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Prolo-Acupuncture with Anthony Von der Muhll

As our viewers can see the title of our talk today is Prolo acupuncture, and I’m guessing that stem from prolotherapy, but I’m not sure what that is. So you can tell us what that is.

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Hi, welcome to this week’s Facebook podcast show for the American Acupuncture Council. My name is Poney Chiang from neuro-meridian.net. I’m talking to you from Toronto Canada today. My guest is Dr. Anthony Von der Muhll who is joining us today from Al Cerrito, California. Anthony Von der Muhll graduated from the five branch university of TCM, 2002, and founded as Santa Cruz, acupuncture, orthopedic and sports medicine connect in three.

He now practices at the sports acupuncture connected in Berkeley, California. Anthony’s one of very few acupuncture in the United States with extensive experience serving as an expert witness for the California acupuncture board and civil mal. Practice litigations. He emphasizes the highest in safety.

Ethics is sustainability in his classes. He’s the founder of AOM Professional. Has taught certification acupuncture, orthopedics since 2015, he has served as a clinical supervisor at masters in doctoral levels for close to 20 years. And he has taught acupuncture, orthopedics and pain management programs at the doctoral level for.

Numerous, very highly prestigious academic institutions across the United States. I’ve invited Anthony to join us today for interview because he has a lot of experience with the, with orthopedics, but he does something that very few people talk about, which is using acupuncture to increase joint stabilization and increase joint mobilization.

So it is my honor. To have you here today, Anthony, my honor to be here. Thank you very much for the invitation let’s get started. As our viewers can see the title of our talk today is Prolo acupuncture, and I’m guessing that stem from prolotherapy, but I’m not sure what that is. So you can tell us what that is.

And how is pro acupuncture differs when. Yes. Yeah. Great question. Yeah. This name, Prolo acupuncture is basically what I call it. There, isn’t a a defined name for this technique in some classical text, but the technique has its correlates in ancient Chinese medicine. As best we can tell, or at least I can tell from reading descriptions of kneeling techniques, but I happened to learn it through a rather different route, which was another acupuncturist.

Who had studied extensively with I think primarily osteopathic physicians. The acupuncturists I learned from was Alan Marcus, who is now retired who specialized in orthopedics and what he learned from studying with some osteopaths and sports medicine physicians is the technique of probing lax, ligaments, and joint capsule.

To bring about tightening and re stabilization of the joint. And the same technique can also be used to remobilize a joint that is lost range of motions, say through adhesive capitis or joint contractual osteo. Although those are more difficult to treat than a joint that is simply lax in a, in, one or more planes.

And so the derivation of the name again is, proliferative therapy is the term is used by physicians who use this technique. Typically they’re injecting an irritant solution of some sort like Dex or salt water, or sometimes they have cocktail like MSM or Conroy and sulfate and they’re.

But a lot of the effect is actually from just simply the needle itself is the mechanical and various neuromuscular reflexes that occur from. Needling into particular tissue. And so it can be done with a dry needle, an acupuncture needle, a filoform needle, or sometimes occasionally a seven star needle.

Interesting. Are there any indications, counter indications for this type of technique? Yeah. Good question. So the indication is very simple, but it’s not intuitive. The indication is simply a joint that has an abnormality either hypomobility or hyper-mobility in one or more planes, not pain.

And so that I’m emphasizing that at underlining that because we are so wired by our training and education to to think about only pain and to respond to patient’s complaints about pain. But pain is a complex multifactorial phenomenon and there’s all kinds of ways to treat pain. But this is a technique that is very specific to restoring the function and the integrity of joints, which in my clinical experience.

And there’s a lot of, other clinical experience and evidence to support this, that joint hyper mobility or hypo mobility. Can be at the root of a lot of chronic pain and disability. So in some sense, it’s an indirect method, but the benefit of focusing on the joint rather than on pain is that you’re improving structure and function.

You’re not just providing temporary relief for addressing psychosocial factors that contribute to pain, which are important, but. Pain tends to come back until you improve structure and function in certainly in my experience. And so that’s why I gravitated to this technique is that it seemed to have a longer lasting effect on not just symptom relief, but actually bringing somebody back to their full functional capacity in everyday life work, et cetera.

That’s very interesting. Yeah. I I never thought about, stability or instability. Independently from pain. And it’s definitely making me very curious about the your method and your instruction. I’m curious about you mentioned seven star and needles.

So we can use this with our existing toolbox. There’s no special, copyrighted trademark products. I have to buy to, to take these courses. Okay. That’s very cool. Having said that, are there certain tools that you find work better for this. Sure. Sure. That’s a great question. So the one thing that’s a little different from what many of us are, were used to or experienced at say the master’s level training is that in general for probing deep into larger joints, we often used need to use larger gauge needles than some of you might be comfortable with.

And certainly I was comfortable with initially. And I’m talking, for example, a very large joint, like the knee joint, where we can do a lot of good in restabilizing a stretched out sprained anterior crucial ligament. I may use a 24 gauge needle. That’s much thicker than the 32 34 36 that are common in in more superficial acupuncture.

Using, classical locations. But the thickness and the stiffness of the needle are important because I don’t want that needle to bend or worst of all break off inside a joint. And I actually have better control and ability to direct the needle that might sound like it would be much more painful.

And actually repeatedly from both patients and my fellow practitioners to whom I’ve taught this technique, the response is surprisingly, it actually does. It feels different. It’s more like a blunt probe and a little less sharp and pokey than a very thin gauge needle. So it’s not necessarily any more painful.

It’s just different. So what type of a gauge are we talking? That’s at one end of it is a, a very large joint, like the hip or the knee on a large patient. I may need, I may reach for a 24 gauge needle, but more typically I’m using, a 30 gauge needle, a 28 gauge needle on small joints, like the fingers, a 32 or even a 34 will work.

Okay. But a deeper, larger joint needs a stiff. Thicker gauge needle to be both safe and effective in my experience is is the technique completely manual or is there like electrical stimulation in conjunction or depending? Sure. Good question. The answer is no, it doesn’t depend on anything else.

Besides the mechanical probing with your hands electrical stimulation can be useful for a patient who does have a lot of pain at the site of the joint hypermobility or hypermobility, but the essential technique. Itself is one of the reasons I began using it is that it works very fast. Under a minute worth of probing with a needle, and then you can take it out and you’ve accomplished your entire treatment effect.

You don’t need to retain the needle. On a very a joint that is badly sprained with, multiple planes that are hyper mobile. I might spend, four or five minutes, probing around till I get the joint stability I’m looking for. But again, once this is a. There is a, an immediate response that I’m looking for.

I can probe for a minute or so, withdraw the needle and recheck the joint through a manual technique called joint play testing, or end field testing. And I get immediate feedback. It’s oh, it’s either more stable or it’s not, if it’s not, I. Probably just didn’t quite get the angle. Right? Didn’t get the needle into the right location.

I can go back in probe around a little more, but with a little bit of experience, you get very fast and accurate at knowing exactly where to go with the needle and getting that re stabilization, take the needle out. You can move on to the next joint, or you can do something completely different. You can, do GU hour cupping or herbs or, treat a different condition like their I or whatever.

So I do retain the needle though on a patient who is experiencing either a lot of post needling discomfort or is just in severe pain and then I’ll hook up the electrical stem and that will provide some additional, that’ll provide the pain relief, but it doesn’t really, it’s not necessary for the effect on restabilizing or Reil the.

To help our viewers visualize, can you describe a little bit of what you’re doing with your hands? Certain change, intensity you’re feeling for, are pecking, are you going through resistance because most people have not learned this technique and we’re not asking you to teach us, but give us some idea.

What is the technical feel or the sensation that you expect the patients to feel while you’re operating this method? Sure. That’s a great question. So the technique there are basically two methods of physical exam that, that. Guide me to where the needle needs to go. The easiest one that comes, that is you need the least training for essentially is simply palpating the joint for tenderness.

And typically it’s the joint line, the crack or crevice in between two bones that span by ligaments and joint capsule. That’s where the palpation is most instructive. And for example the medial knee, extremely commonly sprained, the medial tryout of MC ACL and medial meniscus palpating along the tibio Foral joint line to find where is it most tender in its medial aspect tells me exactly where I need to go.

And then I will take that needle and I’m often asked a question, what’s the right angle is the angle that you need to get into the tender area. That in occasionally you have to be careful about bypassing a major artery, the hip joint, for example, we have to avoid the femoral artery.

So there’s some safety considerations there, but most joints, most of the time, it’s simply finding the tender aspect of the joint line and inserting directly into it. The second method that allows you to verify whether or not your technique has been effective is what I mentioned earlier. The joint play testing, and probably the best way I can do this actually is the, I’m just.

It’s basically a two handed technique, but I can grab a needle here and give you an idea of how I would do this. For example, say on my own, say I, sprained my thumb. And I wanna restabilize an inter financial joint there. And so I will, and it’s perfectly safe to do this on an uninjured joint, by the way.

So if for some reason, your history and physical exam guide you to a joint that doesn’t need this, you’re not gonna do any harm as long as you follow basic safety procedures of clean needle technique. And like I say, occasionally avoiding a major artery that’s in the area. So I’m gonna take my uninjured thumb here and I’ll show you how this would work.

I can palpate along the joint line, say, oh, ouch. And what I’m really looking for is a patient. I actually watch the patient’s face while I’m doing this. Cause what I’m looking for is reflexive unconscious, involuntary grimacing or wincing, not just them telling me verbally it’s tender, but I want, I’m looking for something like this.

I press in the joint line and they go, oh, Wow. Yeah, that’s it. That’s where it’s really sore. And then this is counterintuitive. I know, but remember, I’m not treating pain here. I’m treating structure and function. I’m gonna go right into that tender area. Will it be sore? Yes, actually. That’s how I know that I’ve got the needle where it needs to go.

Is that the patient says, oh, you’ve got it. You’ve produced my typical symptoms. That’s the bulls. And then I know I’m in an injured ligament because uninjured ligaments in joint capsules, oddly enough, won’t really hurt that much. You’ll feel a little poke as the needle goes through the skin, maybe a little pressure, a little mild achiness, but nothing beyond that.

But when the patient goes, ah, that’s it, that’s the pain I’ve been feeling. I know that the needle is where it needs to be. And then I can probe around a little bit pecking, but it’s not hard pecking, it’s more probing. And then. Like I say, typically within a minute, I can just take the needle out, recheck that joint and it’s rest stabilized.

I see. No, that’s very helpful. Thank you very much. Do you find that there are certain joints that you tend to apply your technique more often than others? Like the, for example, in other words, like other which joints in your clinical practice, do you find the most? Unstable and most able and or, or most hyper mobile.

Yeah. Great question. So the I’ll just mention three joints that really were where I first started using this or that really got my attention. I was introduced to this technique by being a demonstration patient for Alon Marcus. Some gosh. 1520 years ago where he, I was having a lot of chronic low back pain at the time.

And he needle into my posterior SAC, IC ligaments along the SAC IC joint line. And, within a couple minutes of probing around the needle, he took it out. I stood up off the table and I was like, Wow. I have never felt an acupuncture treatment like this. Not only was the pain down in my back, but my entire posture from head to toe felt completely realigned in a way that was more comfortable.

And required less energy and essentially to stay standing and that lasted for a good week or so, and then slowly dissipated. Like all of our acupuncture treatments, it does need to be repeated sometimes, but I was so I, I had felt completely different that I was like, wow, I wanna learn something about this, but the two joints where I’ve actually probably used it the most commonly that where I saw the biggest difference in.

Patient’s clinical outcomes was, number one is the acromioclavicular joint that small little crack in between the clavicle and the AROM which is very superficial, easy to find, easy to needle into safe to needle into as long as you don’t needle immediately towards the lungs. And I began to, I was having a lot of trouble with, chronic rotator.

Shoulder, pain and dysfunction and so on. And I was like, oh, that’s right. There’s that technique that Alan showed me, let me try that on the AC joint. And right away, I started getting, instead of 60%, improvement, et cetera, Mo almost invariably, most of my patients. I found through joint play testing had a loose AC joint that they weren’t even aware of.

It was not painful or symptomatic, but needling into it. Suddenly we got stability of that joint full range of motion in the shoulder. Very often, sometimes there was still some range of motion deficits coming from the GLE humeral joint, but improvements in range, muscle strength. Verified through manual strength testing very frequently, fully restored or greatly improved.

And interestingly neck pain also going down because the upper trapes is attaches to the clavicle. And when that joint is hyper Hoag and not stable the muscles around it, overcompensate and tug on the neck. Wow. One needle, one joint, huge regional effect. Couple of minutes worth of probing. Big difference.

Objectively verifiable that lasts sometimes indefinitely from a single treatment sometimes needs to be repeated a few times, but typically will last for months or years without any repetition. After an effective re stabilization. The other joint I’ll mention very quickly is the ankle similar, easy to treat, easy to.

With effects up and down the biomechanical chain from the hip to the foot improved by restabilizing a hyper mobile ankle joint.

Very fascinating. So it’s you have to, if you’re scaffolding, your foundation is compromised, then your muscles are not gonna properly. Improperly it’s different.

Are. Able to share us with us a inspiring clinical story that you’ve had recently, perhaps your practice or from teaching where it was something that, was very transformative. It made a difference. And wasn’t for this technique. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll mention a patient in her mid seventies that I’m actually currently treating , who a long time ago she was in her twenties.

So 50 years ago was an. Obese large person fell on her from, and sprained her superior tibio fibular joint, a small joint. That’s actually part of the calf, but where the superior part of the fibula articulates with the Tal Condi and also sprained her ankle. So she had a she fell sideways onto the ground with this person falling on Herra her superior tib joint, and her ankle.

And her. Couple of small midfoot joints as well, and has been in somewhat chronic pain ever since in her leg. And it’s affected her back and her neck, et cetera, 50 years ago. And and comes to me. And she happens to be medical professional herself has tried a number of different modalities, nothing really helped.

And I should say, this is why this technique is so important because there isn’t really any other technique that can restabilize a hyper mobile joint. You. Repair and replace it surgically, you can inject cortisone to reduce pain and inflammation, but actually changing the function structure without surgery.

This is really the only thing. Guha cupping manual therapy. Won’t do it. Distal kneeling. Won’t do it. So anyway, so I evaluate her calf and your ankle and go, wow. You’re on your superiority, fib joint and your lateral ankle ligaments. Small joint called the Calkino cuboid joint and the spring ligaments on the medial arch of the foot.

All of these are hyper mobile and stretched out from that single injury because they were never treated locally with this type of technique. About three or four minutes a couple of minutes per joint, again stands up off the table. It’s wow. My leg feels completely D.

And I recheck all the joints. Everything is stable. don’t see her for a month. She comes back in, everything’s still pretty good. The superior tib joint needed a little bit of tune up a little more kneeling, but I didn’t have to treat the ankle or the foot joints again. And then I see her, three or four weeks later and she’s can we work on something else?

