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Food as Medicine Part 2

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

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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. 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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Acupuncture in the Heat of Summer

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Hi, my name is Moshe Heller, and I’m from the Moshen Herbs. I’d like to thank the to AAC for, for hosting my talk on the heat of the summer, how to support children and adults through this hot summer or the heat of the summer. So I wanted to mention that I’ve been seeing in my patients lately a lot of Heat diseases which manifest with sore throats and typical heat symptoms and a lot of damp heat.

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I’ve had quite a few cough, this dry, barky cough patients that also have this heat symptoms that usually comes with cough. Fever, they feel feverish, whether they have a fever or not. And also, a lot of COVID 19 presentations with slight fever, feeling very body achy. And also sore throat as part of that presentation and after a few days that develops into a dry cough.

So as I was seeing these cases that came very soon after that kind of damp heat weather that we were I think that I correlated that together and I started thinking of how I can support these patients that are going, that are presenting with these very hot and damp symptoms to prevent those things from happening.

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So let’s move to the slides. And this is going to be what I’ll be talking about, is the heat of the summer. And I just wanted to, I wanted to talk about this subject because this summer has been particularly hot. And, and, uh, there has been, I have been noticing that, And that there have been more than usual cases of colds and flus and strep and COVID 19.

More than usually what I usually see in the summer. So usually in the summer we see a lot less. illnesses. And so we’ve seen in the past two months that we’ve had already a few heat waves, and that is a little bit that shows that there’s a unusual pattern this summer. So this summer has been unusual in that sense.

And that’s why I wanted to talk a little bit about how do we support our patients in this kind of A different type of weather, and especially when we see that there are changes in, in, in the presentation of our patients. I usually don’t think of this formula, I think of this formula more in the weather changes, but since this has been an unusual weather pattern, I have seen, I have been prescribing more and more of this formula, what I call the SHIELD formula for Moshen herbs.

And it is based on Jade Windscreen and in combination with Gui Ji Tan to help support the yin and the wei. And this combination together with some more harmonizing herbs and supporting the wei qi has been very effective in treating and supporting and preventing diseases in my patients. Thanks. It is, um, it’s it’s Uh, a formula that really supports this kind of wei qi on the exterior, but also I added some ban qia and qian pi to help transform some dampness.

Since this summer is damp and hot, we needed those. It actually works really well to support releasing or preventing some damp from accumulating. I also added Gaggen to support the muscle layer, and Lingzhi as an adaptogenic mushroom that supports the immune system. So this formula creates a really great support for the immune system.

You can see how it’s laid out here. We have Yu Ping Feng Sang as the base, Gui Ji Tong added, and also JinYinHua, I’m going to mention this herb again, is a very important herb. A lot of times we’ll see in China the summer tea of just JinYinHua and JiuHua together to support this ability or to help the ability to go through these summer damp, hot days.

And the combination of Urchin Tongue in this combination. I also wanted to mention Cunning Tongue. This is a great preventative formula for summer digestive issues and summer colds and stomach flus. And I usually use this formula in, in, while I’m traveling or away and especially in countries that I’m not, that have these.

It tends to be damp and hot, like India or even China. And we add, so the, you’ll see the original formula here is in black. Fuling Yi Ren, Ho Xiang, Hupo Bai Zhe, Shenshu and Changzhu, and you’ll see all the other ingredients. This is a great formula. I usually add, I do some changes when I’m working with that formula, either because Shenshu has.

Wheat, I sometimes substitute that, and especially if there’s some concerns about wheat allergies, and sometimes either substitute Zhuhong with Chen, or, um, or add Chenpi. I also like to add Qiankuang as this kind of anti inflammatory, it’s basically turmeric, and also, as I mentioned before, Ji Ninghua, Sha Ren, and Jurgen Sao.

So this cunning tongue or curing formula is another amazing formula that you can give to your patient during the summer months as a preventative for getting, uh, sick. I also wanted to mention Digest, Because this is, um, similar to the curing formula, but it’s based on Baohe1, um, which is, um, slightly different and works a lot on the ability of the body to digest food.

Um, and we’ve, again, I modified it a little also to support digestion and clear wind heat and regulate the qi. And so I included Lian Xiao, Ge Gen. And Ji Ning Hua, as I mentioned, and Zhu Hua. So, actually, this digest could also be used as a preventative during the summer months to keep our systems clean. A very, very balanced.

Again, you can see here, strengthening the spleen and generating fluids, transforming foods, stagnation. I have Sanjiao, Liufuzi, Laifuzi, uh, Sha Ren and Gu Ya and Wu Mei. And then I have again, Urchin Tongue to resolve dampness. And some herb, wind, wind releasing herbs. As far as acupuncture, and this can be also given as acupressure, we, of course, when we’re seeing our patients, we need to make our basic pattern diagnosis.

But, on top of that, I usually think of adding things like points Do 14, Large Intestine 11, to help the body clear heat. As well as Stomach 36 and Spleen 9 to support the qi and drain dampness. Stomach 25 to regulate the intestines and pericardium 6 to help regulate the qi and this sometimes this combination of heart 6 and kidney 7 is appropriate when you see some heat going or tendency to have these heat coming up like night sweats and symptoms of this kind of deficiency in Rising.

Stomach 36 and spleen 9 is something I teach my patients to do a self acupressure to help, especially in those damp days, to help that the damp won’t penetrate and keep the chi flowing well. And so this is something I just give as a tip to my patients to help them move through these damp, hot days.

Thanks. In terms of diet, we also, we also remember that the summer is a season of fire and young and growth and maturation. So the food that we eat should reflect that. It should be light and colorful and lots of vegetables that are in season at this time. We usually tend to cook lightly, steaming, sautéing, um, a quick sauté so it gives them the first boost of heat but not overcooking or even grilling slightly to give that first fire going on.

And usually we tend to recommend to eat slightly spicy and pungent because actually a lot of times, We think that we need to eat cooling herbs to reflect the summer, to be in contrast with the summer hot and damp. But the truth of the matter is, if you think about it, it actually is better to eat warmer foods during the summer because that heats the interior and then there’s less of a difference between the body and the exterior and the body can withstand that much better.

So, these are just examples of how you can, what you can give as a, as a support for the summer in terms of diet. And also, one kind of traditional remedy is this mung bean soup or mung bean tea, where we use mung beans since they are cooling and supporting and helping to relieve summer heat. It’s a great addition to the diet.

To support these months. I hope I gave you, uh, a little bit of an in introduction to what are the things you can do to help your patients move through these summer days, and I’ll be happy to. If you have more questions, you can contact me@theMoshenherbs.com or in the Moshen center.com. That’s my new office, and I, I thank you for listening.

