyme disease. I put that Mong on run 12 to raise some young spleen surging gait, young pour the heart or also inside spirit gait celestial window, the small intestine beside the throat bend center, bladder bent part of the knee.

Great ravine, the kidneys. Of course the kidneys fund everything, right? Of course. They’re a great ravine. They fund all of the other movements, which is partly why they are so important. We all learn. Kidneys kidneys Ming Mu Fire, original Chief Fire in the belly. Why? Because that’s funding everything.

So if that starts to go down, then all of the other organ systems are going to be out of balance. There’s no such thing as an out of balance kidney pulse. Everything else is balanced. Not gonna happen. Palace of Toil. A colorful network vessel in the palm and rep represents the heart harmony, bone hole, sanja, suspended bell gallbladder, supreme surge liver.

And we know the liver helps. Move everything according to the inner Canon Pulse examination inspects the distribution of blood, and we know it’s of blood and oxygen inside the channels or meridians, and that diseases generate uneven distributions inside those channels. In other words, we are feeling the imbalances, the disruption of oxygen and blood in those channels, and that’s a part of how we make our diagnosis.

I. Some historical positions because I teach in my diagnosis courses, I teach it maybe what sounds like a few different positions. The basic positions are the same, but there are additional things we can feel like the uterus in the left uterus and prostate in the left kidney pulse. So in the old days. We might talk about the left distal pulse being heart, chest center, small intestine or pericardium or the right sun being the lung in the chest and the large intestine left, middle position, liver, diaphragm, gallbladder, spleen.

So these are all things that historically were felt you could feel in that position with the right side stomach and spleen. The left chair position, kidneys, pretty much the kidneys have always been in that. Most proximal position, kidney, abdomen, bladder, large intestine, and small intestine, because they’re deep, they’re in the lower jaw.

So it makes a certain amount of sense that we would feel that what’s going on with that organ system in the HUR position. Right side. Kidney, abdomen, pericardium, sanal, bladder life gait, small intestine, large intestine. Now, these are all historically talked about, the organ systems that we can feel in the certain positions.

The inner canine indicates that the stomach is the regular chie of a normal person, which of course I. Think is super, super ambiguous. But again, we’re going over a little bit of the history of it. And we talk about that being the person’s y qi. And if it gets weak, the stomach is going to come, become a little bit weak if it gets.

Vanquished gone. Stomach chi will be then scattered. And that’s a basic sign of life, right? That’s how we make our energy. So to have a good earth, solid earth, spleen, stomach, right middle side position is very important. And in my system, which goes back to early sixth century Korea. And from, in my experience, I know and teach about how early childhood trauma is held in that position, in that middle position on the right side, spleen, stomach, earth.

And it has to do with nurturing, lack of nurturing or even perceived lack of nurturing being separated from a parent at an early age or having early trauma. The classic of difficult issues mentions that if the upper part doesn’t have a pulse and the lower part has a pulse, that’s they call cumbersome, but we need to look at getting that better, right?

There shouldn’t be just a low pulse or a high pulse, a deep pulse in a superficial pulse. We need to get those pulses. Communicating with each other because the pulse can’t only have a root. It should have a root, but not only a root. And we all know that absence of a root pulse is going to show that there’s some debilitation in the kidney going on.

In the energy of the kidney, the history of pulse diagnosis isn’t only Chinese medicine either. Hindu physicians looked at the pulses they likened them to certain animals like the serpent, the frog, the swan, the peacock diseases were attributed to the humors, air, bile, and phlegm. And they felt like they were all reflected in the pulses.

And we talked certainly about. We talk a lot about phlegm being in the pulses. Otherwise, this wouldn’t be called beyond slippery and wiry. And they said that a disturbance in phlegm, the pulse would be slow and heavy, like the motion of a swan or a peacock, whereas dis some sort of disturbance in the air would be like the motion of a serpent.

Greek physicians also used pulse diagnosis. They included the knowledge of both music and geometry they felt were necessary in order to interpret the pulse and they. Paid attention to its rhythm or cadence. They also recognize size, frequency, force, and as I said, rhythm. And it is said that the physician Galen wrote more books on the subject of Pulse diagnosis than anyone before or since.

He emphasized the importance of feeling the pulse during healthy times so that we knew what a normal pulse felt like. And then the irregular, the imbalance, the illness pulses became more clear to us. They also studied the speed of the pulse length, depth, broadness strength, so you can see that not only Chinese medicine historians and doctors studied the pulses or all of these little subtle distinctions that can be in the pulse.

In fact, Galen even drew wave pictures, which is part of what I teach in my classes in Europe. Bordeaux brought about the idea of organic pulses and talked about. The, some of the pulses being shown above the diaphragm, seeing the organs above the diaphragm and some below the diaphragm, and then the superior pulses were divided into certain organs and the inferior pulses, the lower ones.

And I talked to people about feeling the upper, middle and lower jou locations of the organs in the pulses. So the earliest case histories used visual exam, listening, questioning, but palpation was the main diagnostic tool. They were palpating or reading what they called the grand rendezvous of the vessels.

And that is that area, the three finger width on both sides of the wrists, the grand rendezvous of the vessels. We have one dimensional models, which say the pulse is wiry. We have two dimensional models, which might say, I can feel a young pulse and a yin pulse, but we’re gonna be looking at more than three levels, three or more levels.

It’s quantum mechanics, which does sound complicated. Physics, quantum mechanics, that all sounds like it’s super, super comp complicated. But I can take that into. A discussion that everyone can understand and we can. Learn what I call a plausible methodology. So we’re going to be talking eventually about the top level skin, superficial level, skin surface, meridian activity, chief flow, emotions, the body’s interaction with the environment, middle level blood, functional aspects, organ function, metabolism are interfaced with.

Our internal organs in the environment. And then the deeper level, the bottom bone marrow organs, chronic disease, hidden emotion, unconscious emotions, adaptive level patterns that are fixed and you might not even know about. So unconscious emotions. And all of this means that we are going to be able to see current situations with the patient and older situations with the patient.

So the physical space that we’re feeling is going to give us a diagnostic. Perspective from birth or before birth up to the current because nothing is omitted in your pulses. It’s like a Rosetta Stone. It’s one symptom didn’t just come from yesterday. It’s a historical. Adding up of events that we can see in the person’s pulses.

So we are gonna be able to look at the circumstances, emotions, healing, disease progression, and that’s all gonna show up in the pulses. And the pulses should change during the treatment. You’re. Your treatment should work like that little Moab bong, changing the pulses while I was watching it, or your acupuncture prescription, changing the pulses.

So acupuncture treatments should be fluid, not prescriptions. I am not a believer in pre what I call prescription Chinese medicine, which means, oh, the person has. PMS. Let me look in a book and see what acupuncture points I should do. That is totally wrongheaded because not everyone’s PMS is caused by the same thing, and that’s your job to figure that out.

So this ends part one of my story or my training in Pulse diagnosis, my ex. You can see how excited I am about Pulse diagnosis and in part two, next time we are going to talk about what a normal pulse feels like. Talk about some emotions, talk about some case studies. So again, I wanna thank the American Acupuncture Council and I will see you next time.

 

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