Now? My life’s doing pretty good. I can. Yes. I love it when you get that oh, by the way, can you also treat this? And it’s yes. Got it. That’s that was super enlightening. I can’t wait to study with you. So if somebody like me wanted to study with you, where can we find out more information? Sure.

Thank you very much for asking and I’d be happy to work with anyone on this technique. My website is www dot a as in acupuncture, O as an Oriental medicine. And I know this is a been a standard term and I’m in the process of actually changing everything in my notes and eventually my website.

But right now it’s www.AOM, A as in acupuncture, O as in Oriental M as in medicine, professional, all is one word AOM, professional.com. And that’s where you can go for information about live webinars, distance learning classes, and returning to in-person teaching this summer, after a couple years off for the pandemic.

Excellent. Thank you. Once again, I’d just like to thank you for your time on behalf of the American Acupuncture, Acupuncture Council, and and to all our friendly viewers out there. If you have any feedback please comment. And and we would love to hear from you. Thank you very much.

All right. Thank you all for your time too.

Using Ma Huang in Formulas

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Hi, I’m Sharon Weizenbaum from the White Pine institute and the White Pine Circle. And I appreciate the American acupuncture council for having me here today. The topic of the lecture today is how to use Ma Huang safely. So I hope this is interesting to you all. So go to our first slide.

Okay. So we’re going to be looking at using Ma Huang safely in relation to some formulas and what Ma Huang does in these formulas and how it’s used differently. So we can get an idea of which formulas are really strong and bring out certain characteristics of my Hong and Richard are actually quite gentle, even though they have.

Ma Huang in them. So we’re going to be looking at first, this idea of cold damage, Ty, on Shanghai gone. So that’s on the surface of the body, this damage from cold, which is the quintessential pattern for which we give Ma Huang. And I’m going to be, I’m telling you more about how I see the use of mobile.

It’s a little bit different than, or my hometown a little bit different than the standard way of thinking about mom one time. So here are the symptoms that go along with the Mohan tongue pattern. Called damage, headache, fever, body, and back pain, joint pain, aversion to cold, lack of sweating, panting fullness of the chest.

And the pulse is tight and floating. So these are the symptoms that are listed in the Shanghai load for this pattern. And I’d like to just go over some of these with the idea. That the model long tongue pattern is a pattern in which the surface of the body is frozen shut. So just imagine that the surface of your body is frozen and therefore it’s.

So you can imagine if the surface of your body is frozen and shut, that you would be very cold. And with the Hong Kong pattern, this aversion to cold is really an extreme version of version. Like you cannot get warm no matter how many covers you put on. So you’re really cold, but at the same time, there’s this lack of sweating because the surface of the body is frozen clothes.

Now this panting that’s here is related to the fact that the surface of the body is completely closed down. The pores are not opening at all because they’re frozen shut. And it’s actually true that. For example, you got a bad burn over more than 60% of your body. You die of suffocation. So we actually breathe through the surface of our body quite a lot.

And so when the surface of your body is frozen closed, it’s difficult to breathe. So there’s. Panting. And the same is true of the fullness of the chest. It’s a deer lungs are not able to open and circulate. Now we’ll go back to the beginning, this a headache and body and back pain. This is a tie young pattern in the Tyrone channels.

Go up the back and onto the. And those are the channels that are frozen closed. So you feel really a lot of pain with a mom. One time pattern, you just feel so achy. It’s not a minor symptom, the way it would be with like a grade, your tongue pattern here, you just feel so achy. And the reason you have a fever is because all the time, the young and our body is going up and down.

So we’re always sweating a little bit, but we’re letting off body heat at the same time. And when we when the surface is frozen shut, that young comes to the surface of the body and accumulates. So you can get fever, it’s pathological heat. So it can’t keep us warm. In fact, we’re very cold so we can understand these signs and symptoms and that.

Holes is floating because the pathology and the life force is stuck up at the surface of the body. And it’s tight because it’s frozen, closed, floating can be in a certain position. Me that it’s, mostly in the term position, it can also mean in another position it’s towards the surface.

So usually with this pattern, that’s one position. Floating and tight. So if you have that image of the surface of the body being frozen closed, so imagine this is the frozen circle around your body. And so you feel all these symptoms, then you bring in my hometown. And so with montage, what we’re doing is bringing pungent warrants from inside the body.

We drink the herbs. Now we are punching warmth inside our body. And it goes up and out, punching in their bodies go, goes up and out. So we bring this pungent warmth into our body and it goes up and out and it melts the surface of the body. And therefore we swap. No. So then the sweat comes out.

And I sometimes ask my patients, do you feel, do you have a feeling like if only I could sweat, I would feel better. And usually a Moncton pattern is actually really good news because it’s so easy to treat. The person is so painfully uncomfortable and yet the herbs. So fast. And if the person, usually within 10, 20 minutes, they have a nice sweat and they feel such a sense of relief.

So anyway, so we have an idea about this cold damage that matches Mohan time. So now let’s look at as Mojang itself. And when we look at my home, we want to look at what it does in the body, but we also want to look. What’s the proportion of Mazatlan in the formula. Some formulas are long and have just a small amount of mamma.

Other formulas are short and have a big proportion of mama. What is the model and combined with that makes a really big difference in terms of the action of the Maha and what are the proportions of Maha to the other types of. And this will tell you the way and the extent to which you’re using mom’s characteristics.

Here’s my rooster out the window. Okay. So Maha Mo long is pungently and warmly stimulating upward on the surface of the body, up and out in a very warm way. Hung is also bitter and it’s bitterly descending an opening from the surface lung to the bladder. So we also have more long patterns where the surface gets frozen and it’s like putting your finger at the top of the straw and the water accumulates.

It can’t go down through the bladder. My hung is also hollow. And so it has this quality of opening through it too. So by opening the poor. You. You can then P I remember just a little story, anecdotal story that might help remember this. Like I said, I had a patient who had a urinary incontinence as a general rule, and she got a cold and it was a Mohan tongue pattern.

And her incontinence completely went away while she was sick. And she noticed that God, I’m coughing and sneezing, and I’m not. And it’s because those pores are closed and it holds that water in. Okay. So when we’re using Mont long, all the symptoms come from the pattern and they can vary a lot. So Mojang is very stimulating to the heart.

So it treats the opposite of that, where you feel fatigue and dog. With the Maha tongue pattern, you want to go to bed and just curl up and sleep. You’re so fatigued and doll. My Hong is warming to the surface, so it’s really good for cold and it’s opening to the surface. So it treats the panting and the lack of sweat it’s hollow and bitter.

So it opens the surface to the bladder to allow water, to descend. It also leads other. To the surface of the body. Okay. So here’s my hometown. So we look at this proportion of mob in a formula and we have three Leon or nine grams. And then we have six Leon of wager, six grams of Granger and 10 grams of shingles.

And then just a little bit of gun set with just three grams. So there’s the formula. So we see there’s a large proportion of third of the formula is . The other thing about mom on tongue is that it’s combined with great. So when you see mama combined with wager, this is going to be opening the surface and creating probably creating a sweat.

If it’s just a little bit of both, maybe not so much, but wager is like a potentiating or . So when you have more hung in a formula, as we’ll see, without wager, it’s not nearly so dispersed. To the surface of the body. So think of wager as potentiating model making it stronger. So the Afrikaan seed and the shadow Bansal Jamie says it’s sweet and warm, beneficially cold.

And with slight toxin, to me, the. The way that the shaman works in the montage is that while Mafong is making the the lungs and the surface of the body go up and out this we, and we’re losing liquid, right? It promotes this sweat. The sweetness brings in oyster for the lungs, and it also helps the lungs go down.

So we’re opening up the poor so that there’s breathing and then also descending the lungs. So rules, cough with reversal of the G, which is what’s happening. Then the chia is rising and getting stuck up about. So those are the primary things we want to notice there. And then 10 show you and says the seeds are more bitter than sweet.

So this gentleman, Sergeant hesitance was sweet, but also bitter, which is really why it is known to have this. Moving down. She said for the rising up of the cheek. So Shinran is in there really to help the lungs to send once they’re open. So if we’re looking at the lungs here at the top of the body, we have the rising on the left and the descending on the right.

She ran works here on the right, helping the lungs descend. And if you’ve watched my previous Videos you’ll know about this circle. So mama tongue is the quintessential model and formula it’s potentiated by Granger and it has little else to really control it. So it has this frozen exterior mama goes up and out and it’s also bitter.

So it helps descend with the Xing run. And then it dissolves the frozen. Okay. So now we’re going to look at another formula. And so maybe now you’ll notice in this formula though, there’s a lot of long proportionally given the amount of sure go. It’s actually quite a bit less than in my hometown. In addition, not only is it not potentiated by wager.

It’s also got the shirt go to balance it out. So if you think about what Shergill does, if mom’s long excites the heart and stimulates, sure go columns agitation. If mom goes up and out in order to help produce a sweat. Sure. Go. Opens up the young Ming to relieve and stops waiting. We know in, by Hutong, big sweat is one of the symptoms of

So we can see that shirk out really counteract some of the negative effects of ma Xing shotgun tongue. It’s also sometimes called mushing gunshot tongue, or

And so this is an amazing formula. I just love this formula. And so I want you to see how this formula is safe. You know what, with mom one time, not only are we worried. Someone is getting insomnia and having palpitations because it’s so exciting, but also we’re worried about their pores opening too much.

And them losing a lot of young through their pores and a lot of yen through the sweat, so there are a lot of cautions and contraindications for Mohan. However mushing. Sure. Gone Tonya is quite different. And in my experience, it doesn’t induce a sweat at all. And this formula is one reason.

I really love it. When you have some over and over again, great results with it and you feel just when to give it and you feel like you have a super power. And so I feel that way with mushing shirt on. So in this formula it’s really for when the surface was frozen and it really has just dropped into your lungs, not in a way that you’re getting better.

Like sometimes when you have a cold, as you’re getting better, you get a cough, but you feel actually not as bad as you did in the beginning. This is that feeling of. Oh, no, my condition’s gone south. I’m getting worse. It’s dropped into my chest. Really. This is going to turn into bronchitis or pneumonia.

Just draw that feeling of dropping in. And you’ll have patients where, when they get a cold, it always does that. The beginning, it’s just a cold and then they’re, oh, no, dropped into my chest. I’m going to be in this for awhile. I’m getting worse. And. And this formula mushing turn on time.

It’s, just some opening the exterior, but really opening the downward movement of the lungs and preventing them from getting hot. For me, the shirt gal is not necessarily such a cooling or it does have a cooling effect, but that’s because of. Is pungent and it opens up the downward movement of the young men.

So if you were in a room and all the windows were closed in getting hotter and hotter, and then you’re just shitting all over the place because it’s getting hotter and hotter, it’s like opening the windows and it sure gal has the quality of going down, not from being bitter, but from the slivers actually being vertical.

Slivers of the stone. It’s also sweet. So the it helps to moisten the lungs back up when they’d gotten hot. So it’s just a beautiful formula when you take it. And it’s the right formula. Again, the result is almost instant, like whenever you have an acute issue and you get the formula, it, the results are usually really fast compared to working with a chronic issue.

But so you can see that the fear, like I’ve taken mushing shirt on Tom before and with long time. Oh my God. The littlest bit. And I would get palpitations because I’m so not a mop on Tom type of person. I don’t get mop on them. Tongue types of issues, but with mushing shirt on Tom, never a problem. I think a lot of people are really afraid to use mom long at all.

Oh, I can’t give somebody a formula, but what I’d like you to see is like all mom formulas are not the same. So here we have mashing shirt on top. The right solution is floating and slippery because of that heat and the young Ming and the sweating means that the lungs are blocked. And so here we have the and there’s this block in the young, main preventing the lungs from going down and it’s getting hot and you give the white tiger, which is sure.

Go and it clears that okay, the next formula I want to look at and I put the clauses here for you, but I’m not going to read them. And if you can look at this and see, okay, how strong is this in terms of opening up the surface of the body? Inducing a sweat and you can probably see, wow, this is really strong.

So it has Mojang at six Leon or 18 grounds and wager to potential. So dodging long-term is a formula. That’s going to strongly open up the exterior of the body. It’s going to create a sweat. You have to be careful with this formula. Now it also has sure go, but it’s got relatively less usher gal and a lot more of mom long.

So this is a formula to be careful with. Now we also have in this formula, the the. Three Musketeers. John Datta. And we have gone so in my hometown, but here, we also have shown John and dad’s house. And that’s super important for this formula because not only are you inducing a sweat and getting rid of young that way, you’re also giving sure go, that’s very cooling and you have to replace.

Those that fluid and warmth it from the stomach. So Sean, John, with that though, it starts this cooking process in the stomach of bringing in more fluids, especially with gun sale. So we can see in this formula, I would love for people to be able to now look at formulas and see how strong is this formula going to be.

No. So this is a really strong open. The exterior melt, the exterior formula. And it’s like mom, Hong Kong, except not only is the surface still blocked, but there’s starting to be a lot of heat developing now in the mushing shirt on Tom, those surfaces just barely blocked. And so it’s much more that the heat is developing.

So here we have a comparison of the dodging lone tongue versus the mushing shirt on Tom.

So mashing. Sure. Gone has no Granger or Sean, John. So it’s not for water. This young John is in there for water and it’s not so diaphoretic. And the Xing ran is high in mushing shirt, Anton drains. It’s more for the lungs. So it’s much more of a young men formula mashing shirt on tongue and less for Taya compared to dodging.

So here in dodging London, lots of Granger with lots of Mohan, also shown Jong is going to be pungent and warm. So diaphoretic, the Chung drawn means there’s water. So this, there can be water swelling, especially like in the joints with touching long tongue, much more. Taitung less young men. So dodging low tongue.

We have. It’s very cool. With some heat starting to develop, and we give the blue green dragon, which is Mont long and Granger, and we give the white tiger and we melt the cold and also clear that he, while replenishing the fluids from the middle, the fluids and the warm from the middle. The pulse is same as shouting, long time.

And it’s, but it’s slippery in the right Guan because of the heat could go all the way up to the right.

So dodging lumatone indications. It disperses that coal that’s on the surface of the body and also water on the exterior, like swelling in the joints. There’s no sweating with this pattern or mushing shirt on. You might have sweating. You might not have sweating, but it’s not a big part of the pattern.

You will have pain with the dodging one-time pattern. You will have heat. And also vexation, you’ll feel agitated.

So we look at the doses of Baden comparing dodging long tongue with Mohan time.

My hometown is pure Ty young dodging, long tongue is mostly Italian and going into younger. So at our final formula, hopefully well-trained by now you look and say, wow, there’s a lot of my one. There’s also a lot of sure gal. And so then we also see there’s quite a bit of Shung John.

So this formula has no Quaker. Really inducing a sweat. It’s more just opening the pores and warming the surface of the body and cooling heat in the Shung. John tells us that it’s for water and this is called wind water. And with this formula, you get swelling and pain in the body and sometimes swollen joints that get very hot as well.