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Acupuncture Malpractice Insurance – Using Touch and Moxa to Change the Pulses

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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Acupuncture Malpractice Insurance – Stomach Channel and Lumbar/Abdominopelvic Dysfunction

So today we’re going to be looking at the stomach and spleen and kidney channel, primarily the stomach channel.

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Hi, I’m Brian Lau. I’m an instructor with AccuSport Education with the Sports Medicine Acupuncture Certification Program. I’m also help lead the dissection classes. We do a lot of dissection within the program, which is something that’s very relevant to my discussion today. And I’ve been also working on a lot of functional movement patterns organized through the channel sinews which is through Jing Jin movement training.

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So I’m going to present on some of this information today. I want to thank American Acupuncture Council for having me back. I always appreciate this opportunity. So today we’re going to be looking at the stomach and spleen and kidney channel, primarily the stomach channel. We’ll have a part two of this webinar, which will go more into the spleen and kidney channels.

But specifically the abdominal points, a little bit of the anatomy, the depth of the fascial layer that we’re reaching with the needle or manual techniques. Or really your exercise or whatever intervention we’re doing. We want to understand a little bit about the depth, the layer, the target tissue, all of those things.

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So let’s look today at the stomach channel primarily. I have an image up here from Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy. So this image doesn’t have these acupuncture points on. It doesn’t have the stomach 27, stomach 25, etc. I put those in manually. Let’s play. But the netter image is really good anatomical illustrations that can give us a little bit of a understanding of the anatomy.

So first thing to notice that the primary aspect of the stomach channel is going right into the midline of the rectus abdominis until I get down lower, we’ll talk about those lower aspects. It also changes as I get up to stomach 18 and goes more to the edge of the rectus abdominis, but by and large.

They’re running up and down the rectus abdominis right along the midline. Another thing to note, looking at the anatomy, is that the rectus abdominis is our six pack ab muscle. For a very lean and muscular, you can see those six pack abs. You can take note that it’s actually eight packs.

There’s a pack up here that’s not very visible, even when people are very muscular and lean. It’s a very flat sort of pack, so there’s actually four on each side, but people see these three. That would give that appearance of the six pack ab muscles. And with that, you can notice these tendinous inscriptions.

So we’ll talk about some of these points that lie right on these tendinous inscriptions. Much more fascial it has a little stronger connection with the surrounding fascial structures. And sometimes I think there’s a little bit more bang for the buck on these points stomach 25, obviously a very big point.

So we can feel and palpate for these tendinous inscriptions. They’re not super obvious in palpation, but you can sense them, you can feel them. You can fall into a slight little valley. off the muscle and that can help guide your palpation and guide your needle angle, needle technique, et cetera.

So we can just initially take note of that, that the points are either in the belly of the rectus abdominis or in these tendinous inscriptions. There’s some variation on the themes lower, And some variation on the themes higher, but by and large, that’s where the territory that we’re going to be in today.

Next webinar, we’ll jump over to the spleen channel and the kidney channel on the abdomen and look at some of the variations of that theme there. So where are we needling? What are we affecting? Multiple things. One is that we have these branches of the thoraco abdominal nerves that wrap around.

They actually travel between the internal and external obliques. They pierce the semilunar line the fascial seam that’s right at the lateral edge of the rectus abdominis. We’ll come back and talk a little more about that next time. And then they, from there, they innervate the rectus abdominis muscle.

They also come back superficial and have cutaneous branches pretty much along right where the stomach channel is. So these would be for T7, T8, T9, 10, 11, and all the way down to 12. Important to note that the, those levels are also the levels where there are innervations for the celiac plexus, for the stomach organ, for multiple organs in our digestive tract, the intestines, et cetera.

So there’s going to be a lot of communication through the nervous system between this innervation of the rectus abdominis and the innervation of things like the stomach organ. So that’s going to be helpful to understand that there can be various visceral, somatic, and somato visceral type reflexes.

Organs are cranky, the muscle is going to get cranky. If the muscles are cranky, the organs are going to get cranky. There’s communication between the two. So that’s going to be part of our effectiveness of needling. These abdominal points is their relationship to the organs. It’s also worth taking note that some of these branches of nerves, like the subcostal nerve has a a bondage.

cutaneous branch that travels in the front through kind of ASIS region, anterior hip, GB29, that kind of area. There’s other nerves from the ilioinguinal and hypogastric that also become cutaneous. So abdominal muscles and the back muscles that are innervated in this area can often refer along these cutaneous branches.

There’s just a lot of communication through the nervous system that’s relevant to the pain patterns. and the dysfunction that we see that would lead us to using these points. So that’s something to notice. These nerves travel between the internal and external obliques. Let’s look at another image and talk about the fascia layer.

All right, so this is an image, both of these are images that I made, so it has a little bit more channel specific language in here. This would be the territory that those nerves are running between the internal and external obliques. If we follow this fascia layer, let’s look at what happens. This fascia, external oblique, all of it goes above the rectus abdominis.

Internal oblique, the fascia actually bifurcates. Some of it goes on top, some of it goes underneath, deep to the rectus abdominis. So for the stomach channel, we’re following this fascia that goes on top of the rectus abdominis. It becomes the anterior rectus sheath. And this is the territory, in my opinion, of the stomach channel is that needle penetrates or as I’m palpating or if I’m doing manual techniques.

I want the target to be that anterior rectus sheath, possibly the muscle itself. So this portion right here. So that’s the territory very frequently. I’ll just bring the needle to that first density on that anterior rectus sheath and try to stimulate a sensation, see if I can get a traveling sensation.

We’ll talk about where we want those to travel to, what we might be looking for those points here in just a moment. But that’s it. That territory of the anterior rectus sheath. Consistent with the external obliques, somewhat the internal obliques also. If I look at that image on the right here.

You can see that would travel through this external oblique fascia. That external oblique muscle does not fascially connect with the spine. As we get into the deeper points in the spleen and kidney, we’ll look at how that really has a much stronger connection into the lumbar region and into the spine through the fascia.

We’ll come back to this next time. But we’re on that target tissue just on top of the rectus All right, so if I follow that anterior rectus sheath and the rectus abdominis up through this channel sinew, if I wanted to look at it that way, the stomach sinew channel, that’s going to travel on top of the ribcage.

So that continuous fascial plane that’s coming up the thigh meets at the abdominal muscles with the rectus abdominis and that anterior rectus sheath will then travel on that uppermost end eight pack muscle, so to speak that goes on top of the ribcage and that’ll follow up into the sternalis and pectoral fascia and then up into the neck.

So it’s superficial to the ribcage, anterior to the ribcage. That’s the full plane. I will bring our focus back here. There is a nice connection to the lumbar spine through the stomach channel, especially the sinew channel that travels up the vastus muscles and into the thoracolumbar fascia here. So this is nice territory.