Same in the . But here, the surface is not so cold. There’s a formula family of the maid servant w way formulas where you can add a bite, you, if there’s more dampness and a thicker coating on the tongue, you can add on Shaw, if there’s vomiting and then there’s a formula. That’s a very small doses called wager R UAB E.

Two times grade your tongue with one part two parts, grades, your tongue, and one part UAV. But the main point I wanted to make here for this lecture about using Mojang safely is that this is the main servants of your way are known for their consideration and gentleness. And we can know that Mojang with sure gal without wager is very gentle.

So you don’t have to be worried here about agitating, somebody or creating too much of a sweat when you have this sure. Gout without the wager, just like in marching shirt on. So this is basically saying what I just said. Okay. So would the UAB tongue, the surfaces lightly closed? And it’s made there be water swelling, and actually it’s the combination of the Gonzo.

And the mama also treats the water swelling, and then it also starts to get hot because it’s not moving once that blocked surface starts to get hot. And we say, oh, it’s moving into young name. And so you get not only water swelling, but it starts to. Red and the water swelling is painful and we’re also, you can see where replenishing the fluids from the fluids and the young from the inside.

So we add the blue, green dragon mama shown tongue and the white tiger. And. It opens things up and clears the heat. So the water swelling goes away and the heat is clear to the person is comfortable. Again, an amazing formula when it’s given at the right moment. Okay. So thank you. Just to end with a few little farm pictures.

We had three pregnant goats and every one of them had triplets. This is a couple of. And so now we have nine baby goats. So that’s Elm and Jasmine with their babies. And that’s my daughter, the farmer with our puppy that was born New Year’s Eve here. Okay. Thank you very much, everybody.

Evidence-Informed Acupuncture Practice

And so today we’re going to be talking about the importance of evidence-based practice. Or evidence-informed practice, which means it’s coming out of a lot of the research, which the exciting part about that is that we’re getting from the other aspect, the more Western scientific model.

Click here to download the transcript.

Hello and welcome today’s episode of the American Acupuncture Council live stream. My name is Tsao-Lin Moy. I am a licensed acupuncturist and herbalist with a brick and mortar practice in union square in New York city. I’m very excited. Today to be welcoming Sandro Graca and very grateful to the American Acupuncture Council for putting these livestreams on now a quick Al Sandro is a licensed acupuncturist and lecture and research.

Is he’s done. He’s writing lots of papers about in particular women’s reproductive health, which is extremely important because not enough is done for women’s health. And he is also an avid speaker. And he is the director of evidence-based acupuncture and a fellow at the American board of Oriental reproductive medicine, and S and also the society for acupuncture research.

And so today we’re going to be talking about the importance of evidence-based practice. Or evidence informed practice, which means it’s coming out of a lot of the research, which the exciting part about that is that we’re getting from the other aspect, the more Western scientific model. Is now really recognizing, the benefits there’s like more concrete evidence and information.

And so we’re really looking at integrative medicine, or this is the, this is what we’ll be bridging that helps to bridge, understanding and better practice. So thank you so much, Sandra, for being. Thank you so much for asking me, inviting me to be here and asking me to do this talk. It’s always a pleasure to talk about.

I love research, but more so, it’s a pleasure because I get to contribute towards the future of our profession. Absolutely. We really need, we really and this is for the, for the public. Because we’re looking at what’s happening is, Medicare is going to be covering a lot of insurance companies are covering or not covering because there is, where’s the evidence.

And this is an area that it just benefits everyone. And if somebody is on the fence, About I don’t know if it works that here. We’ve got some great studies. And again, we were talking before the break about the one with carpal tunnel and I’m so very excited to see your presentation Sandro.

Yeah, thank you so much. I think that’s a really good point. And one of the things that I would mention is that there are actually different ways of using this information and different ways of using research. So one of them is, as you said, just having that you know the language to be able to talk to other people about what we do because not everyone knows what we know or loves acupuncture and Chinese medicine as much as we do.

So they might not have that language. But if we have another language to be able to communicate with them, then it just becomes a little bit easier to have that interaction and to get the ball rolling in terms of communication. And also, as you said, with the policymakers, obviously, But another aspect that I will bring up on my presentation as well is going to be that fact of the more you write about what you do in your clinic, because that’s research too, reporting, what do you do?

And the results you’re getting in your clinic. You’re contributing to the literature and you’re leaving something there for not just the people around us now, but also for the future for others to read what we’re doing in the clinic and taking that a step further. Absolutely mean, what would we be doing? What would we do without the sew-in aging or the link shoe, or, the golden cabinet or all of those things where this is very traditional practitioners, we’re recording all of their cases.

And then from that, tome of information gathered. That they were getting results that then ended up being prescriptions and points to use that they could pass down. This is thousands of years, so there’s no reason why, we shouldn’t be continuing to contribute. And then with modern science to take advantage of, that aspect of.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll talk a little bit about those different aspects during my presentation. So if we’re okay to go and then I’ll obviously I’ll leave a little bit at the end as well for us to talk about it, but I’ll show you how I try to put those together. Hopefully what do you will take from this and thinking about my main role, in terms of research with evidence-based acupuncture and being that idea of ancient medicine, modern research, and the evolutionary thinking that hopefully for all of us to continue to carry our perfection forward, this is almost like a little bit of a disclosure as well.

So what I do, as you said, I’m on the board of directors of evidence-based acupuncture, I’m a fellow of the born. And on my, for full disclosure to pay jobs. I am a lecturer at the Northern college of acupuncture, and I’m also a researcher on the Cochrane review group for acupuncture, for IVF. My main work is and research and passion is on PCLs polycystic ovary syndrome.

And I am a member of the SRM of Astra and the androgen excess society for PCLs. So that’s really the. My passion lies. And I want to say big, thank you. And this is not just a, a token of gratitude. This is really a big, thank you for you inviting me to be here because I’m a doer. I like to put the M get my feet down and could do some work.

And this is a paper that came out only. Last month was the end of March that was finally published. And this is a survey of clinical practice. And this is really asking the practitioners what they’re doing, how they are doing. Really proud of this is my first author paper as well. And working with such a great, an amazing group of people that are, really motivates me and to do more.

So what this says, and this is why I’m really saying a big, thank you, is that practitioners that were in the survey actually said that they favored knowledge obtained from webinars and conferences. Ah, nice webinar talking about research. So I hope that this reaches as many people as possible and the message for our side, because as I was talking just before we started, I don’t spend as much time in the clinic anymore.

The message for academics and clinician researchers is to hear what the practitioners are saying and saying that they still want this dissemination of knowledge. They want to know about this, but beyond those traditional publications on the journals and stuff like. They do want to know more about research literacy and special interest groups, like for example, da Borum or the obstetrical acupuncture association that I’m connected with as well and the AAC as well.

Like it’s the associations needing to link with the practice. Just a quick acknowledgement, because again, we like doing this and TCM and here I am saying that I would not be here if it wasn’t for the passion for research from professor Ian McPherson, who unfortunately is no longer with us.

And he’s there with the person who was my supervisor for my MSC. That’s Dr. Lara McClair. And I just want to say that yeah, Lara was spot on when she wrote that for Hughes retirement. When she said that he inspired thousands of us to become researchers, that I’m really proud to be one of those and to continue that work.

And obviously Dr. Mike Armour, who we saw the name on that publication there, who’s really helping me. And in this new career, for as a researcher. So I’ll start this with a little story and. Because my granddad was a great storyteller and I always look at Dr. Leon hammer and think about the great stories that he always shares with us.

And this really connects and links for me in terms of research and why we’re doing this rather than just being in clinic and keep doing the same thing over and over again. So he wrote this paper in 2002. So that’s 20 years ago. And look at how relevant that is. He started with the paper could be some not, but a small story.

And he said a little girl once asked her mother why she cut off the end of the roast before putting in the oven. And the mom said because that’s the way that my mother, your grandmother used to do it. We’ll have to ask her. So off they go to grandma’s house and only to find out that grandma actually did it because her mother had.

So the three generations are to go over to great-grandma’s house. And I love his wording was there to seek the wisdom of the ages. And when they posed the question to the great grammar and the great grammar just said, why? Dear the pan was too small. So that story just continues and it’s a great article.

If you have the time to read it, it’s amazing. And he just talks about that. Chinese medicine needs a new pond for a roast that has grown since ancient times in size and in shape and what we can talk about now, he says then at the end there about the. Pulse is no longer a sign of internal cold in our time is a sign of overworking nervous system.

And I always think about this and going, this was written in 2002. How would this tide pools will be described in 20, 22 after all that has happened recently? So it’s really interesting to see that sometimes. And this is no disrespect to our practice, but some is there. More cases that we’re just doing things because that’s what we were told.

And then when we asked the people who told us they were doing it as well, because that’s what they were told. So that’s what really motivates me. And at the time when I was getting this information together, I would, as I was at a webinar, there you go with Elizabeth and she said this is word by word, what she said, Chinese classical medicine is not yet finished.

We have to continue to edit it. And I thought, huh, that’s really interesting. And bearing in mind like me. So I’m Portuguese. I speak English. I know a little bit of Chinese from learning. Elizabeth Tasha is French. So she’s speaking in English and she’s talking about Chinese medicine as well. So for me, the language is very important and she said that it’s not to invent, but to discover new ways to express, it’s not because it’s not in the classics that it’s not interest.

And then this was the sentence that really, I was talking to her, like emailing back and forth after this webinar, because I thought this was really interesting. There are a lot of things that we are yet to develop. If we want to continue to practice a living medicine and not a dead. And again, I really liked language and that really stayed with me.

And this is the work that I was already doing, and that I’m really passionate about doing now, because it depends on how we see things, order and chaos could be different in different ways that when they are in front of you, So I do love the classics. I read them when I was studying and I still do when I have the time, you always go back to them, but now I just do more work in research and I love research.

And I think that it’s really important for the continuity of our medicine. And just like Elizabeth Kasha said to continue to practice this Olivia. So you might be wondering, and if you’re one of those purists that would say that, no, this is, ancient medicine. We need to stick with the ancient medicine.

I thought that too, and I was able to see things from a different perspective and I always bring up this study because it, I came across this just by pure accident. And again, it’s just one of those things Dr. June mouse was involved in this, as you can see in the name. And it just really caught my eye because when considering barriers for occupants to use.

And bearing in mind, this is a hot topic, right? Like it’s breast cancer survivors. So it’s really, it’s charged and it’s emotional. And I would always think that the main thing would be because I don’t use acupuncture because it interferes with the treatment that’s that was my perception would be, that would be the top thing.

So when I started reading the paper and realizing that lack of knowledge about acupuncture was actually the main reason why these people weren’t getting acupuncture was just mind blowing. And knowing that interfering with the treatment, not based on science, the side effects, painful, difficult time finding an acupuncturist.

I thought, I always thought those were going to be way up higher. I did not think that lack of knowledge was going to be an issue. And since it is, then we need to get this information and try to make sure that people know about acupuncture, but that they know about it from reliable sources. And if we can’t communicate with them in terms of the classics and old language that is harder for them to understand, let’s bring a language that it’s easier for them.

So that’s I want to like interrupt you just for a second about the cancer research, because I mean our the information okay. That is one of the very, if I remember correctly, the th the evidence and the efficacy of acupuncture for nausea. From chemotherapy, that was one of the burbs studies for nausea, for pregnancy and chemotherapy.

That was really validating okay, this is why acupuncture works. So the surprise that in the area among, breast cancer, that is still not this is a great thing to do that, it’s a, non-drug, it’s, easy to. Very it’s not going to injure you in any way.

That’s the surprising is that it can really help simple, very simple thing to be doing to help somebody. But so you can see how important it is that to language is, so this is going to be teamwork, right? So it’s going to be the patient needs to know the clinicians that are already looking after that patient.

They need to know as well. Practice. I think that we all have to be ambassadors for our medicine, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And we need to, and once we are called up to be on that team, we need to be able to talk to them because if they ask us, what did you just do? What treatment was that for that particular patient, we need to use a language that they can understand this.

Otherwise, they still won’t know what, when damn cheap Schwab, they won’t know what that means. So how would you want to work with someone that you can’t understand? So it’s being part of the team and what language you’re using to make sure that people can go actually allowed something here.

I always say this on my presentations in we do the. Practitioners graduated and they start going into their own practice. And what they do. I always say that do not ever let any patient leave your clinic without them knowing a little bit about what you did, because you don’t want them to go and talk to someone else and go, Hey, I went for acupuncture and it was brilliant.

And that person is going to ask him, oh, acupuncture, I’ve heard about that. What did they do? Oh, I don’t know. I was just lying there and they put in some needles. I don’t know what kind of advertising. It’s not really, that’s not really great word of mouth. Is it? I was lying there at then. It’s, people, patients that are informed make better decisions about their health, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So that’s really good. And thanks for bringing that up because that’s one of the aspects. So that was a little bit of about. How it relates to our practice and to the people around us. So more specifically now I’ll give you an example of B for me, how it’s start. Was I looking at points or IVF?

So I was getting people into the,

and Nick and they were going, and I remember clearly the very first time of looking at a re what’s, this thing, all about this, Paul, all those protocols. Points are to use this right? So it helped us. And it was interesting for me, need to go. It wasn’t available in the classics in this detailed way for this specific issue that is so recent.

And this kind of gotten me thinking and from then on, it was like, okay, so what else is actually been written and in research and what else can I, what other information can I get from these papers as well? And to take that con the continuous from the policy protocol and how things changed here we are.

Now, all these nipples protocol was published in 2002. Here we are now in 2019 with a systematic review and meta now. Telling us more about three or more treatments, the use of a modified protocol. We know the C MoPTA credenda migraine. The acupuncture protocol is even more used now and how we’d adjust to the changes on the IVF procedures as well, because the IVF procedures now are not the same as they were when the policy protocol was designed.

So again, it’s a living medicine, so we’re all learning from it. Yes, exactly. Am I just want to point out that, protocols are. So really a guide. They’re not because of course each we’re still practicing patient centered medicine. And, radically personalized. And so this two ideas about the idea of improving blood circulation, calming the nervous system down, right?

So those are these points elections, but they’re not the only thing. And then there are many practitioners that do, assist with reproductive, with the IVF protocols, et cetera, et cetera that are going to tail. To their patients and use some, maybe all maybe less. But yeah.

So with protocols, I like, okay, it’s not with everyone. It’s got it. We still have to personalize treatments. Absolutely. Yeah. And I’ll show you a good example of that then towards the end. Cause I have one again, because I have more experienced with the IVF side of things and how important it is to have, as you said, like that protocol, that set of ideas, but then how.

Also work with that and add more related to that person in front of you. So just to summarize, and I will talk a little bit more about these points, just more specifically, but research literacy. So knowing about research, why is it important if anyone was to ask you. Through the main points that I would say to someone best practice.

So we spoke about this just now, knowing what is being done, what has changed, what are other peoples in other parts of the world doing and how is it working for them? So in other words, is it informing my practices? Professional credibility. When you’re talking to someone, if you’re able to talk to them in a language that they understand, it’s easier to have a conversation.

So it’s not taking anything down from the classics or from Chinese medicine. Language is just adopting that if I was speaking Portuguese only because I was in Portugal, we wouldn’t be able to have this conversation. If the classics weren’t translated from Chinese into English. We wouldn’t be able to read them when we were in college and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

So it’s the credibility of, oh, I understand what you’re saying. And we’re having a conversation and then linked with that is engaging with other healthcare practitioners, because we want to be part of that team that is looking after the patients. And that is pretty much how evidence-based acupuncture was born.

By the way evidence-based acupuncture was something that was set up by a medical doctor who did acupuncture. And in his own words, it was just getting the same question all the time when he told people to in his office and they say, oh, I think you should get acupuncture. People who go but you’re a medical doctor and you’re telling me to go and get acupuncture.

Do you believe in that? I knew would always say the same thing. It’s nothing to do with belief. It’s to do with it works. So I’m telling you to go learn. Belief has nothing to do with this conversation. So the EBA has this one sentence thing that you see on the website and on our forum. It’s the goal is to construct a successful evidence-based explanation, and that will help us to communicate.

Acupuncturist evidence effectively and support the public clinicians and healthcare policy makers. And that’s really important because those people are the ones that will decide what type of medicine and who gets to work, where, and that is using the language of science. The healthcare policy makers was something that we added more recently in the last few years.

And it’s been really interesting for me to look at that group specifically because. They might not have any medical background at all. They might be coming from a law background or, anything else, not necessarily a medical background. So not only they wouldn’t know about what we would call biomedicine or Western medicine, they definitely would not know from Chinese medicine eater.

So really important to have a language that we can talk to them about. And that’s because the public. And these, everyone is reading stuff from all the way from, as you were saying, these great papers coming out in terms of acupuncture for cancer. But the other side of the spectrum has stuff that is not accurate at all.

And we just can’t change it because it is the way it is. So there’s a big wide spectrum of information that these people are accessing. And I would prefer them to get this information from us. I added a slide because he asked me to, because he wants to talk about this one. And I really liked this one and seeing the stuff that came out of acupuncture research that is so much part of our day-to-day life.

And that’s sometimes we might not even realize that it came about because of acupuncture, research, neuro imaging research, you were talking about the. The paper and talking about how MRIs have been used and gave us so much information about what’s happening inside our brain, when we’re getting acupuncture biomedical knowledge of connective tissue, Penn level Lily Helaine Lowe’s event, like a it’s all, acupuncture is definitely so fascinating that as it looking to see how it works, they find so much more and it actually does advance.

The Western medical model. It’s yeah. So you see it adds onto it. Yeah. Insights into therapeutic encounters. Again, professor you McPherson wrote a lot about this as well and how, and even, yeah, Vitaly not, but I’ll put this out there as well, how the encounter actually matters. And that should account for when you’re doing the research tens machines, the anti-nausea wristbands, all of this stuff is there because of this work that is being done.

Hooray to us, and the new thing that you seeing more and more the comparative effectiveness research in terms of really trying to get that pragmatic approach to what we do in clinic and trying to put that into what is happening in research as well, and the amount of stuff that is out there.

And again, I won’t go on too much about this because we all know about this. John puts this amazing stuff together, compiles all this information. There’s almost 16, probably. Now this was in February 16,000 of Cochran’s central register of controlled trials. We should not discard this information.

We should use it. And that information is of good quality. This is something that we hear every once in a while about there’s a lot of research, but is it of good quality? We now have information showing that it is it’s the last 20 years. Yeah. Twice to fold higher rate than biomedical research.

The quality of that research is better as well. It has improved on journals and we have the papers to prove it as well. So this is good information to have on your website and to have on under your belt when you’re talking to other people. If they say, oh, there is stuff written, but it’s not a good quality.

Actually let me show you. And this is, I always go back to this amazing sentence that John said when we had our conference about the research is out there, but who’s reading it. And I guess that this is why I’m here doing this with you. And this is why we have our goal with EBA to get people, to talk with different languages and understand different languages and ultimately whatever floats your boat acupuncture.

So I’m asking you to be the change, you all listening to this, you and I say this, that you spend more time in clinic than I do. So you matter. And here’s the example that I was saying to you about the IVF work. So we’re looking at this from 2012, the Delfi consensus put together. So this is asking practitioners about information, about what you’re doing in the clinic for your IVF treat.

That information is, can even see that Shane Littleton was involved in this professor. Carline Smith’s name is Derek says on grant. Anyway, the names you’ll recognize the names anyway, but this was asking to practitioners, tell us what you do in the clinic. All that information goes towards an RCT. It doesn’t always have to be an RCT, this group is really reliable and really good at putting this research together.

They were able to put it in RCT together. That goes into a secondary outcomes of that RCT. So more information from that in terms of anxiety and quality of life for women undergoing IVF. And sometimes the clinics are really interested in this quality of life, anxiety for those people going through IVF.

Then all that information that started with the clinic remember goes into a systematic review and meta analysts. That gives us a lot of information. All of that goes into information for the Cochrane review, which is more likely to be something that, again, healthcare policymakers and medical people will be reading about that.

Remember how it started with that email in your inbox. Hey, do you have five minutes? Do you have 10 minutes to help us out with this? So what I want to say is that, if acupuncture is helping with anxiety over IVF, then. It’s obviously going to also help with anxiety over climate change, anxiety, over whatever anxiety.

And we see, move that there is this opioid crisis for pain. Acupuncture is great for pain. It’s great for helping people get off of addiction. But also if it’s great for anxiety, then we’re also gonna be looking at the future where so many people are on anxiety medication. Which are also very addictive.

And so just by, I’m just like adding into this. Just because one research area is about they’re a little more granular. The information then, gets applied in other areas as well, which is a very easy bridge, especially when it’s addressing those biomed those Mo biological mechanisms, that are showing up for things like anxiety, depression, and all of that. So this is a really big. And a good add on to that would be also to say that if you are, which I’m going to go into now auditing your clinic and showing and putting out there what’s happening in your clinic, you might actually be finding new trends you are now seeing in clinic a lot more patients complaining with X condition compared to what you were before.

And once you write about that, maybe someone in. Austria is going to go. Oh, actually it’s funny. You mentioned that because I’ve been noticing that too. And then someone in New Zealand is going to go, oh wow. It’s not just me. These guys also noticed that, right? Oh, there’s definitely, I’ll tell you in my practice over the last couple of years, anxiety and sleep problems.

And then looking at other research, there was, increase in writing of prescriptions for anxiety medication. Like even looking outside of. Who’s coming in your office, you start to see other, trends that are in the media and being reported, you start to look at, oh, cause I look at it when a patient comes in, I’m having a sleep pro and I’m like, wow, it’s all happening.

And then all of a sudden you see so many people. Are experiencing having these things. And once it that’s what I was saying. Once you start, if you keep this in your clinic only no one will know. Then you’re going to beat the best, kept secret. If you find a prescription that is really good for that particular condition, and you don’t tell anyone again, let’s go back to the beginning and think, is this a living medicine?

Is that going to, is that going to be the secret from your practice? And no one will ever know. So I know I’m exaggerating, but I’m just giving the example of why it’s important to audit your clinic. Just show what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. And then when you look at the outcomes, you might be helping practitioners all over the world to access.

Improve the type of treatment that they’re giving to their patients. So on-screen now there’s just a few examples of how you can do it. My mom, a lot of people know about it and a lot of people use it, which is great. There’s one which is online now in the U S you might’ve heard about it because I can track are actually involved in the study going on in the Northwest as well.

So yeah, you will hear more. About them because they’re online. So it’s just a little bit easier to collect this information from the patients as well. So that would be my thing. And for those who are interested in getting to know more about how to collect that information, then write it down in a case report.

And here’s what you have to do. Basically just look up. Care, which is case reports and then start collecting the data from your clinic. There’s actually more specific into Chinese medicine. It’s called Karch. And a lot of people will know about it even for N of one trial. So when you have just a one person this information is out there, but I would go back to what John Weeks would always say, it’s out there, but who’s reading this right.

I’m always in there. I’m in there. Yeah. Yeah, jumping in and I go if this herb is doing that, I’m going to look in the other categories. And I also look at the foods, what’s in the food medicine, there’s so much there. So this is really, I’m really excited about, you talking about.

Big point of interest for me, because it’s important that, a lot of practitioners may not do continuing education or, they may get a little bit I don’t know, stale with their treatments. And so I think this is important, very important to be up to date on what’s out there and also really again, to be in back.

For our medicine to be able to talk about it intelligently. Now, when I was in school, we didn’t have as much, I was in school, graduated 20 2002. So over 20 years ago there wasn’t a lot that was out there. There was the IVF study coming out of Germany. There was the study for the nausea and I think there were still working on the.

Down at NIH, right? So there wasn’t really a lot. And then you’d have to have things well, actually coming out of Japan, there were things, but they’d have to be translated. So what we have now, and also the internet was, very much in its infancy. This is, it’s so accessible for practitioners to do that and good good clinical practice.

To double check. Yeah. And this is we didn’t, people are going to be watching this and thinking that we arrange this, but we didn’t, and this is a great segue into this because what’s on screen now. It’s only part of the slide and I, this is actually a sentence from the paper itself that I’m going to show you.

And it’s something that adds on to exactly what you’re saying and what still to this day. And I hope that this will help to change that. Turns people against acupuncture research a little bit while clinical trials provide valuable data about if efficacy of interventions, findings often do not translate into clinical.

That’s something that you see and you hear, I would say that too, like maybe 10, 15 years ago, but then after learning and after doing my MSC and getting more into research, I don’t anymore. And talking about the timescale that you are giving this sentence is out of this paper that has just been published recently by a good friend of mine.

Beverly Devela. She collected information over 15 years. 15 years of information. Now, anyone can come from anywhere saying that, oh, there’s not enough evidence about acupuncture, or there’s not enough for us to base our decisions. That’s 15 years of information right there and published for everyone to see.

So in looking at this and saying these are sentences from the paper itself and that key punchline on, in day-to-day clinical. Practice not appears to be a safe, effective intervention for breast cancer survivor. This is really important for us to know and to have this, to be able to say straight away.

Actually, and what I’m going to emphasize too, is the beauty of doing the research is we also have thousands of years of, knowledge about the, how it was used. So we’re not, it’s not just being made on. We’ve got these, it’s not made up something it’s really based on, okay, this is what they say, this is what was going on.

And this is why they continued to do these practices. Now we can take that and look at it. So this is the point. So it’s the only 15 years ago, 15 years. Thousands of years of evidence that’s in, in these records and then really looking at them. So it is actually like we’re doing like a little bit of a retrospective, right?

Look at everything that’s been done and then designing. Different kinds of research based on what’s showing up in, in health for us and how, and like how we can actually use this and integrated with what I consider like the traditional model, right? Like where that fails.

There are these other things, and there’s no reason why we can’t do both. It’s not an either or and it’s and again, as you, we see that a lot of the acupuncture then informs better practices in a Western medicine model, like areas for growth. Yeah. Yeah. And this is again very timely for you to say this because I’m going to give you the two examples, just because we spoke about a discount at the end of the presentation.

This is just out in the last couple of weeks. Good friend of mine. Good colleague, Dr. Mathias, zoom or Martinez works. Mathias is a medical doctor who was also trained in TCM. He works in oncology and. And he wrote this case report about what are the patients? So this is like debunking a bunch of stuff against occupants in one paper right there, right?

Is a medical doctor trained in TCM who uses it in the oncology setting. And as now published a case report, which I’m asking you to do more and more showing the difference in one patient between getting acupuncture. This is one treatment, just one treatment. The difference between getting one treatment of acupuncture and the oncologist.

Like amazing stuff. And I just put another one because again, to link it back to the states as well and see, cause people would be familiar with this they’re obscene and Valerie, Valerie actually sent me a message before this. So if she’s watching hi and yeah, just publishing a case report and showing what’s happening in your own setting.

Again, hospital setting, acupuncture being used and how it’s helping the patients, but it needs to come from you. It doesn’t have to be a big, huge RCT a case report will do with. So here’s my plea and my punchline and my please. And then you can stop and you don’t have to listen to me anymore begging you to write research.

So here’s a time I’m V I’m more visual. So I like this and this makes sense to me. So I hope it makes sense to you as well. We started with the classics. All of this was written. Back in the day we read them. We learned about them in school. The first book that I read about Chinese medicine when I started studying in Portugal was Giovanni’s book translated from Chinese, some Chinese terminology there as well.

It all starts to make sense. Then you go into what brought me into research occupants or research the book. And again, the names they’re amazing. Rosa Schneider just, really inspirational for everyone. That’s how I started. And that’s what I read about. And it becomes the classical book now in terms of where it all started.

Now we have all this information going into Cochrane reviews and going into research and starting to be part of the research literature. My question then is who is writing tomorrow’s classics because yesterday’s classics have been. But in 200 years, in 2000 years, when they look back, what are they going to say?

That those guys in 2022, what were they writing about? What were they doing in their clinics? So this is why I’m asking you. To do it and to please make it your turn now of writing the stuff that you’re doing in the clinic and telling more and more people so that we can adjust and adapt the trials as well into being more like what you do in your own.

So that’s the end of my presentation and my begging for you to write what you’re doing. Oh yeah. I, and I have to say, I love that book. I actually have four different copies of Sue and aging and link shoe because each translation is slightly different. And I also had the pleasure of studying some with Elizabeth shot, the LA she’s amazing sense of humor.

And what I would say is that it’s also important to reread the classics, especially after you’ve been practicing, because then when you read it again, you go, oh, so a lot of this is you need to read over and over because and research and read papers because you’re at one level as a practitioner and then you get some experience and then you go back and then you can catch the deeper meaning and then also apply it.

So it’s always, so this is not, it’s like review, do that retrospect review again. Go back and you’re like, oh, wow. I didn’t know this before. And our information comes from many different places. I find my patients are fantastic for reporting stuff back to me which is also important.

So what I want to ask you Sandra, how what can we do to help you? Can we where can we find you? How can we follow you? Listen to more of the stuff that I have to say. Ah, yeah, I wasn’t expecting that. Yeah. Okay. So look as an individual, obviously it’s my pleasure. And it’s my passion to to the research side of things.

It’s just how I get to write. So some people would write books for example, which are very valuable. I, that my passion is that, writing these papers and putting it out. Sharing this information with people. So on a personal level I’m working in research. I’m I love lecturing. I love teaching.

I love learning from the students as well. So people can find me, Sandra grass online that they will be able to find more information about me. And the main work that I would do that would be more visible than for people would be through evidence-based occupants. And. Thankfully, we have a lot of people helping and supporting it’s a nonprofit organization.

So evidence-based acupuncture.org is where people can go and check it out. We have a forum as well, so we don’t do discussions on social media anymore. And we just take that to a private place where we can all talk as practitioners and as colleagues and outside of the eyes. Are there any. Censorship of social media type thing.