To consider for lumbar pain, especially when the pain is at the sort of lateral raffae, lateral edge of the the erector to go back to the image just before, when the pain is at the seam right here, that’s a very commonly, you’ll find tension and restriction at the lateral quadricep, that could be a nice distal point to work with that thoracolumbar fascia up here.

But in terms of rectus abdominis, we’re going to put our focus here. That’s going to be consistent with that superficial plane up into the chest as we look at a corrective exercise for abdominal restrictions for the stomach channel. We’ll come back to that idea in a second. All right. So let’s look at some trigger point referral patterns that would give us some indications of when we would consider these points.

Thanks. Locally, at least, we could also add distal points, but we’re going to keep the conversation on the local needling. So let’s start with the upper portion of the rectus abdominis muscle. This is from Travell and Simmons, Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction, Trigger Point Manual, excellent book.

I’m sure many people are familiar with that. This is an older edition image. The newer third edition, they don’t have the X’s on here anymore. This was common areas. where trigger for trigger point formation might form. They weren’t exactly like target tissues, measurable type things. They could, had quite a variability from person to person.

But it was through primarily Janet Trevelle’s experience. Dr. Trevelle would find common areas where trigger points formed and she put the X to somewhat signify that. They’ve taken the Xs out because trigger points can form anywhere in the muscle. I the old version to be honest.

Because there are norms, I guess you can make an argument that if you’re looking for something that you think should be there and it’s not, it can lead you astray. I think that was some of the argument for taking them out. But but I do think that there’s some value in having the kind of go to areas that are fairly consistent.

And this is the case for this upper abdominis muscle. It can have, first of all, a bilateral referral to the mid thorax region, pain that travels horizontally across both sides, pretty common pain pattern that people would obviously think, they would want massage on the back or acupuncture on the back and oftentimes those erector spinae might get a little cranky in response to that because of that noxious kind of irritating signal from the referral of the erector subdominus.

But as you’re working in this region manually with acupuncture, whatever, people frequently feel it refer back to that site of complaint. So first thing is to find it with palpation. The other thing is this area can be common for epigastric type pain, especially in that region locally. Nausea even just irritation of fullness, abdominal fullness difficulty taking a deep breath.

This area can really lock the breath down. Those are all symptoms that I would be considering that would lead me to palpate up in this area. And generally stomach 20, which is one of the points right on this tendinous inscription would be a very powerful point for that. She has the X a little higher up.

Those can be along the rib attachments can also be. Trigger point formation, but I find stomach 20 is the most common sort of go to for that region. So back to Netter, stomach 20, can’t really see that tendinous inscription here. It’s hidden under the fascia in this illustration, but it’d be in this general region as I go.

get into that even with pressure, it feels like it pulls all that tissue down. Almost feels like you’re pulling the diaphragm down. It helps the diaphragm descend a little bit. So this is really useful point needling also with manual therapy, but again, the target tissue would be into that tendinous inscription for stomach 20.

But also I do a lot of manual work here and you can look at the fiber direction that I would want to be able to free the fascia up at this connection of the external obliques and the rectus sheath. So this area can get very congested, narrowed, pulled in, looks like the chest sinks in that region, and I often want to broaden that area by doing a nice deep myofascial stroke away from the midline.

Whoops, sorry, I didn’t mean to click there. But also working on the stomach 20, I’ll show you some variations of some manual techniques I do here in just a moment that I can just do seated on myself. All right, next region is we have this peri umbilical region. This to be honest will be a bigger player when I get into the next webinar it covers the spleen channel because very frequently these will be on the edge of the muscle, but it’s not uncommon to be on the stomach channel stomach 25 in particular can be a really big source of what we’re about to describe.

This can give a very gassy, internal bloated type sensation when there’s trigger points there. And pressure on it will refer all throughout the abdomen, sometimes even into the hip, deep into the pelvis, wrapping around to the back. It can be a pretty broad pain referral. Stomach 25, very useful.

Stomach 27 region is another one that, that’s quite frequently again along that tendinous inscription can be a big component of that type of pain, but we’ll come back and talk about it. Along this lateral edge in the spleen channel and look at the difference in the anatomy next time, right?

So just again back to Netter so we can see the territory for today. Stomach 25 into that tendinous inscription. We’ll look at palpating that. 26, 27, that’s another one that tends to be in that tendinous inscription. So those 27, 25 are the ones that I most frequently find in the stomach channel that gives that kind of gassy, bloated, distended area can be involved with things like constipation working on that area can make it easier for people to have bowel movements.

So there’s just a lot of reflexes between these areas and the internal organs, right? Another kind of region of common trigger point formation we’ll come back to when we look at the kidney channel, these tend to be more medial along the kidney distribution. We’ll talk about the difference in anatomy next time.

So final one, final region is the lower portion of the muscles. And this could be anywhere from stomach 30, which now, because the rectus abdominis is narrowing, now we’re going to be at the edge of the rectus abdominis. The spleen channel travels along that edge, but when the muscle gets closer to the pubic bone attachment, it narrows quite a bit.

The line of the stomach channel falls on the edge of the rectus abdominis there. So it’d be more of a lateral kind of edge of the muscle very frequent area of trigger point formation for low back pain. So that’s going to create this sort of horizontal band of pain into the sacrum and along the iliac crest, oftentimes bilateral, just like this.

It can be a very similar pain to lumbar facet joint pain. And sometimes those two go hand in hand, that it could be a little bit of both. contributing to that horizontal band. But easy to think about the lumbar facets for that and do tests for the lumbar facets. Maybe not quite as apparent to consider the rectus abdominis muscle.

So definitely when you have this type of pain distribution in including palpation and orthopedic evaluation for the lumbar spine, I would encourage you to look at the rectus abdominis if you’re not already. All right, and here’s just an image. You can see what I’m talking about. Spleen channel follows along that lateral edge, stomach channel right in the middle.

But as the muscle becomes narrower and I get down to stomach 30, then I’m on the lateral edge. So trigger points form on that lateral edge, sometimes in the belly of the muscle. It’s a little trickier to distinguish. between the kidney channel and the stomach channel there. But to be honest, I think it’s more often the kidney channel.

So this is another one we’ll come back to in just a bit. All right. So last thing I’m going to come back up to the stomach region up to that upper part of the erectus abdominis and notice underneath that the stomach organ is there. In this area, if there’s a lot of restriction in the rectus abdominis it can impair just normal, good, healthy stomach motility.

So as you take a deep breath in, that stomach has a various ranges of motion. It does rotation in the transverse plane. It kind of moves in the sagittal plane, rolling forward. And it creates sort of a rotation in a diagonal aspect also. So I don’t know if you need to memorize all of the different ranges of motion unless you do visceral based osteopathic type techniques or Tui Na techniques that work with the organ motility, but just having an appreciation for that motility is really very important because as we open up the organ.

The rectus abdominis create more space, create more potential for movement here. That’s going to encourage a little better stomach movement with the breath. It’s going to allow for a deeper breath and really help that healthy motion that kind of massages and mobilizes the stomach organ. So let’s take the PowerPoint away.

We’ll look at a couple manual techniques. And then we’ll look at an exercise to work with this anatomy, especially that upper part of the channel for this class. All right, so we’ll look at an exercise, but let’s first talk about a manual technique. Obviously, this would be done with a patient prone, but it’s easy enough to do on yourself, even standing or seated.

Xiphoid, I need to be careful of the xiphoid process, not putting a lot of pressure on the xiphoid. I’m actually over the rib cage. So just lateral to the xiphoid process, I want to hook into that fascia and mobilize and move that fascia like I’m pulling open the ribcage, moving it lateral, spreading along that lower portion of the ribcage, pretty sensitive area on a lot of people, but I’m not putting a ton of pressure, just sinking to the level of depth to the ribcage, angling, spreading, opening.

So really nice technique that I teach. Very simple to create more space and more openness there. I could also find that tendinous inscription. I can feel the muscle. If I’m careful, I can notice a little dip into that tendinous inscription at stomach 20. Same thing at stomach 25 would be the same technique.

And I just want to press Soften that tissue. It almost feels like I’m pulling that tissue away from the costal margin, creating space. So just some holding pressure there or I could also spread laterally in that same way if I wanted to. Very easy techniques that you can follow up with after needling, and they can give a lot of assistance with creating space, more movement, freeing the tissue after the needling.

So the last thing, we’ll look at a corrective exercise to move and stretch the rectus abdominis, but especially this upper portion. This is from eight pieces of brocade. It’s called Separate Heaven and Earth. I want to start. With my rectus abdominis slightly contracted, pulling up on the pubic bone attachment, that’ll take me into a slight posterior tilt.

Rib cage is slightly pulled down, so I’m bringing my upper and lower attachments closer together. Bottom hand facing up, top hand facing down. My hands change, but think that the hands are moving because I’m opening the front of the body up. Pelvis goes to neutral. Rib cage lifts. and push. My hands are on the midline.

Hands come together because I engage the rectus abdominis. That’s going to start to tuck the pelvis under slightly, bring the ribcage down. Hands separate because my ribcage is lifting away from my pelvis.

Exhale, everything comes together. Inside, inhale, everything comes apart. So the main thing with this exercise is I don’t want my hands to get too much to the side. I want them to be on the midline so that I can encourage that movement in the stomach region, mobilize the stomach organ, stretch the rectus abdominis upper fibers.

So I displace that to the side, I lose that stretch in that midsection. I need to also lift the chest so that everything separates. Everything comes together,

inhale, separate, exhale. Ten times would be a nice nice amount for patients just to open that structure up. Last one is the first move of eight pieces of brocade. Two hands hold up the heavens. I’m going to clasp my fingers, turn my palms up, reach the hands, lift the chest, same thing. Opening of the front of the body helps lift the hands.

If somebody has decent enough balance, they can follow it up on their toes.

Hands come in, spines coming together, lift, press, lift,

and back down. Easy exercises. Patients usually are able to do those quite well. They can really supplement the treatment. Fun to, to go into the abdominal fibers, like I said, we’ll look at a little bit more on that lateral edge and medial edge, looking at the kidney channel and spleen channel.

Difference in the anatomy, we’ll look at that in the next webinar. So thanks again for American Acupuncture Council, and I look forward to the next time.

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Acupuncture Malpractice Insurance – Lumbar Pain: Supplementing Acupuncture with Therapeutic Exercise

Today I would like to show a side bending exercise I give with patients frequently in the context of treatment of low back pain, especially when the facet joints and the QL is involved.

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Hi, this is Brian Lau. I’m with Jingjin Movement Training, also an instructor with Sports Medicine Acupuncture Certification Program. So thanks to American Acupuncture Council. I always appreciate doing these webinars. A lot of fun to get together and share some information with you. Today we’re going to be referring back to the last presentation I did.

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We talked about the internal pattern, talked about the Zhui Yin and Xiao Yang channels in general. We looked at it in relationship to rotation. We even looked at a rotation exercise. Today I would like to show a side bending exercise I give with patients frequently in the context of treatment of low back pain, especially when the facet joints and the QL is involved.

It’s a great exercise, great to add to your repertoire when treating patients. It’s actually a great exercise to do for your own health. You get a twofer, you get something you can practice for yourself if you don’t have a good side bending exercise, but then something you can use to, to, as part of the treatment.

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So it’s an exercise that patients can do at home, yes, but as much as anything, I use some equipment for this. is it’s an exercise that I do after treatment to supplement the treatment to help open the tissue that I worked on with acupuncture manual therapy. So let’s go to the presentation.

We’ll start going over some some introductory information, a little bit of anatomy, and then we’ll look at the movement. Let’s talk about the quadratus lumborum, not the only muscle in the low back that causes low back pain by any means, but it’ll be a little bit of the star of the show for today.

And this exercise can work for a lot of different things, but when the QL is involved, it’s a really great exercise specifically for QL. Type pain. So this is the trigger point referral pattern of the quadratus lumborum. You can see some of the trigger point referrals can be out to the gallbladder channel, along the side, even to the greater trochanter.

They can wrap around to the liver channel. Sometimes the deeper fibers can go towards the SI joint or glute area. But by and large, it’s gallbladder and liver distribution. Now it’s interesting to me because I see, and we’ll look at a brief picture in a moment with the anatomy, I see that the liver, I somborum is part of the liver sinew channel which is a little higher up than the channel is classically described.

We’ll talk about that briefly. But interestingly also is liver V as a distal point, I do treat it locally local treatment is extremely important when you’re working with low back pain when the QL is involved. But as a distal point, liver V, the low connecting point, is a very useful point that becomes very reactive with QL pain.

And it’s interesting that this low connecting point treats this muscle that has a referral both to its its Xiao Yang partner, the gallbladder channel refers to the gallbladder channel, but it also refers to the liver channel. So its referral seems to be between those two those two related channels and the low connecting point would make sense that it would become reactive in that case.

So let’s look briefly at the QL anatomy. This is from Matt Callison’s Motor Point Index. He also has it in his Sports Medicine Acupuncture text. A great book if you don’t have it. This shows the iliac crest attachment, the 12th rib attachment, but also fibers that are going to transverse processes.

It’s a very complex muscle, multi layers. There’s actually three layers of the quadratus lumborum. We did a class on this that’s available on Net of Knowledge, and we talked about all these layers and different fascicles. It’s an interesting muscle. to spend a little more time on that we don’t have time today, but just to highlight that it does have attachments on those transverse processes and the 12th rib and the iliac crest.