And without any distracting voices, either from the outside, so just for us to talk on the farm and share ideas and yeah, EBA connect is the way that people help and support the work that we do with EBA. Awesome. Awesome. Fantastic. Thank you so much. For coming on and sharing all this great information and also really helping people to really keep their practice from going stale.

And then also, be better practitioners, better, clinical practice. And then, this is how we bridge to other professions and become part of the team. And keep keep us professional, right? Yeah. Share what you’re doing in the clinic. Like it’s amazing.

I really appreciate the opportunity of coming here and being able to talk about this. I know I speak a bit too fast when I get excited about it. But it is really I’m learning so much every time. To find out from other people in their clinics, what they are doing and how can that influence? You said it yourself.

The study was from Germany and then you were reading it and then someone else, the paper I showed you, the survey of practice was actually in Australia and New Zealand, and now it’s everybody else in the world is reading it. Mathias wrote that paper from the hospital, the oncology. In Austria and now everyone is reading it.

So I think that it’s really important for us to stand proud of what we do and, have it on our websites. Haven’t, especially have it published and be able to talk about it in terms that other people can understand. And as I said, like the case reports would be, as you can see, the example would be the best way to put it out there and publish it for everyone.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Okay, so here we go. Hopefully you will join us next week. We are going to be having Jeffrey Grossman will be coming on and presenting for the American acupuncture council. And all right. And again, thank you for the American Acupuncture Council for putting this production on.

Treatment of Radiation Side Effects in Cancer Patients

Hi today we are going to talk about the treatment of radiation in TCM and this is quite an unusual topic, but we are, it’s one of the topics that we are getting a really great results, both in the treatment.

Click here to download the transcript.

Hello, everybody. And welcome. I would first like to think the American Acupuncture Council to put up this presentation for all of you. And I would like to start with the presentation. I hope you’re all. Hi today we are going to talk about the treatment of radiation in TCM and this is quite an unusual topic, but we are, it’s one of the topics that we are getting a really great results, both in the treatment. And also even in the research that we are following up. Radiation therapy also known as radiotherapy is one of the most common treatments.

In cancer. Almost half of the cancer patients will get radiation therapy. Although, there’s so many advancement in the treatment of cancer, different drugs, et cetera, radiation therapy is just continuing to develop and be there as the, one of the major modalities that are used the cancer care.

And how does it work? Basically radiation is a very high frequency of radiation, which is used and it works in two ways. One, it has a direct effect and direct effect of radiation. It damages the DNA in the cell by producing more and more free radicals, but it is also a. Eh, a larger indirect action by producing the whole area of more free radicals, which are damaging more cancer cells and much less healthy cells.

So this can also give some kind of additional effect to the radiation. When we look at the radiation, we are actually looking at the very high frequency res. If you look here, you see the size of J regular Ray radio radiation. And as we move along, you can see the side that the radiation that we are using in x-rays is here.

And in gamma rays, we are even going to a much smaller size, but x-ray the size. And the frequency of radiation is extremely high, and this will help to understand the effect in Chinese medicine. And one of the side effects of radiation is here. As you can see here in the picture, like a person that is radiated for neck, a very common area for neck cancers or for women with breast cancer.

So you can see the redness appearing there, and this will help us also later to understand the effect of radiation in Chinese medicine. And the side effects of radiation are very much dependent on the doses. The area of which is radiated and also the sensitivity of the surrounding tissues or organs.

And today, the radiation is very exact. So there is less damage to surrounding tissues in the past, there was much greater damage and the radiation side effects, first of all, the main one is really this heat, but there’s also fatigue. And there is some diffused feeling of not of being ill, not being yourself.

Sometimes headaches obviously on the skin, they can be in DEMA inflammation, like in his trunk. So sander. And if the radiation is like to the throat, to the mucus area, then there can be mucositis or dry mouth or dry dryness, wherever the radiation is directed at, the radiation can be directed to any place in the.

The very common thing we see in the clinic is radiation to an in throat, in their throat cancers, but also to the head and to the breast, obviously for breast cancer. But radiation can be done to any tumor. The side effects let’s look at them for a minute from the Chinese medical point of view, the way we view them.

So as you can see, it’s a very stressful. And small frequency of a phrase that penetrates deeply and they’re causing dryness. First of all, dryness to the fluids and dryness to the fluids over a long period of time in Chinese medicine, we’ll create in deficiency, which means a long-term thirst and a longterm inflammation, either the local or even more general.

Radiation in itself is toxic heat. And I think this is one of the key issues when we are teaching oncology acupuncture now to treat and diagnose patient with a TCM in oncology. Toxins is one of the main things we have to consider, because this is a new parameter, a new pathogenic factor, which is not very much obviously mentioned and then aging and the classical Chinese medicine.

So to understand toxins and its effect is one of the key factors. We have a combination of toxins and. And toxins and heat. We’ll also create some cheat deficiency. And if after a long period of time, even Jing deficiency, this deep penetration of the Ray goes deep inside the cell. And obviously also to the DNA of the cell.

But if Chinese medicine we’ll talk about this going deep into the gene level. And so this is the main factors that we are seeing in the. And this is the pathology in Chinese medicine. So first of all, it’s toxic. It is the nature of the x-ray. We see the dryness in many different area. It can be either superficial to.

Dryness or can be deeper. And then we’ll talk about the fluid and fluid production, like on the land, in this and the stomach, which are involved in Flint production. If it’s a very strong radiation, we’ll see in the efficiency, as we talked before, especially if it’s for a larger area, Xi deficiency is a classic and the two deficiency can also extend even four months after the treatments and locally we can see.

And which can affect like the tender masculine Meridian in the area that is being radiated. And we look at the supply of the tender muscular Meridian to the area, the classical combination of points, which are addressing this pathology. So large intestine elect will help to take the heat and it’s a young midpoint, so it will also help to cool.

And also GB 14 is actually for head radiation or neck radiation. It’s when they all the young meridians are joining will help to take the heat out. The excess young for drugs. Again, we’ll use points on the young meaning stomach for the foreign, large intestine. Two, both of them are water points and they’re in reaching back the fluids for inefficiency.

We can add kidney the six and if the radiation is over a long period of time or area with many bones, then we can add gallbladder 13. Which is the viewpoints and for bone marrow and some other kidney points depends on the radiation area. If there’s a general chief efficiency, we’ll do stomach 36. If it’s deeper, we’ll go to the seas and use stomach 30 and, or Lang nine, the gain to help to rebuild back the cheap.

For local area, we’ll use more local effected points, team end points. So let’s give you a kind of a general idea how I will treat the radiation and how we are treating radiation. And when we are teaching them college acupuncture, we start with some general prescription and go into many other options of treating.

One of the very interesting research that was done because there’s many high quality research, which are showing that acupuncture is good, especially for dryness of the mouth of the radiation for patients with head and neck cancers and this dryness. Extreme, and it’s very debilitating and it really create a extreme suffering to this patients.

Imagine that on top of having radiation and having a throat cancer or mouth. Your mouth feels like it’s desert, there’s no saliva or free for the production and because there’s been many evidence that acupuncture is good for it. There was one really interesting research that they want to share with you.

And it’s, they looked in functional MRI on patient. It’s actually not patients. There were just volunteers. I know Gary Dan from Memorial Sloan Kettering, he did this research, so we took volunteer. And punctured them a large intestine to, and looked in functional MRI and the amount of saliva produced and and the real comparing to placebo.

So this was the use of the occupancy was at the large intestine to comparing to a non occupant tree point, just on the side of. And this design is quite a interesting, because they did this time acupuncture, some got the real acupuncture, some got the sham acupuncture. Actually they did the crossover. So this.

People who were in the research in the beginning either got real or shy and then crossed over. And what was compelling was the mechanism, the functional MRI, and also the amount of saliva, the results were quite unusual. And you can see that the patient, whenever they are this, in this respect, the people who are examined when the large intestine two was punctured the area in the.

Which is to do with the saliva production was got more blood and you could see it in there. It was activated, comparing to the placebo point where there was no specific area in the head, in the factional MRI. And as far as salivation, they put the cotton ball in the mouth of this patient. And. Wait it before and after the puncturing of either the real large intestine two or the placebo, and this was very significant higher amount of saliva where large intestine two was punctured.

So it’s one of these beautiful research which shows you how a point. Both has a physical effect and potentially some mechanism of action, how it is working. So the conclusion of the study was that acupuncture in large intestine, two was associated with neuroma activation in the brain, but also was correlated to more saliva production.

I love this research because a lot of time, even as an acupuncturist, we would laugh to see this correlation between the city. What we know and the real finding, and that’s the beauty of research that you can actually look at it finding. Cause what it means. It has a lot of other ramifications than just supporting people with.

And dryness in the mouth due to radiation. It also means that this point is effective to many other conditions of dryness in the mouth. For instance, your grin, which is an auto immune disease, which the mucous membranes that had drying up any other dryness of the mouth which is stemming from different disease or even from in the efficient.

That we see, like for women, with menopausal people who get up at night and have to drink water. So we can use this point in additionally, maybe to kidney six and other points that they discussed to help with this dryness. And why is it working? And that’s, to me, the beauty, and as I say, I teach a lot. I am cology acupuncture.

You’re all welcome. If you’re interested in this field to do join us teaching and. It’s one of the things that we see this strong effect of acupuncture on different side effects in cancer patients. And we can understand why when we look both into research and we look into the Chinese understanding of the point.

So a lot of interesting people, too. And always been a water point and the large intestine Meridian goes to the mouth, as we know, and it’s a young Ming Meridian, and it was indicated for dryness in the mouth, but also for two sakes and for throat pain 2000 years ago. Now we can see the evidence, how it works and we can utilize it also with more confidence, looking at the risks.

But also understanding more how occupant you can help for patients with cancer. I’m on this beautiful project. When we draw the points with my two colleagues about the human needs, key from Poland, Dr. Babish Kaminski and Annie yell from Israel. And this is just an example of the drawing of the large intestine in Meridian and large intestine two.

And this is just to add to the beauty and understanding of the water production. Eh, around this point, another optional points actually see between 83 and another point, which helps in producing saliva and generally enrich the body fluids in the body. So as we know, large, interesting too, is both a water point is in spring point.

So it has a lot of different Chinese, eh, indication. So both reduce here. Young meaning points like large intestine in stomach of both helping to reduce it, helping to replenish fluids and in a deep way, even to strengthen the kidney and through the internal docs of the same chow. So despite, as you can see as a very large options in helping patients with dryness, But specifically also to treat radiation other points because we are on the treatments of radiation, which are very good for the neck and the patients who have neck and throat cancers is also maybe Lang 11, the Firebird.

And you can use lung five or alleged. This 18 is a local point again, to gain back this Floyd and reduce the heat and the toxic heat, even bleeding a point like large intestine 11, if there is a very stubborn and acute throat pain and a pain in the throat after a day. This was a little bit about acupuncture and the use of acupuncture and the, also the proof for acupuncture points and why acupuncture works so well for ideation, I did also more than 15 years of research into one formula.

And one of the things that we tried this formula, and when we combine it with radiation there is always a few. That herbal medicine, especially willingly they’re fear with radiation. And what we know from this formula, it’s called LCS. One, one is that it’s not that it’s not interfering, but it’s actually working through the same mechanism of actually producing more free radicals.

And also we have proven how it’s kills cancer cells. And does it affect. When we tried it with radiation, and this is a publication that we publish this in one of the very reputable journal. With my colleagues here. And my last colleagues is professor Berger, who is the head of the oncology services in the hospital that just to work Sheba hospital.

So it’s a very interesting publications, which is showing actually the twin. We take this formula here. We showed it the different cancers here. It’s for example, breast cancer in prostate cancer. Because if you actually have a look, you can see the blue line is just radiation alone. And on the side you see the amount of cancer and that is killed.

So the lower you go is the hundred percent of cancers are killed. So this is the, just the radiation. It’s. That the amount that we are using here is killing around 50% of the cancer cells. When we are adding the formula in small dose, it kills much better when we are adding it in higher doses, it much better, but even five.

So this isn’t for example, for breast cancer cells, and this is for prostate cancer cells. So what we see actually in this experiment that we published it, the formula is not just helping him killing cancer cells, but it’s actually even having a synergic effect. Definitely not interrupting. And there’s the whole debate of using herbal medicine together with radiation.

Definitely anything which reduce the amount of free radicals you shouldn’t use with radiation vitamin E for example, vitamin a. But actually it was this herbal formula. This we’ve been researching, we’ve shown not just that it’s not interfering, but it’s actually potentially adding to the radiation effect.

And that’s what we see because it’s similar. We know that the mechanism of action, so we can explain even why. So I’m advocating for people who are using radiation also to use this formula. So we have that. We have acupuncture, we have herbal medicine. All helping patients, oncology patients. So in this presentation, I talked about acupuncture stressing about the, also the mechanism of flagging this thing, do it, how it helps in radiation and other points.

You have quite a nice selection of points that you can use for patients in radiation and the herbal medicine LCS 1 0 1 or protective veil. Is it called? So you have already, I think even from this way, Some key component in ideas of how to help patients with the radiation, especially for the, they can throat.

But generally, if you’re interested in courses, you can look at it the same academy, there is much more information and quite a lot of free information about it. So I hope you enjoy this presentation and I’m wishing you all the best of. And from Shane to Shen thank you. On Friday, we’ll be Tsao-Lin Moy presenting on this channel.

So you will come to watch it. So keep healthy and safe and all the very best buy for me.

Alchemical Chinese Medicine: Entering the Mystery

And in terms of saying that alchemy in Chinese medicine, Is this idea that we’re all perfect. We just don’t know it.

Click here to download the transcript.

Hello, and welcome to another edition of, To The Point. Very generously produced by the American Acupuncture. Today on this cold spring day, I am really excited to have a guest. Leta Herman is now chemical healer and a TCM teacher. She has a podcast called the Inspired Action and she’s an author of several books.

One is through the mystery. Also the energy of love, connecting your circle and the big little guash of book. And she’s just a delight. She has a training center for her El chemical work called the alchemy learning center. And we had a nice long discussion by phone about her work. And I think you’re really going to be interested.

Many of you are really going to be interested in this. We’re calling this entering the mystery of alchemy with Chinese medicine and Leta. Please, introduce yourself, say hello.

Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me, Virginia. And thank you to the American Acupuncture Council for having me here.

I’m thrilled to share this information with you in any way I can.

Yeah. Now we hear the word outcome. He tossed around. And some of us have studied it with Jeffrey UN for example. And it’s, and it really transcends just Taoism. And but how do you define alchemy or how are you looking at and trying to practice alchemy?

Yeah. So I think about, for me as a very generic word, and as there’s alchemy in the west as well as the east. So it’s a very broad word that generally means transformation, but because of the studies that I’m doing in alchemical Chinese medicine, I would like to define it a little bit more narrowly.

And in terms of saying that alchemy in Chinese medicine, Is this idea that we’re all perfect. We just don’t know it. And we need to like, as human beings, we’re here to evolve. We’re here to have experiences and we’re here to maybe even the Dallas would say fulfill a curriculum of this lifetime. And alchemy is about transformation in a big scale, on a big scale.

And it’s about how can we ask ourselves better questions about who we are? How can we take a journey along in our lives so that we can continuously evolve. And I think it’s equivalent somewhat to the Buddhist enlightenment idea where Buddhists are trying to achieve something in called enlightenment and in Daoism, we’re trying to achieve something that would be called a realized human being.

Jen Ren and and that’s a person that’s like a Sage or a wise person who basically is approaching life very differently than the average person. And there’s a long tradition in China of Chinese medicine, healers who have done this, like since they Meow and go home, but others as well, who were the ADA mortals, for example, that a group of people and there were others.

That group of alchemists who got together and they were working on their own evolution.

Yeah. And that’s solid bet.

So I, I know that we both not only studied with Jeffrey Ewen, we both studied plant spirit medicine. That’s a rather rare, esoteric subject. How do you bring that into this work? Or do you, or are you doing it more in a Dallas way? Is it a fusion of things?

It’s funny because I studied plant spirit medicine, which is truly a shamonic technique, even though it came out of the five element acupuncture tradition it basically incorporated the shamonic traditions with acupuncture and came up with a new and new kind of medicine.

From that perspective, of course, plant spirit medicine has been a native man medicine. Eons, but, so I studied that first and then I went on to study with Jeffrey Yuen and really delve deeper into the alchemy concepts. And then much later Jeffrey Yuen started teaching shamanism as well, which was just very interesting to me because I’ve obviously been attracted to the esoteric.

Day one. And I’ve always been working with people where I felt like I really wanted to get to the root of their problems. It’s like they, they didn’t feel well or they had emotional issues and I always wanted to find what is that root of the problem? What is that? Psychological, mental, emotional, spiritual root of those problems and both plant spirit medicine and alchemy are about that.

So I, I think that’s why I’ve been attracted to those different approaches.

Yeah. Yeah. I know the work that I did with plant spirit medicine was really, probably the most perfect. Lead transformative work that I did, despite a lot of meditation and other kind of traditions and practices.

And I had done shamonic work as well, but it was something It was from me. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak on certain issues and traumas that I have. And so I’m really, eager and curious to see how you work and whether it doesn’t matter whether or not you bring that into it, because I know from reading, your book, the which is the entering the, what is it?

Which one is it? The through the mystery gate that. You have had amazing results with patients, very transformative, not just getting rid of just physical pain, but getting at the root of very deep issues and Yeah, excited to, to learn more about that. And so actually, since we’re talking about treatments, how, what is your treatment like?

Okay. Okay. I have two kinds of treatments. One is a set of treatments that are just ours. Two-hour long treatments that people do over a very long period of time. It’s called the nine stages of alchemy. And that’s really about cultivating your passion in life, your full potential in life.

I say it, the goal is to really get you to fly in your life. So that’s all of the kind of forward-looking. This is where I’m headed work. But before we do that, There’s a lot of the past. And we say a lot of skeletons in our closet, a lot of things that haunt us from the past or that are hooked into us and won’t let go.

And so that’s where we do longer sessions. We do a, basically we devote a whole day to someone’s healing in that perspective and the most common one we do in that case, it’s the 13 ghost points and the 13th ghost points is about those hooks. They use the word ghost. Which it doesn’t mean you’re haunted by an entity.

It could just be you’re haunted by the past. It could be that, someone did something to you or you had an accident, or you just had a really difficult childhood or some kind of abuse scenario and those things they, you’re not free in your life because those are hooked into. And so we basically have a whole day where we do the 13 goes points.

It usually takes somewhere between four to six hours. And we just give someone the time and the space and the honoring of what they need. To let it go to really, truly let it go. And it is a transformational, like I’ve had

phenomenal and also your head is not into the mentality of oh, keeping on the clock and the next patient.

And then, you can really dive in very deeply with people. That’s beautiful.

Beautiful work. And people always say, aren’t you more tired after you do a long day like this? And I say, no, actually I’m less tired because I’m not switching eight times in the day changing, getting people in and out of the room, et cetera.

I’m just devoted to that person for the day.

Yeah. That’s one of the things I like about the facial rejuvenation acupuncture that I do because I try to make it a transformative treatment. But it’s I’m just with someone for a couple of hours. And you can just slow down and just you, I don’t know, you just, for me, I need that time to go more deeply with someone than, maybe some people could just go in and give them a look and change their life.

But yeah I think also for the patient, they feel more cared for and can really open up and relax into the. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. Wonderful.

And the changes are pretty dramatic. Sometimes it’s right in the treatment room, where someone will say, oh my God, the monkey’s off my back.

Like I feel it. Or and they truly mean it. Like they come back in after that and they’re like, my life has completely changed. Sometimes someone’s voice will literally completely change. They might have a really high voice and suddenly. Lower voice or I’ve had people who that goes points are really interesting where I didn’t even know they smoked.

And that was an issue for them, but like a month or so later, they’re like, I don’t know why, but I just stopped smoking and I wasn’t even trying. And it was like maybe that’s because he were smoking. Because of this thing that basically were carrying around, it was latent in your body and now it’s gone and you don’t need that habit anymore.

You don’t need to smoke to deal with it, that pain.

Do you work with any prenatal trauma or.

Oh, absolutely. There’s another treatment that I do call the nine heart pains and then the nine heart pains treatment we begin with utmost source heart one, and that is supposed to be related to pre.

So in terms of just what you’re coming in with, what we’re basically a human being that’s incarnating. And that point is representing this, the start of a new ARN incarnation. And what’s all the baggage that might be there in the very beginning in utero. Wow.

Can you talk about the, so when somebody comes in how does the treatment.

I like to start with a little kind of ritual that I do with people, which is just talking and then having them pick a poem out of a book, having them pick a card out of a deck of cards, just to break the ice and get, even if I know them well, it’s just, they might be nervous. They might be anxious about getting there.

They just settle into something very simple. And then they get up on the table and. I take pulses and we, we do something really unusual in these treatments. We have an iPod or some kind of playlist with 20,000 songs on. And we shuffle it and they’re of all genres. And the idea is we’re trying to simulate how things were done in the ancient times where they had live musicians which I was really fortunate to see a similar type of event at mouth Shaun in China.

When we went there with Jeffrey Yuen, where these musicians were just playing. This live improvisational music and, there were symbols and all kinds of instruments. I don’t even know the names of, but that music was very. Emotional. It emoted things from people like people had tears running needed down their face.

And we’re here where, we don’t really know Chinese music as much. I have Chinese music on my playlist, but it’s more than that. It’s we need music that we can identify with. So I put every genre I could think of good, bad, whatever. You’re. Opinion is about music.

We have it all and we don’t segregate, we don’t we don’t try to limit it in any way. And so what we’re doing is just allowing the music to vibrationally. Move the treatment along. And the treatment itself is a vibrational technique. It’s about shaking up stuck patterns.

All alchemy is vibrational in the technique. And so it’s really about stimulating something that is been stuck and trying to really evoke more than just transformation. I like to say transmutation something really. Stronger than a slow evolutionary change.

And are you using needles or is it more energetic or.

am feeling I have, I, you can do needles or not needles. And I personally do not use needles for alchemy. I use my finger as a needle, and the idea is, I don’t want the separation of between me and the person of the needle. So energetically, my finger becomes the needle. So I just call it non needle needling.

And I always recommend my acupuncture students attempt to do some of these treatments with needles and without, and then they can choose how they want to do. It’s a little more challenging to do some of these treatments with needles, because some, in some of the treatments, the needles are retained and there are needles on the front and the back.

So it’s a logistical issue and it has been done. It’s not that it can’t be done, but there is an issue of, if you’re. Four to six hours on the table, the person’s going to have to go to the bathroom. What are you going to do about the knee? So there’s a lot of complexity that gets removed.

If you do the non needle technique,

and then you’re probably more apt to use your intention and transmit your G then just relying on the needles to do the.

Exactly. Exactly. And I really don’t recommend in general, I’ve had people who have gone to acupuncturists and receive the ghosts points and the, they did it like in a traditional stick, the needles and leave the room.

I don’t really ever recommend that because it’s such a powerful, emotional shift that it really needs to be. The, what I talked to people about is becoming an alchemical. Healer is really walking the walk with the client. So you have to be in the room. You have to be not only just not sticking the needles in and leaving the room, but each needle could take an hour to insert if that would be extreme, but it could because.

It’s takes that long for that person to allow the shift to happen. So you have to think of it in a totally different way. Becoming an alchemical healer is really different than just, how we’ve been taught Chinese medicine in general.

Now I understand even, even better why you’re doing it without needles.

Yeah. That makes sense. And can you talk a little bit more in detail about the nine stages of that? Yeah. So treatment approaches.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s actually my favorite work. The ghost points are very dramatic and they really shift people in huge way and it feels like a miracle often every day in my clinic, when I watch people walk out the door completely transformed.

That’s beautiful and I love that work, but that’s trying to get rid of something. That has been that package for them, that they that’s not about them, that they’re just trying to unload and. And then when you do the nine stages of alchemy, it’s like, how can you almost become more precious, like a metal that’s being polished and polished until it’s, beautiful.

And I feel we’re all a little bit tarnished and we need a lot of polishing. But in, there is something really precious. And so the nine stages of Alchemy’s. Just taking one step at a time. And I like to say that you can invent your own alchemy. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. I just like to say there’s some really.

A wise old ancient Chinese people that said, Hey, if you do it in this order, it works really well. So stage one is a treatment that we do. That’s just about E. It’s about creating more ease in your life. And so you do this treatment, maybe quite a number of times, you might do it over a whole year with someone where they’re just getting to a state of ease.

Now, imagine you might have someone who already has their. So you don’t need to do a lot in that stage. Maybe you do it once or twice or three times. And then it’s there’s not much happening here because you’re already there. You’ve done that work. So then you move on to the next stage. And the next stage is about I call it the best protections, no protection.

It’s about all the armor we wear and we don’t ever want that bad thing to happen again. And so we’re always on the lookout for it. We’re always checking for it and it’s tiring. It’s exhausting to live that way. And so what would happen if we removed that protection? Because we’re so good in ourselves and some of them throws a dart at you.

You just Dodge it. It’s not about you. It’s about them. They’re having a bad day and you can see that. And so once you start to step into stage two, you’re no longer protected. And then stage three is about all that prenatal stuff. It’s about the ancestors stuff. It’s about your past lives. So we need to unload that and then stage four, five, and six are where all the fun begins because you get to be, you get to be free of all that stuff and you literally start to shine.

You start to look like a light. And stage four is about being like a child. Stage five is about channeling and listening to the world and being like a wise person. And stage six is about really, truly flying in your life. Some of the immortals were purported to fly. And as late as in the 1950s people send, they saw them flying.

The movie, crouching tiger, hidden dragon, that’s not supposed to be just fictitious it’s supposed to be real. And what I like to say is I haven’t seen anyone levitate off my table yet, but I expect them to do it at some point, but they start to fly in their lives, and that’s really magical to see.

It’s yes, like taking off on a runway, it’s maybe some people have been taxing a long time, but they just haven’t been able to get liftoff. And a lot of this work is about that. And it’s about. Living what we call in our podcast, the inspired action podcast. We talk a lot about Wu Wei and stage six is about what is sometimes translated as non-action, but I like to call it inspired action.

How do you live that kind of spontaneity in your life, where you’re just free and easy and just, basically looking at the footsteps in front of you that are already there. And all you have to do is put your foot in there and put your foot in there and put your foot in there. You’re good to go.

So that’s on me.

I like that, flying in your life because that’s really more important than, developing some yoga city, some power You know it, I know I had a teacher who used to say, these people that spent all this time and energy, trying to levitate, even if it’s just a few inches or a foot off the ground.

And if they use that for, more of their inner development or for helping, world peace or something, how much more useful that would be. And yeah. I like that idea of people flying in their life. It doesn’t have to be something literal, and that it doesn’t even have to be that doesn’t even have to be the goal.

Any literal flying. It probably would just happen if somebody reached a certain stage. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. That’s how I look at it. Exactly. And like I said I would love to see it literally, but I just like to see it as someone living their full potential and. It just really not held back by all the things that hold us back.

Yeah. And so what about 7, 8, 9.

Yeah interesting that you ask. So I decided a long time ago that I can only go as far as how far I’ve gone. And so I’m working on stage seven and I. I believe that in stage seven, you have to really go into the case. So to speak, you have to retreat from the world to do that level of work.

And it’s really about morphine. It’s really transforming in a big way. And in ancient times, in, for example, when I went to , there are caves, there were people. Basically living inside the cave for many months at a time, people bring them some water through a hole or maybe a little cracker too, but they’re basically in there until they figure their stuff out.

And so the idea is, I have. Been, I’m still very much in the world and I’m still like living a stage six life. And I want to keep working on my stage seven. And so therefore I don’t really want to take anyone else through stage seven, eight and nine. So seven is about this idea that you can morph.

You could completely transform yourself. Stage eight is that you can become like a ninja. You can become an. And stage nine is that if you become invisible, you need to learn how to reappear, if you want to. And there, there is a story of go hung when we went to gongs mountain where, he basically was surrounded by all his apprentices and he suddenly vanished and his clothes fell to in a pile on the ground.

And so he never came back that we, that I am aware. Or that I’ve been told. He obviously could still be a mortal walking this plane, but but the, his idea of immortality wasn’t necessarily that you had to come back that you just needed to transform into some other dimension.

Yeah. Also the, in India they say, if you reach a certain stage. Enlightenment or development that you have a choice, whether or not you come back to incarnate. And then

third

answer is you do come back to.

Yes. And that they not talked

about needs and desires and unfinished biz. Yeah.

Yeah. And we say that it’s stage nine is like being a Bodhi. PSAT’s a bodhisattva, you come back for the benefit of all and you’re coming back to help.

I’m going to bring you. Okay, here we go.

Okay. I’m back.

Yeah actually, maybe because of the tech issue, it’s a time to maybe it’s a sign to conclude this, but I would like to have you back and have you talk about the starry sky points and the nine heart pains and, there’s so much more we could talk about, unless there’s anything you want to say in conclusion,

Okay. All right. I was thinking that in terms of alchemy and just Al chemical healing in terms of like people who are doing acupuncture that are interested in delving into these concepts, it is it is like a a different roadmap for people it’s really about.

Am I interested in cultivating myself in terms of my own alchemy? Am I interested in becoming an alchemical healer because I want to transform as much as I want my clients to transform. And so I really look at this as like first, what about me? The practitioner? And I really came to that conclusion because in the beginning, I didn’t really think of it that way.

And it took me a while to understand a lot of that. Through my own cultivation. So as I did more and more work with this, I transformed much more quickly than I think I would have on my own. So I say to practitioners that every single time you do like a ghost point treatment or one of these treatments, the sign that you’re actually doing it well is that you transform as much as the client.