It communicates with the multifidi muscles that also attach to the transverse processes and those muscles then go to the spinous processes. So this exercise we’ll be looking at would work those muscles too, but what really I want to highlight in this image in addition to the QL is the facet joints.

We’ll come back and talk about those in a second, but you can see them really well on this illustration. This is where the main movement happens from vertebra to vertebra. Facet joints are also called zygopaphyseal joints and these can be pain generators themselves. When there’s pain associated with a QL, multifidi, and or, and it’s often a and the facet joints this will be a really good exercise to complement it.

So the facet joints of the spine have a coupled relationship between side bending and rotation meaning that they both they, when they do one or the other, they do both. So when you’re side bending, there’s also a rotation component when you’re rotating the individual vertebrae can side bend.

And in particular, the lumbar region has limited rotation just by design. The facet orientation has limited rotation. So we’re going to be doing side bending to really exercise and move those facet joints. So if there is facet joint pain, moving the facets will help open that tissue up and help desensitize that tissue.

But when you’re moving the facets and sidebending, you’re also stretching and contracting, depending on which side you’re sidebending to. Stretching and contracting the quadratus lumborum, and you’re somewhat activating the multifidi also. So nice to know that these coupled relationships exist because really a good comprehensive program will include both sidebending and rotation.

We’re going to look at sidebending today. Here’s the liver sinew channel, so classically it ends at the groin, following up the adductors, adductor longus, pectineus, adductor brevis, gracilis, adductor magnus in my mind is part of the liver sinew channel, it’s more posterior, has a different fascial plane that it lives in, but we’re going to be looking more at those anterior adductors.

I also have in the list the lower portions of the channel, including the flexor digitorum longus, which is what you’d be needling into if you need a liver 5. So that would be affecting that fascial plane. And classically that ends at the groin, but if you follow that fascial plane up, it goes into the psoas, the iliacus, and the QL, all part of that plane, even though we access the QL from the back, it’s much more of a central muscle.

It’s on the fascial plane of the adductors. That would follow really all the way up to the diaphragm. So you can take that channel, in my opinion, up to the diaphragm. But QL is a big player in that and common cause of low back pain. So it’s important to understand these pathways. So liver organ itself has a particular movement that’s going to play into this.

So we looked at rotation at the last webinar I did with the American Acupuncture Council. So in the transverse plane, there’s a rotational movement of the liver in relationship to the diaphragm and the organs around it, like the stomach in particular, kidneys too. There’s a movement in the sagittal plane where it’s tilting forward, tilting back.

Those are going to be exercised much more with rotational type exercises. I want to look at this frontal plane movement. So the frontal plane movement, the liver moves in relationship to the left ligament that holds it up to the diaphragm. And as you side bend to the left and that liver flares up, you want it to be able to move in relationship to the tissues around it, like the transverse colon, the stomach, et cetera.

Then it can also rotate down so it can have a movement in that frontal plane that we’re going to be really highlighting in the rotation exercise. So you’re going to be stretching and contracting the QL, you’re going to be mobilizing liver, you’re going to be opening and closing the facet joints.

It’s important to do sidebending activities because they are underutilized and they’re extremely important for low back health and liver health. Alright, real brief, I’m not going to go into a lot of needle technique for the QL, it takes a little bit more time than I have here today, but I just wanted to highlight a couple directions that you could look at if you’ve had some training with the liver I mean with the liver sinew channel with the QL.

I can needle through this fibrous part of the thoracolumbar fascia where all the abdominal muscles meet, at least all their fascial compartments meet. And then it separates into fascial compartments that wrap around various aspects around the erector spinae and between QL. This is called the lateral raffae.

It’s the lateral seam of the abdominal muscles before they separate into various layers of the thoracolumbar fascia. So I can angle a needle into that. Sometimes that tissue is pretty reactive in and of itself. And that’s my target tissue. Or I could go through that and touch the QL. If I’m trying to needle the QL, I usually just go straight lateral, parallel with the table of the person was lying prone.

If they’re lying sideline, it would go straight towards the table, perpendicular to the table. So there’s some instructions here. If you go back and watch this, you can freeze here and look at those. I, again, this isn’t an instructional webinar on needling that. I just want to give some highlights real quickly here.

I’m palpating into that lateral raffae. So you can see I have about a 30 degree angle or so towards the table. So I’m at the edge of the iliocastalis lumborum advancing the needle into that lateral raffae. Maybe I touch the iliocastalis lumborum. Maybe I touched the quadratus lumborum. Maybe I’m in that fascial seam, which is my target.

And I think what happens is when I hit that fascial seam and engage that, it’s gonna pull on whatever structures it needs to. But it’s just a very reactive place and I needle the lateral raphe quite frequently based on palpation. If my goal is to needle the QL, I’m going to go more parallel to the table, directly cross fiber to the QL or needle it sideline.

I’ll have the leg extended to help depress the ileum on that side and then go straight down towards the table. This is my preferred way of needling the QL if I want to cross fiber the QL, but I might do it prone if I want to combine it with other points, for instance. All right I have some of these types of exercises, including this exercise, but I want to redo the video.

I have it on my YouTube channel, JingJin Movement Training, there’s a QR code there. I haven’t put short samples of those on my Instagram page too, so you can follow that if you’re interested in more information. But I want to now go and show some instruction for this particular exercise that you can use in your treatments.

So I’m going to exit out, and I’m going to back up, so give me just a moment.

Alright, so let’s initially, minimize something, sorry. Let’s talk about equipment first of all. So I’m going to show you two things that I use for this. This is a product called, from a company called StickMobility. StickMobility. StickMobility. com So I like the, I really think this is a solid product. I have them.

I, it comes in a set of two of these. This is a six foot one. I’m not super tall. If you’re taller, I’d get the seven foot one. So I’m about five eight. This one’s going to work for the exercise I’m going to show you quite well. But if you’re six foot tall or something like that, I would go ahead and get the seven foot tall one.

It marks them pretty well on the webpage. So it comes with two of these and it comes with a shorter one. I will say they’re a little pricey. So if you’re not going to use them a lot, I paid 180 for them. That was before greenflation or whatever we want to call it. So they’re probably, I haven’t, I meant to check before the webinar.

They’re probably 200 or 220 or something like that. Now it’s worth it. If you’re going to use them a lot, they’re very solid. They’re not going to break on you. For this particular exercise though especially if you’re going to give it to patients, I think it works just fine with PVC pipe. So with this PVC pipe, I put a little chair stand, whatever these are called that goes on the ends of the legs of the chair.

So I put those on the end because I wanted to be able to grip the floor so that this works out pretty well. These are just little rubber stoppers but the PVC pipe’s pretty strong. So this would be, I don’t know, 10, 15 or something like that. It takes you a little time. You have to go get it and find the appropriate stoppers for it, but it works out just fine.

So I’m going to use the stick mobility one since I have it, but this would be perfectly fine. I’ve never had a problem. PVC pipe’s pretty strong. I’ve never had a problem with that breaking. But I guess that is a consideration if you have a professional product, maybe from a liability standpoint. So maybe in your own office it’s worth having these, but if you’re going to give it to patients and they’re not willing to buy something that’s 200 and they’re only going to do this one exercise, I think the BBC pipe would be a really adequate way of doing it.

But you can also just give this in your office as a complement to the treatment, even if they don’t do it at home, at least they’re engaging that tissue that you just addressed with the acupuncture. So let’s get this set up. I want this to be somewhere about a foot away from my side of my foot. I don’t know, maybe with the metatarsals, doesn’t really matter.

It’s somewhere along the side of the foot, about a foot away. This exercise is easier the farther I move it away. But you’ll see as I go into side bending, if I have it too far away, it’s going to slip. So I need to have it close enough to where it grips. So that’s going to be a little bit of a challenge.

If it’s too hard, you need to move it away. But if you move it away too far, it’s not going to work so well. So about a foot is a good happy medium. So I’m going to put the Stick down. I’m gonna get my arm about at a 90 degree angle at the elbow. I’m gonna reach up, palm facing forward. So if I open my palm up, it’s facing forward.

Grab around. This is where if I was too tall, I’m gonna be like this. I’m not gonna be able to get my head under when I go to do side bending. So it needs to be high enough up to where I’m comfortable. Okay, so I want my chest to turn slightly Towards the bar, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to push out with the lower arm.

I’m going to let the top arm straighten, and I’m going to turn my chest forward. So that’s the position. I need to turn. So I’m pulling with the top arm, but I’m not pulling with the elbow. I’m pulling with the shoulder blade. And then I’m pushing out and extending out. So you can see it gives a really nice stretch all the way through the spine.

For Especially the lumbar spine, very complimentary for working with facet type pain and QL type pain. Come out of it slowly, I can turn my chest back, forward, and relax. So it does take a certain amount of strength for this. This one’s not overly, requires a lot of strength. It’s somewhat also positioning and learning how to use your whole body.

People mostly are trying to use the arms and it’s very difficult for them to push. I’ll show you how I assist them and help them in a second, but part of it is learning how to turn the chest and side bend into the, how to pull with the shoulder girdle without pulling with the arm. That’s going to shorten everything.

I need to pull my scapula back on that side, push the arm out on the bottom one, and then just lean and let it start to bend through the torso. Okay, I’ll show it on the other side and then I’ll show you how I help patients with it. So again, set up about a foot away, arm down, out about hip level, we’ll say about a 90 degree angle thereabouts, maybe slightly lower.

You can adjust it as you go for comfort, palm facing forward. Behind the bar, behind the stick, grab a hold, face my chest towards the bar, or at least in that direction. So I’m rotated in this case to my right, I don’t know if that’s going to show up because sometimes things get a little weird imaged on the webinars, but I’m facing to my right.

This is my right hand at the lower portion, and then I need to turn my chest forward. So I’m turning slightly to the left. Project, pull

the shoulder blade back, my left arm on my top arm, push out with my bottom arm, let everything side bend,

and slowly turn back when I’m ready, and there you go. So how I help. So let’s say I’m back on this side.

Patient can’t really do, first of all, the most often what they’re doing is they’re going to bend the top arm because they’re trying to pull. They need to learn how to let the lats lengthen, let that arm straighten, turn the chest. So it’s a little bit of a difficulty. So imagine I have a patient who’s struggling with this activity here.

I could be on the other side. I usually brace this with my foot and I help them. I’m not just pulling them through it. But I’m giving them some assistance and guiding them, let your top arm straighten, okay there you go, and then I’m helping pull them. Now, once they get into the stretch as far as they can get, I don’t want to just let go when they come out of it.

So I’m pulling, guiding them through it. Their chest is facing forward. Okay, so let’s come out of it. I’m slowly letting up as they turn their chest forward, especially if they have back pain. I don’t want it to be a very jarring activity where they’re in a somewhat compromised position and they just let go.

So I’m helping guide them through it. They don’t have to go as far as I went. Maybe they just go a little bit. Maybe they just get to here. But if I can help pull enough to where Pulls on this top arm, they’re going to start to get that stretch down through the lats, and then also into the QL. Highlight the movement.

I would definitely do it on both sides. So if it’s a lot of pain, maybe they only get this far, but usually this feels good for them. So if it is causing a lot of undue pain, I might come back to it in another treatment, but usually it feels good, feels therapeutic, it feels helpful. It feels like it supplements the treatment.

Same thing. I’d get them set up on this side, chest angled slightly towards the direction of the pole, turn the chest forward, push out, and that same thing. I might be over on this other side, guiding them, giving them some help, making sure they feel stable, guiding their positioning, let that top arm straighten.

Let everything stretch, giving them, coaching them through it, and giving them some guidance, helping them find the maneuver. So using the stick makes it really much more effective. Some people do a side stretch, which is great, nothing wrong with it. Or they might do something with the hands overhead, no problem.

Really nice, You can do a lot of the same types of things. There’s a windmill exercise I do, reaches through nice mobilization. I don’t like this one as much for back pain because of the rotation until they get a little bit more farther along the treatment and they can comfortably go in rotation without causing pain.

So there’s other ways of doing it, but the stick is a really guided way that you can work with patients. You can give them that assistance. You can take them through the process. In a little bit more controlled way. And to be honest, having that arm pulled and stretched from the stick really makes the stretch much more easy to access and takes them into it in a much stronger way.

So it’s a simple bit of equipment, even especially if you just got the PVC pipe. We’d recommend at some point, splurging and getting the stick mobility. I think they’re a really good product, but they are a little pricey. But it’s nice to have maybe the PVC pipe one also in your office so you can show patients and give them some recommendations for what to do in their at their own house when they’re practicing that.

But it, like I said, even just doing it that one time after treatment is part of the treatment. That’s how I view it. So I think you can take that same approach. All right. I think that covers the main information that I wanted to cover for this. Give it a go. Like I said, I have some videos on my YouTube channel, JingJin Movement Training.

I’ll make a point to get a new video up with this from different angles so you can see it and review it. But you can also review it from the webinar. That is on American Acupuncture Council’s Facebook page. It’ll also be on my YouTube channel. And if you wanted to go back and look at the rotation exercise I did, those will be at both of those places also, and it’ll give you a complimentary exercise for rotation that’ll also work.

The internal pathways quite nice. So thanks again for American Acupuncture Council. Look forward to seeing you guys at another time.