And I know that all of us have that experience of that big aha moment when the client shifts and then you shift as a result. But it’s way more apparent in alchemy. It’s really about not only the client, but the practitioner themselves. And I don’t mean that in a selfish way at all.

You’re not doing it so that you can transform but that’s one of the things that happens.

That’s, I always say that, people can memorize the classics and Chinese and what have you, but if they have. Cultivated themselves, spiritually and psycho spiritually. And if they haven’t learned to cultivate their cheek, then if there’s limitations on what you can do for people.

But if you’ve done those other things, it can transcend anything that you can find written, modern origin.

Yes. And so that’s why one of the things that we are doing is we have a website called the learning center and there’s an app as well called the alchemy learning center. And what we’re doing is we’re putting a lot of these.

Genes into a format that people can do on their own. So there’s things for both lay people and acupuncturists, and there’s this, just very simple cheek gung as an example of things that you can do to build your cheek, but there’s also, things about a deeper level of the five elements and how to understand ourselves on a very deep level, because if you’re doing alchemy, you really need.

Who is my authentic self, energetically, but also, in all different ways. And we talked a lot about the nine palaces, which we also, did a lot of teaching in that’s available there. And then we have something called the master outcome program. And that is for apprentices.

We have two programs now. We’ve. People coming from all over the world. So we have a virtual one and then we have an in-person option where you can come to the clinic and get supervision to do some of these treatments on your own. So when I did it, I had a teacher who really, mentored me.

Much many years later. Now I want to offer that to people as well, because it is work that is really hard to embark on your own.

Yeah. And it’s very hard to find an apprenticeship, people get out of school and they’re they’re not totally on their own, but th it’s not, there’s a reason that the traditional way was, a continued apprenticeship because that’s how you got.

And,

Yeah. Yeah. And I like to say, we go to a lot of CU classes, and we get a lot of download of information, and I just took this one piece and I did it in the clinic over and over again. And now 20 years later, it’s I want to share that with others so that it doesn’t take you as long as it took.

To figure this stuff out. So I think in practice it’s much different than in theory. And so the theory is great and it’s great to get CS is about theory, but we all know we have to somehow translate that into practice. And I always feel like my gift is that I used to be a tech writer before I went into Chinese medicine.

And so I like to take something super technical and then bring it into something that is. Easy for us to learn and utilize. And that’s, that is the same as tech writing. Really. That’s really what it’s about. It’s a health

teacher. Yeah.

Yeah. So that’s what I’m doing at the alchemy learning center. We have ongoing programs that start every every six months or so.

And. And so we will take a new group through starting in September. So yeah, so we, and we have a clinic in north Hampton, Massachusetts, that’s called the alchemy healing center. And if you want to actually get the supervision and you want to shadow, for example, a ghost point treatment, Just be able to observe me doing the work.

You can come to the alchemy healing center and do that as an apprenticeship program. So that’s what we’re offering in terms of that. So again, it’s just, it’s really about you can go and do it on your own. Everyone knows what the ghost points are there they’re online. Like anyone could use them, but, are you going to just stick the needles in and leave the room?

How

do you use them? I taught school for years and all the beautiful, poetic spiritual sounding names and qualities attributes that are, attributed to them. But it’s how, you’re actually. Helping people to achieve those kinds of results that you can’t do from just reading the description, really it has to be an alchemical process for the practitioner.

Absolutely. And just, when I started out, I actually started from more of the five element tradition. My, my mentor was a part of the Worsley school in England. And so I came at it from more doing internal devil’s IDs and EDS, internal dragons and external dragons treatments, and then started incorporating the ghost points as another option.

And then I started learning more and more. But going back to those days, I remember feeling terrified about doing my first IDs treatment. I imagine that a lot of people are scared in the beginning. We don’t really understand it. We don’t know what it’s about, so we need a lot of handholding

and also you’re entering into territory of somebody’s psyche that you really don’t know what to expect.

And. You shouldn’t just go charging in there. I know, you know that.

Absolutely. And I think that the important thing is to remember too, in the beginning interestingly, you don’t want to, you think you want to do the ghost points with the people that have the most obvious, disruptive. Things going on in their lives either mentally, emotionally, or spiritually.

But when you train, I’m really looking for people that are a little bit, Pretty doing pretty well in their lives. They’re not in deep crisis because we don’t want you to train with someone who’s, everything is just so tumultuous in their lives. That’s a very advanced, case.

And you don’t want someone new in that level of work quite quite at the beginning. So a lot of times when people take a class with me, they’re like, oh, I’m going to go do this. And I’m like, okay. But pick someone. Might just want to unload a little bit, if a few skeletons in their closet, not a whole closet full of skeletons that are going to bust out and remember it is a Pandora’s box for some people and there’s no closing that box back up once it opens.

And you have to think about these. There’s a lot of ethical issues to think about in terms of when you’re doing this level of work, how do you feel about it? What do you think is right and what is really going to be best for the client? So there’s a

lot of, we spoke about that on the phone. If somebody comes to you for.

10 of the muscular pain and you sense that it’s something deeper, I’m thinking of that story. You can tell them from the book. But do you have to ask permission or in, in your way of looking at things as opposed to just treating what you’re seeing if you see that there’s something much deeper than.

I use, I tell the story of my golfer person who came in and I said, this elbow pain you’re having go, this golfer’s elbow. I, is it possible? It’s emotionally based. And he kept saying no, there’s not. I, my life is great. There’s nothing wrong. I just have this pain. It’s my.

It’s my elbow. I just have this pain and he kept pointing to one of the coast points, large and test at 11. So we went round and we did a lot of treatments and we did . We did cupping. We did all kinds of points. He did everything you can imagine. And even he bless his heart. He came back, he kept coming back and no change, which is usually a good indicator that you need to do this work.

So finally I said to him, look, why don’t we just try. Emotional treatment. Let’s just try it. I didn’t talk to them about the ghost points, cause that’s a little odd and I knew it was a little bit out of his sort of frame of reference in the world, but I didn’t want to throw him off that way.

And honestly it’s just large intestine 11. It’s just another point. So I said, but this point, this point might really help you. And in fact, I think we should do a series of the points I did all of the ghost points with him and I said, let’s do a series of points and just see, okay.

We haven’t gotten it yet and you’re still covered. So let’s try this. So I did. And as soon as I got to large intestine 11, in which I did it over, you can do the points over many treatments if you want. So the day that I got to large intestine. He suddenly out of the blue started telling me about the fact that his secretary who was a longterm, many generational friend of the family embezzled like a hundred thousand dollars or something like that from him.

And it was. And that she was currently in court to be tried and go to jail about it. And so he said, yeah, I guess that is an emotional thing. And the next day he came back, the next day he came back, the pain was. So he became a convert obviously, and we did all of the stages of alchemy together.

And by the time he got to stage six, like all of the money concerns went by the wayside. He did, he got like a million dollar contract. He sold this house. Like all these things were happening and he just couldn’t believe it. It was just like, my lucky stars or something, yeah.

I think that, when you look at, how people are unaware of these things that are lurking deep down and they just think, oh, my wife’s good. My job’s good. They just don’t necessarily think about it, but sometimes there’s a lot there. And so do you have to say I’m doing this like really esoteric ghost point treatment?

No, you don’t want to lie to them. It’s more about what’s the language that they use. So I don’t try to shock people into thinking they’re doing like really weird stuff. I’m just like, what’s the language that helps them understand what you’re going to do. And in fact, there’s a ghost point called ghost market rent 24 and rent 24 is the fact that there’s a gift that you have that needs to get to only certain people in the world.

You don’t want it to go to the people who don’t. You only want it to go to the people who need it. What are the words that are going to best express in a way that person can receive the. If you say a bunch of things that are very alarming to the person who needs the gift, they’re going to be like no.

So you know how I look at it is how about, just using words that the person can take in and can help them understand that. Yes, I need Barden tested 11, I, it doesn’t need to be some big, scary thing. For some people, yeah. Some people come into my clinic and say, I’m feeling. I have a possession and I know it.

And then it’s okay, so we need to use that language. I need to be able to express to them. Yeah, we can work with possession. That’s okay. That’s what these treatments were traditionally for. So of course,

like a literal, energetic. Just that people get so obsessive that it becomes like a possession of thoughts, both versus an entity,

right?

Both. So the ghost points are wonderful for obsessed. In fact, that’s my favorite way to use them is there’s so many of us right now who need ghost points. Pretty much all of us. If you’ve been on this planet for like more than 20 years, it’s pretty likely that you’ve had some events in your life that are continue from the past.

So we that’s obsession. Like we can’t let that. And so that’s what the ghost points for really miraculous for. In addition, if you actually have an entity which is called a gateway to you, I just ghost a good way is a person that maybe died at some point and their spirit didn’t go home, to, to heaven or wherever you want to think.

And it stayed around and then potentially got into someone else. That is the Chinese medicine belief that can happen. And, whether you believe in it or not, doesn’t matter. The fact is that the person exhibits certain qualities that we would associate with that kind of possession.

And so we say there’s emotional possessions, and then there’s these entity possessions. And then we would do different treatments depending on which one you might have. And that’s really something that I. Developed through practice. For example, I still use Worsley’s IDs and EDS treatments, and I love them for particular cases.

And then I like the ghost points for other cases. And they’re all in the same realm, they’re all in this realm of, you’re not totally in charge of yourself, whether you’re obsessed or possessed, you’re not really running the show. And that’s the level of that.

I’ve heard alcoholism described as people especially for people whose personality changes when they drink that they, it’s almost there’s an entity that wants to experience that sensation of drinking or drunkenness.

And so they keep Eh, they exert this control over the person. It’s like somebody sitting on your shoulder and that you really have to, for some people with ringing problems, you have to, do, if it’s not a formal exorcism, somehow you have to deal with that energy.

Yeah. And for alcoholism or any kind of drug problem, I would say that there’s two parts to it.

There’s probably something that is like a ghost, again, it may just be. The drugs influence on you, but something taken over like a possession or an obsession. So there’s that. So I might do the ghost points, but then there’s more to it with any kind of addiction, because there’s often a reason why we got addicted.

And that is where I would do something called the nine heart pains. And the nine heart pains treatment is about loving yourself. And usually what’s behind an addiction is some kind of self-hatred or self-loathing or dissatisfaction with who you are. And so that treatment is usually also necessary and really important.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Cause that’s getting it, and maybe in this case it could be a two-pronged route to the cost, but yeah. To get to the root cause, no matter what.

And a lot of people when they’re just learning about alchemy, they don’t understand. So we can talk about the points.

The points are fascinating. They’re interesting. But to do that treatment, that loving yourself treatment, for example, which I call the nine heart pains treatment, you have to be so present. And so unprotected yourself, vulnerable yourself. So that person. I can now take that in and start to love themselves so that’s a deeper level of motivation.

Like we got through that. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh that’s great. I want to thank you so much. I know, taking time out of your day for this and do it with hard energy and humility. So I’m looking forward, maybe we can do this again in June and. Looking forward to doing more things with you, so fantastic.

Yeah. Anyway, thank you very much everybody. Next week. It’s Matt Callison and Brian Lau talking about they have great things. But we will see you soon and thanks again, the American Acupuncture Council and for all you listening. And I hope you’ll look into this because I think it’s going to make you a better practitioner and a better person, no matter what you’re doing.

So I’m signing out Virginia Doran of luminousbeauty.com.

Cosmetic Facial Acupuncture Theory and Treatment for Enhancing Dermal Collagen

And today we will be talking about cosmetic facial acupuncture theory and the treatment for enhancing dermal collagen.

Click here to download the transcript.

Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us today and thank you to the American Acupuncture Council for producing and hosting this presentation. My name is Dr. Shellie Goldstein. And today we will be talking about cosmetic facial acupuncture theory and the treatment for enhancing dermal collagen. So let’s go to the slide.

Great. Okay. When we talk about enhancing collagen, and then we talk about cosmetic facial acupuncture, if this is really not a new topic, it’s based on the principles of my run, my. Rung needs beautiful appearance. And it is a holistic regime that was practiced throughout Asia for centuries. It was designed to promote systemic health and wellbeing delay, the visible signs of aging.

And it was a combination of acupuncture and herbs that were either topically applied or ingested. And that as the story goes, it was designed for emperors to keep their concubines looking beautiful and health. And for emphasis to maintain their youthful and raving appearance. But honestly, I believe that there were variations of this service of my wrong regimes utilized in most households throughout Eastern.

The today’s modern application of ancient. My rung is similar and slightly different. We generally use it today as an alternative or an adjunct to patient neurotoxins, volumizer, or other enhancing appearance enhancing services that are mostly familiar in our Western culture. I call what we do. Modern application, a tight, healthier, tighter, brighter, natural look, and feel.

And that is truly what it is when we, as a cosmetic facial acupuncturist, that one of the advantages of specializing in any type of profession is that our patients come in with a certain subset of complaints. They’re fairly common and throughout there’s, there are certainly some changes, but for the most part, Our patients come in and they talk about wrinkles increasing across their forehead, around their eyes.

They talk about eyelid ptosis, which is that drooping of the upper lid onto the eye itself, swelling or darkness under the eyes, possibly wrinkling or creasing between the brows and around the. And then in the cheek area, they talk about wrinkling in the cheek area, skin laxity, which is a loose pitted appearance, a nasal labial fold.

That’s the fold between the corner of the nose and the corner of the mouth. And then around the mouth and along the jaw. And they complain or talk about wrinkling or creasing around the mouth. Particularly the smokers creases above the lips and creasing horizontal creasing below the lips, marionette lines. Marionette lines are the lines that form between the corner of the mouth and the edge of the jaw area.

It’s a perpendicular line. And then the horizontal line is called the mental crease and it’s right underneath the lower lip. And then loss of definition along the jaw area. And then in the net, patients will talk about their skin being lax or platysma abandoned collectivism, abandoning, or these little bands that you see running in a vertical fashion along the neck area.

And then from a dermatology perspective, acne, rosacea, hyper dyschromia, which we often hear of is sunspots. When we treat with facial acupuncture, cosmetic facial acupuncture, there are both visible changes that we see and then internal changes so visibly. And this is our topic for today is toning skin laxity.

And we’ll talk about these more throughout the year, but today we’re going to focus on skin laxity. Other changes that you can see with cosmetic facial acupuncture treatment are saw. Softening of deeper wrinkles, eliminating of fine wines improvement in muscle tone, correcting and healing skin problems that we discussed, even in skin, texture, color, and luster and enhancing the overall appearance and vitality of the.

And then internally, because we are working from the inside out as facial acupuncturist will see an improvement in muscle integrity, a thickening of finning, a trophic tissue, which will ties in today’s presentation and improvement and the physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing of the individual themselves.

As we are adjusting channels, organs and other systemic impacts. When we talk about facial aging in our Western culture, we are often times used to immediate gratification. So when we are talking with our patients and working with our patients, we need to be really honest about what it is that we can actually do.