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Acupuncture Malpractice Insurance – Improving Vitality: Treating the Liver Channel and Organ

Today, we’re going to be looking a little bit at the liver channel. In particular, we’re going to look at the internal pathway, talk a little bit about some of the anatomy, and we’re going to then look at a therapeutic exercise that’ll help work rotation, liver channel primarily,

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Thanks for tuning in today. I’m Brian Lau. I’m with Jingjin Movement Training. I also teach with Sports Medicine Acupuncture certification program. I want to thank American Acupuncture Council for having me back. Today, we’re going to be looking a little bit at the liver channel. In particular, we’re going to look at the internal pathway, talk a little bit about some of the anatomy, and we’re going to then look at a therapeutic exercise that’ll help work rotation, liver channel primarily, but really all of the Jueyin channels and the Xiaoyang channels.

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That would also include, obviously, gallbladder, Sanjiao, pericardium, and liver, but we’ll highlight the liver channel, that’ll be the focus of the webinar. So let’s go ahead and go to the PowerPoint, and we’ll jump into some anatomy, and then we’ll look at a movement that will work some of this anatomy.

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So this image right here is showing my interpretation of the liver sinew channel. We’ll maybe talk a little bit about the sinews, but I want to go into the next slide, and we’ll go right into the liver channel itself. So many of you are familiar with this image from Dedman’s Manual of Acupuncture, or you’re familiar with other images possibly.

So just to highlight the internal pathway here we have the external pathway, acupuncturists are all very familiar with that, probably familiar with the internal pathway, but the external pathway, we have points. So we have a little better sense of the anatomy. Liver 13 would be actually a motor point, motor innervation for the external obliques.

Liver 14 would also be on the region of the external obliques, more at the attachment site. But let’s look at this little internal pathway. and discuss some of the potential anatomy for that. These internal pathways can be a little bit more vague. So I’m going to go to an image, a couple images actually from Netter’s Atlas of Anatomy, fantastic anatomy atlas.

So in Netter’s Atlas, here we have inside the abdominal cavity. So peritoneum’s removed. What we’re seeing is the liver reflected back. So you can see the little hook here, grabbing the liver, pulling the liver back. And what they’re trying to highlight. What Nutter is highlighting in this image is the lesser omentum between the liver and the stomach.

It’s a ligament that holds the liver to the stomach, allows for a particular amount of movement, but keeps some positioning of those organs intact. So I see that this lesser omentum is part of that internal pathway of the liver. Topography wise, it makes sense. It matches the topography fine, but if you open up in dissection and go inside of that Lesser Omentum, then I think it really gives a clear indication or at least a hint at what Deliver Channel is all about.

And that’s what we’re looking at here. We have the contents of the Lesser Omentum. We have the Hepatic vein, we have the portal vein, and then we also have what I think is really important to understanding the liver pathway and the liver channel itself, is we have a branch of the vagus nerve. In my view, and probably others the liver, Being a general, directing where the blood goes, is really about autonomic nervous system functioning.

Particularly, you could argue that it’s about the parasympathetic rest and digest portion of the autonomic nervous system. Very active at night, the blood returns to the liver at night, it returns to all these vessels inside the liver, these capacitance vessels that holds and stores a whole lot of blood.

Blood moves very slowly through that, they’re more full. At night, when we’re not moving, it’s more under the control of the parasympathetic nervous system. But it’s also really autonomic nervous system regulation, telling the body to give blood to the digestive organs, or do I want to give blood to the skeletal muscles because I’m out playing football or doing martial arts or something like that?

It’s where am I in my phase of activity? So it’s really about regulation between those. Now, we think of the liver oftentimes from pathology, which is more sympathetic overload, but in its health and most obvious function, it’s really more about that rest and digest, the most yin, the quietest portion of the nervous system.

And lo and behold, inside this lesser omentum, we have the branch of the vagus nerve. I would posit that this gives us a hint that internal pathway is following the vagus nerve or has something to do with the vagus nerve. I’m not saying it’s necessarily the entirety of the pathway, but it has something to do with that pathway.

So we’re going to look at a movement in a little bit, and I want to be able to move this region, or at least over time of practice of this movement. I want that to move the liver. and move the liver in relationship to the stomach to be able to exercise the contents in the lesser omentum. So just a real brief summary of movement of the liver.

The liver itself has movement in context of these ligamentous structures like the lesser omentum, in context with the diaphragm, of course, also. So the liver moves in the frontal plane. It moves up and down, follow, I’m gonna turn it over to Jim to talk about the the BAPT program.

The original BAPT program was designed in response to the COVID 19 pandemic to provide a way for the medical population to provide the needs of their bystanders to provide the necessary medical care. back and forth. We’ll look at that when I’m standing in a bit. And then it kind of moves in the sagittal plane, a tucking under type motion and a tilting motion.

So those are the motions we’re going to be really highlighting in this rotation exercise. So if you’re doing rotation and you’re letting that rotation wind through the body, it’s going to start to mobilize the liver, mobilize structures like the lesser momentum, and it’ll really complement Both for your own health, but if you’re treating patients and giving them exercises, it’ll really complement any treatments you’re doing for the liver channel, whether it’s musculoskeletal or internal type work, it’s good to have them be able to exercise these internal portions of the channels.

All right. So when we’re doing these rotations, like I mentioned, it’s sometimes you have movements that work a channel, but by and large, functional movements. We’re looking at networks, and when we’re looking at side bending and rotation, we’re looking at the Zhui Yin, Xiao Yang network. So all of these channels have something to do with rotation, and if that rotation is going through the pelvis, through the spine, through the shoulder girdle then we’re having both the arm channels and the leg channels of these Zhui Yin and Xiao Yang channels exercised.

So it’s really more of a functional network that we’re going to be exercising, but I’m highlighting the internal pathway of the liver channel. So just a couple images here, all of these are showing some aspect of either rotation or side bending with the exception of the middle image, which is really more about extension.

I put this one in here for a particular reason, because even when we’re doing activities like Tai Chi, like this is showing push hands or Tai Chi movement we’re stabilizing the lateral side of the body and the medial sides of the body. So to be able to have this nice posture and express the strength that would come from engaging the back and pushing forward we need to be stable, as the weight drops into the front leg, we don’t want that front, in this case, the left hip to rock up, or we don’t want the other hip to rock down.

We want to have a certain amount of stability from side to side. So this one is using the stabilizers and it is using this Joanne Xiaoyang Network. But to do it, it’s not an active movement that you see like you do in this gymnastics ring movement where you can see an obvious side bending or any of these rotational type movements.

So that’s why I put that one in there, but all of them feature some aspect of rotation or side bending, all featuring that Zhui Yin Shao Yong network. So we’re going to be looking at some pelvic movement, so using the liver channel, at least the sinews, pectineus would be one of those muscles, using the Shao Yong channels, piriformis and the lateral hip rotators.

To create and guide rotation of the pelvis, we’re going to be using the external obliques on the liver channel to help with torso rotation. Internal pathway of the, or at least internal portions of the liver sinew channel, QL, and the psoas will be active. Pericardium channel creates a sling around the body, that’s going to be active.

So really gallbladder channel is going to be active. We’re using those channels primarily, but I want to come back to that idea of exercising the internal pathway to complement treatments or to complement and help our own health. So this is showing some of the complex movements that happen between the two sides of the innominate bone, the pelvic bones.

Those also, when you’re walking, they’re going through a rotational type movement. And this is from a study that kind of highlighted those movements. We don’t need to get in the weeds with that. That’s very complex. That could be its own 20 minutes. Might not even be enough time, but its own its own webinar.

But just to highlight that when we’re doing types of movements like walking or turning, that there’s a discrepancy from side to side as one side does something, the other side does something different, we’ll look at that when I’m standing. All right, and that’s an image highlighting some of the, not just the pelvic movement, but how what happens in the pelvis relates to what happens in the ribcage.

So you can see in this boy running, the pelvis has a rotational and twisting type motion. The rib cage in this case has an opposing opposite action. So what’s happening on the right side of the pelvis is mirrored on the left side of the rib cage, but sometimes you can do rotation and have it mirrored on the same side.

The important thing to highlight is that lower rib cage and where the liver is, where the diaphragm is going to relate. It’s going to respond to what’s happening in the pelvis. So when we’re doing this rotation exercise. I want to look at how that winds from the pelvis up into the lower rib cage out into the shoulder girdle.

If you want to learn more about this, you can check out my YouTube channel. I have a lot of movement from a channel perspective movement exercises on there, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, some other types of calisthenic exercises, all from the lens of the channel perspectives, looking at it from the channel movements.

It’s called Jing Jin Movement Training. You can also check out my Instagram page. There’s a link or at least a QR code for each of those. All right, so I’m going to step back and we’re going to start looking at some of the exercises now. So I’ll get a little more back so you can see me more fully.

Let me just get something else out of the way. All right, so this is one exercise that I use a lot for myself. I give to patients also. It’s going to highlight that rotation in the pelvic girdle. It’s going to highlight that rotation In the lower rib cage, it’s going to highlight that rotation in the shoulder girdle, almost like a towel that’s being wrung out.

I want to have a wringing type motion that works throughout the whole body, so I can exercise that entire channel. I want to start with my stance about shoulder width. Maybe almost pelvis would be a really, a good marker. Maybe the outside of my pelvis could almost fit to the inside of my feet. So about a pelvic width stance would be good.

You can make it a little narrower, you can make it a little wider, but somewhere, I don’t want it to be super wide in this particular exercise. So somewhere about pelvis width, right? So I’m going to start with just a pelvis, so you can highlight that. I’m going to put my hands on my ASIS. This is not the motion, I just want to set the stage for it.

And I want to turn. Just to about 45, turn. As I turn, the pelvis is going to pull on the thighs, so there might be a little rotation, but I don’t want to lose form in my thighs. I don’t want my knees to cave in. I want to keep a certain amount of architecture in the knees. It’s okay if the legs move, it’s okay if the knees move a little bit, but I want to keep somewhat of an openness between the two knees.

I’m just turning, almost as if I’m a playing card at this point. So my ASIS facing 45, my shoulders are facing 45. So I’m not really moving yet in the torso, I’m just moving the pelvis. So even from the get go, there’s a little bit of movement in the pelvis. One side pulls back into a posterior tilt. One side moves into an anterior tilt.

You don’t have to do that. Should just happen once the pelvis loosens up. If you’re working with patients, sometimes they’re stiff and that has to take some time to manifest. But if they’re just getting a genital turn, they’re starting to exercise that movement from side to side, that contralateral movement of the pelvis.

All right, next phase, once I turn 45, I want to continue to turn, pulling through with the rib cage. So pelvis goes, Ribcage continues, as if I’m bringing my chest towards the side wall. Okay, so now let’s look at the full movement with that in mind. One arm up, one hand down, turn,

open the chest. So this hand pulls back to the tailbone.

Relax the torso, turn, open the chest. Relax the torso, turn, open the chest. Real briefly, I’m going to turn to the side so you can see from a different angle. So as I turn This hand, I want to let it pull back, turn my chest. So my chest is almost facing forward now. That’s going to depend on flexibility. I don’t want to torque myself past where I can comfortably move, but that’s the idea is I want to turn past where my pelvis can turn, open the chest, shoulder girdle moves,

soft, gentle. It’s not a real big deal with this exercise, but it can be very useful to do on a regular basis.

Okay. So facing forward again. I want to highlight a couple more things, and then maybe show it, and then I think we’ll be good. So as I turn, opening the chest, it’s as if somebody’s reaching through, pulling, So I want to turn fully to where this area moves. When I come to the other side, turn, move. So I want that whole lower ribcage to pull through so somebody’s reaching through.

See if you can see that as I’m doing the motion.

Might help with it is it might seem like there’s a little bit of a stand up at the end. Chest is bowed and soft. As I turn through, I get taller. Turn, move. Get taller, turn, get taller. So that getting taller is where you start working the lower rib cage and start working the internal pathway of the liver channel.

So that’s it. It’s a simple exercise. I want to get a full turn, but I don’t want to tense my body up and make a big to do with it. I’m just turning the hips, turning and opening the chest. That’s going to help my shoulder girdle open and just the gentle Once I get comfortable with it, then I can speed it up a little bit if I want to go faster.

But I would start small and start slow and get the pathway. Down, get the feeling down before trying to add speed.

I will get a video up on my channel for this. I might go from different angles, you can see it a little bit more. But I think from just that, it’s something to get started with. This is an easy exercise, easy for patients to do. It’s a little bit of coordination with it. It can take a little practice for people a little guidance.

You just want to watch them and see that they’re doing it in a very balanced way. But it offers a lot without too much difficulty, so I think it’s very applicable for a lot of people. You can do it seated also. Just keep in mind when you’re seated that you wouldn’t have access to as much turning of the pelvis.

So if I, if this area was fixed, I wouldn’t want to pull myself around. I wouldn’t want to pull my shoulder girdle around. You get the movement. I would still want it to be small ribcage turning in relationship to the pelvis so you don’t have as far to go in a chair, but it is applicable, it is something you can modify into a seated position.

It’s a good chance to work the liver channel, and it’s helpful for a lot of musculoskeletal, back pain, that kind of stuff, but really anything that’s involving that channel. Yeah. Thanks to American Acupuncture Council. It’s really enjoyable for me to come out and show some of these exercises, look at the pathways, to get a chance for us to feel movement in those channels.

And maybe we’ll check out side bending next time in the next webinar, and we’ll go over some some applications for patient exercises there for your own therapeutic benefit. So thanks again, and I look forward to seeing you guys next time.