And I speak to my patients like this. I say, although the. Aging as part of the aging process, you’re not going to stop aging. It’s normal. It’s part of the intrinsic and extrinsic mosaic of aging itself. But what we can do is we can delay those signs of aging. And when we treat you with one treatment, we can see short term benefits lasting maybe three to seven days, and then generally.

When we perform this in a series of treatments, averaging 10 to 12 times per once a week, we can see longer benefits lasting between four and 16 weeks. And then we’re going to maintain the results or the benefits of your treatment with monthly maintenance treatments. And that’s approximately one time a month.

Now they may be a little bit confused as to why they’re not getting longer treatments or longer. Longer effects from our treatments because we are used to immediate gratification with longer term, say three months to six months with neurotoxins and maybe even longer with volumizes or filler. So I explain it to them as what we’re doing is we’re taking your face to the gym.

And we talk about going to the gym and the benefits of going to the gym as a cumulative effect. So you can’t go to the gym. And pump up and then expect to see large muscles, right? What you get is tired and a little bit sore. You’re not going to get tired or sore from facial acupuncture, but the concept is we are treating a giving a series of treatment to make an internal change that will last throughout time.

And ultimately you feel healthy and you feel better as well. In 1996, the first landmark study for facial acupuncture, measuring the efficacy. Yeah. Was in the international journal of clinical acupuncture. They took 300 cases. This wasn’t treated in China, that it gave them patient will acupuncture 10 treatments, one time a week.

And the patients noted a 90% market effect in terms of their subjective experience of the treatments. The benefits it’s said was there was an improvement in skin texture, stint, color, skin elasticity. Wrinkle reduction and overall rejuvenation. And also they noted that these results were not just confined to the face, but also included work from the practitioner’s point of view to address the entire body, the organ system, as well as the face.

So ultimately what we’re doing is Chinese medicine. We’re treating the body to sustain the changes on the face for appearance. And the reason why we are working in that vein is because we are traditional Chinese, Eastern medicine practitioners. And it’s because we still are applying the concepts of channel theory.

We are looking at cosmetic facial acupuncture as a whole systems approach towards diminishing the signs and symptoms of. This means that we, when we are support, when we are treating with facial acupuncture, we are treating and supporting the entire patient. That’s foundational because even though the wrinkles and the other facial concerns are the chief complaints, we are looking at it from a holistic perspective, and we know that the conditions on one’s face, the conditions that they’re talking about.

Skin laxity muscle tone. And that type of thing is really directly related to their internal health and overall well. When we treat with facial acupuncture, we’re not just working with the face as practitioners of Chinese medicine. We know that we need to consider and address all of them, energetic Meridian pathways and all of their corresponding organ systems.

And we treat them in the same way that we’re treating other conditions with acupuncture. We address those imbalances in those internal systems, digestive, circulatory, reproductive, neuromuscular, whatever it is and in doing so we are from the inside helping to diminish those visible signs of things. When we talk about these concerns, skin, laxity, wrinkles, muscle Capone, skin, dyschromia, et cetera.

We call those the symptoms. Those are just the symptoms of that underlying pattern is disharmony. And when we treat, we’re going to treat the root cause first with body points, and then we’re going to treat the symptoms. So we. Points on the extremities. And then, and along the torso, first, we do our diagnostics.

We treat the patient for their underlying condition. We apply acupuncture points on the legs, the arms torso, and then we address the symptoms or the facial concerns with points on the face. And then we take them out those needles out in the opposite direction. And that point selection on. Body is specifically related to the underlying pattern disharmony and the points selection on the face can be either on the Meridian, off the Meridian or around the associated channels.

And this is what we’re going to address today. When we think about acupuncture points, we know that acupuncture points are located in areas with higher concentration of superficial nerves. We know that there are a higher concentration of blood vessels around those points. And we know that there are neuromuscular attachments where those vessels and nerves penetrate the deep of the muscle fascia.

What we also know about points, acupuncture points in the body is that when we stimulate the acupuncture points, that sensation is transmit mid. From the peripheral nervous system to the central nervous system by the dorsal root ganglion. We also know that due to Nur, or when we look at neuro imaging, we know that there are acupoint stimulation is activity in the brain areas that is associated with that local area that we actually put the needle in.

But it also transmits into more distal areas, not on the knee, the point of needle insertion. This is important because when recently we’ve discovered that we have interstition when we first were looking at bodies and we would dissect cadavers and we would open them up and we would pull out this sheet of sticky film.

Substance and we would throw it away. Guess what we’ve been throwing away has recently been discovered as a very important structure in our body. It’s called interstitium and it is a fluid filled cavity that contains connective tissue, fascia, and fluid. And you can see this in the demonstration.

This is an, a. This top area is a microscopic expansion of what’s underneath and you can actually see that there, this whole area is the interstitium. So it’s made up of fluid fill barriers, and then it’s made up of these little structures that are more split support structures called connective tissue and fat.

Guess what? Within that fascia, we have college and college in is the primary fascial component of that connective tissue or on the face. We’re going to call it fascia. And that college in actually has an electric. Signaling component to it. It’s called college and Paz electricity, collagen fibers have this mechanical or electric property.

And it’s actually the basis for communication from the insertion of the needle throughout the fascia and into the, not just the local areas, but more general areas as well. And when we alter that college in, when something happens like aging and that college and those college and fibers get altered, it’s going to change the physiological response as that stimulation moves out into other areas of the face.

And in fact, what we’ve been looking at recently is that therapeutic efficacy of acupuncture, why acupuncture works may be linked to this, maybe linked to the ability of needle insertion in an acupuncture point to radiate outside of that local area and flow through the interstitial tissue, into other areas or other neighboring structures of the face or in the two.

Here’s what fascia looks like. You can look at the bottom, it looks like sticky film or some type of saran wrap that actually does two purposes. Either wraps around substances to protect them or connects them such as on the face from say the muscles to the upper layers of the skin and under repeated or intense stress that fascial tissue changes.

And it becomes disorganized and it decreases in flexibility and it loses its ability to signal. And if you look at this image right here, this is what college in stress looks like. This is how it changes from a more. Area, if you think of your face and you think of this area of the face and a younger person, it’s much more plump, but this is what that disorganization of college in fibers decrease in flexibility, decrease in an electric signaling and ultimately tissue breakdown.

So we’re going to look at how to change that. Here’s what it looks like in an image. And here is the superficial area or this top of the skin. On the top of our face. And as we age, it moves from the bottom, which is nice, organized, thick banding of co of college and tissue to disorganize broken down college and fibers that then create a pitting area in the surface of this.

When you think about a mattress, you think about a brand new mattress. It’s nice and full it’s, nice and plump. And as we sleep in that mattress in the same position over and over years and years later, it starts to form a little pit. That’s the same thing as the pitting effect that happens in our skin, that little dumpling or the little.

Drop in the mattress is what we see on the skin. And we start, we call that college in breakdown. And when that happens, skin has no place to go. So for the purpose of this today’s lecture, the loss of college and underneath the surfaces of skin causes that pinning and causes that skin to dry.

Now with an acupuncture needle, we can actually make a change. So when you know that acupuncture needle and creates a natural wound healing cascade to release growth factors to stimulate the production in deposition of college men in the dermal layer skin, what is that? When you look at the skin, there are the very top layer is called the epidermis and the very, very top layer.

What you look at when you look in the mirror or you look at somebody else’s called the stratum corneum and then underneath the epidermis is the dermis. And the dermis is actually the integrity or the health of that, of our skin tissue, a healthy cell. Start at the bottom of the dermis and make their way up to the top and float up to the top.

As the cells float through this tissue, the integrity or the volume of this dermal layer is supported by colleagues. And collagen and another T is elastin, but we’re not going to talk about that right now. So you can see this thick area in the top corner. There is our college and fibers and the very, very thin ones are called elastin.

And the little dots that you see are called fiberblast fiber blast. Are actually what needs to be stimulated in order to make collagen in the skin tissue and there’s research, particularly by a man named does Fernandez who has done a lot of work with Derma rolling or skin piercing with acupuncture needles.

And what he’s found is that when you place a needle into the skin you create a microtrauma in the tissue and that might . In this cascade of information to fibroblasts, I’d say, make college and into the fibroblasts, just make as much healthy colleges as they can possibly make. So it changes it from being that on uniform clumped appearance of college and underneath the tissue to lay a Ficker, as you can see a thicker line.

Of college and in the upper dermal layer and throughout the dermal layer as well, to support the upper layer of the epidermis. And we do this with needles. We do this with short needles because let me go back remembering the different layers of tissue and layers of tissue in the body. This layer, this dermis epidermis dermal layer is really the very, very surface.

Of the skin of the face. Because if you think about the pace and you just take your finger and touch your face well, before you know it your own, do you feel that before it, between the skin, the upper layer of skin and bone, you have muscles, you have connective tissue, you have nerves, you have. Your circulatory system, you have fat, there are so many layers that are between the surface of the skin and the bone.

So when we are treating this dermal layer, we actually have to have very shallow insertion. And we do that challenge insertion with small short needle. My favorite. And and also the favorite of many of the other practitioners that treat with facial acupuncture for appearance enhancement are serum.

Serums are always great needles. They, and what I like about them is the safety quality about them. Their medical grade stainless steel used around the needle shaft. They’re triple polished and clean cleansed with ultrasound and. Alkaline acid or water to remove foreign substances, and then they sterilize them.

And then the honing of them they’re specifically rounded to reduce damage in the skin tissue, because remember we’re working on paced people’s faces. There are a lot of nerve endings. There are a lot of capillaries and vessels. And so we want to use the best calling the needles that we can possibly use in order to get maximum results.

And Siron also has a line called J 15 that are specifically designed for cosmetic patient acupuncture. And on the other side I tend to use the 40 twos and 40 fours. Although some people use forties, this in this area, the one set up about, I liked. Another great line is called dong Bancorp.

Their DVCS are made specifically for low loss of LMS. This is another option. They are also well-made and compliance with the world health, our organization in the U S and then FDA approved and throughout Europe in England. Because they are the largest manufacturer of acupuncture needles in the world.

They’re much more economically priced. They’re basically a fifth of the cost of this here and needles. Many practitioners will use these needles on the body and then they’ll use the on. There’s another company that I really like in use in that called Acue fast. And what I like about them is they’re environmentally friendly.

Their packaging is biodegradable and the plastic material is recyclable. Again, they are Korean made spring handled with surgical stainless steel, their machine sharpen. There’s another, they’re just another great needle. In order to eliminate some AQI trash, they come 10 needles in a package and a bliss and a vacuum seal pouch, and they sell the tube separately.

So in some of these treatments with that, I’m going to show you or the system, you may not need a tube. And so that book, optional tubes are different. And then the other types of needles that we use to penetrate the very surface of the skin, it is the intradermal needles, either the straight intradermal needles that run in a horizontal position for insertion and a horizontal manner.

These were invented in Japan and then the press needles, go in vertically. Those were come from. There are many types of intradermals. This is a really good line. It’s called thrive. Great needle. Hard to get because they come from England. They’re triple Pall, double polished, and there’s three.

Different sizes, the gold, the copper, and the silver again, just another example of a really good line. So those in you who are from the UK are watching from another country. This, you can see I’ve put on. Bottom the links in order to purchase them, or cammo here in the U S CRN has another, the spine next intradermal needles, I think is acupuncture.

We’ve used these most of the time. And again there, what’s interesting about them is that heat sealed blister pack. And then the little ring holder, you definitely need to use tweezers with them and they make them in certain different sizes with the. PO box of a hundred needles. DBC has started to make another intradermal needle.

That’s interesting as well. Again, five needles in a foam pack, and there’s a new one coming out. This is not on the market yet, but it seemed to be there in their first line of production this year. Ella piss. I liked them a lot. But they come in there again, the high, same quality at that as serum upholds their integrity of their production, of their needles.

They come in five needles in a blister pack. What I like about them is that they’re short. But they also have handles so that you don’t need to use tweezers. For those of you like me who are somewhat uneasy, need a tweezer compromised. And then there’s always the pie. Next introduce dermal is a single press tax press tax are great.

Not all states will let you leave a needle in there, patient. So you need to make sure to contact her, find out what your regulations are. Within your state to see if you can actually leave these in your patient when they’re not in the office. And again, they come in different diameters as well. So let’s get to the treatment.

When we are treating our patients, this is what we’re looking at here. You can see in the, before, this is the image that we were looking at before you take any of those needles that you want to use, and you can treat them either on the acupuncture point S either The point rate lateral to the corner of the mouth stomach for depending upon how you can see the skin pitting, you may want to go a little bit higher, but just remember that in order to get the beneficial effects, you don’t need to be on the point.

Exactly. So what I might suggest is say, needling stomach for me again. You’re going to do your normal intakes and discover your patterns of disharmony. So if you look at this, you’ll find most people who have this pitting that have some type of a spleen deficiency. Either. We explained us digestive disorder or something like that, because if you’re looking at the stomach Meridian, it runs right through this area.

And how many people as we’re aging, don’t have some type of digestive. Disorder. So remember your spleen, remember your stomach, treat the underlying pattern of disharmony and then come back and we’re going to go back and treat this spleen area. So say stomach for, and then take your smaller needles and you can slide the.

At a 10 to 15 degree angle. Now that’s very superficial. That’s almost like Japanese acupuncture where you’re actually angling them almost parallel to the surface of the skin. So you can take those needles either the intradermals or the the half inch, and just slide them into the area of deepest pitting.

You can also write in here in the integral. And the nasal labial fold, just slide them right in there. And then that’s and then this is what I did. And then after treatment 10 treatments, you can actually see. A much bigger difference. If you have other questions about those, you can certainly let me know.

I know these are are these recordings are available and you can always contact me just to let you know that I have partnered with the Pacific college of health sciences. We offer a program called facial applications for cosmetic, and he has met, which is a much more in-depth program that you can access in the way to.

Contact us is this phone number and email below, and it’s not, we’ll be learning my techniques. We’ll be learning other techniques with other leaders in the field, such as Matt Callison, Mary Elizabeth, Wakefield, Michelle Gellis Deandra Courtney, Carrie Hart. A lot more. This program allows financial aid will be as available classes begin January of 2023.

And then again, if you have other questions, you can follow me on Instagram. Or Ann or contact me@infoathamptonsacupuncture.com. So thank you again. Thank you for the American Acupuncture Council for allowing me to present today and also please join in next Wednesday too. With Chen Yen. She’ll be presenting at the American Acupuncture Council and hope to see you again.

Thank you. Goodbye.

I do have a question. Is it there is one question, Elizabeth, thank you. The, yes the course that is being offered as a hybrid program. So the didactic component of it is online. And then there five days of hands-on clinical learning offered once or twice a year.

Do I recommend patients take college and it really depends upon the college in remembering that college in is a large protein. And it may, or if you are explained to you deficient with terrible gut problems, you may or may not be able to absorb it. That’s the clinical and the written information or that, or the more.

Therapeutic information. However, that being said, I take collagen in every day. I use a company called Vital Proteins and honestly, I see a difference in my skin. Yes and no, I hope that answers your question.