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Being Laser Focused on Patient Results – Lorne Brown

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Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors. Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

I want to, again, thank the American Acupuncture Council for inviting me to continue hosting my show on their series to the point my name’s Dr. Lorne Brown and I’m the founder of healthy seminars. And I have run my practice in Vancouver, BC, and I’m the author of. Missing The Point why acupuncturists fail and what they need to know to succeed.

Our topic today is being laser focused on patient results. And I’m very excited. I’m going to give a thorough introduction to our guest today, which is Dr. Steve Liu. And we’re going to talk about being laser focused on patient results. And you’ve probably heard me talk about this before, where I say to her.

Thriving fulfilling practice where you’re helping people and you have abundance in your life as well. Yin and yang have to be in right relationship. And that yin and yang is your clinical results or clinical skills. And then there’s the practice management, your business skills, and many, I’m a charter account and I’m a CPA and I’m a doctor of Chinese medicine.

And it’s important to have those in balance if they separate or they’re out of balance and you have no practice management skills, even though. Skilled practitioner in the world, you may have no patients, so you’re not really helping that many people. So my goal is for you to develop that practice skill.

So with integrity, you’re helping your patients. So you experience abundance and you help heal your community. When we talk about being laser focused for patient results, it’s a pun, but we’re actually going to talk about low level laser therapy and how this can not only. Help with your clinical results.

And that’s why I’ve asked Dr. Steve Liu to come on with us. But also I’m going to share a little bit about this, the practice management of, by adding that special added value in your clinic practice, that you’ll become more attractive to your patients. So let’s introduce Dr. Steve Liu. He’s become, he’s not only a colleague, but he’s.

A friend of mine over the short period of time that I’ve gotten to know him. He is a licensed acupuncturist from from Arizona. He used to be an electrical and laser engineer in the Silicon valley. So he’s been fantastic for me to talk to when I want to ask about the different lasers out there and how they work, because he’s got that background and he’s combined low-level laser therapy, which the scientific community calls photobiomodulation and what we call laser acupuncture.

In his acupuncture practice. So he’s integrating the two and it’s been doing that since 2000. So he’s had quite a few years since the year, 2000 of combining those. So he’s the perfect guest to have on our show. You should know that he is a member of the north American association for photobiomodulation therapy since 2001.

And he was it’s presidents from the years, 2008 to 2010. So that’s quite a feed as well for an acupuncture. To be ahead of that north American laser association. He also served as the president of the Arizona society of Oriental medicine and acupuncture as well. And he’s also served as a board member of the international society for medical laser application.

So you’re starting to see. Steve is very involved in the communities and sits on boards because of his skillset and his knowledge. And he founded in 2006, the American society for laser acupuncture as lat and in his practice. He treats many conditions. He’s going to talk about some of the neuropathy chronic.

Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease as well. So let’s bring Steve on and I’ve got some questions for Steve. I want to let our audience know right away. Steve, these are the questions I’m going to ask you. So for all those of you, why do you want to pay attention? I’m going to ask Steve why laser acupuncture and regular acupuncture, why he sees it as a perfect.

I’m going to ask him what he’s using it for in his practice. Why are people attracted to his practice and what is giving him better clinical results since he’s doing the combination. And then we’ll talk a little bit about as lad as well. So Steve, welcome to the point. I’m so glad to see you again.

My good friend let’s dive into this why laser acupuncture and photobiomodulation also knows a lot of laser therapy. Why do you think this is a perfect marriage for us acupuncture?

Thank you Lauren. Thank you. Thank you again for the wonderful introduction. And my name is Steve Liu. I’m a laser acupuncturist.

That’s what I call myself now. I think there’s a three folds Y acupuncture and TCM will form a Perfect marriage. And number one we see a lot of older patients. And I always tell my older patients that we are not 20 years old anymore, including myself. So our healing ways slow. So we, as as an acupuncturist, we always try to convince patients that how to help heal faster, but then they are older and laser can leave.

Help speed up that healing along with acupuncture treatment and number two, or, some patients may be afraid of needles. So they are needle phobic and kids, especially, and younger people or even older people. So you can use a laser acupuncture in place of of the needles.

And number three, I think is the most important part is the. When you see chronic pain, which is what we see all the time, it’s very challenging as and because these are patients that came from, I call them medical rejects because they’re being rejected by the medical professionals, whether it’s medical doctors or chiropractors.

And because the techniques they tried and they don’t work for these patients, then they come to us as a last resort. And how are we going to heal these chronic. And laser is the one acupunctured get the healing started. We know that we can do that. And then once we got healing going, we need the laser to help speed up.

And I think that’s the best part of that in this matter.

Yeah, I think I’ve heard you call it. It’s the great normalizer. And so you’re finding that using the laser with your acupuncture, you’re helping these older chronic patients bodies behave more like they’re younger or an acute stage. So you’re getting those results.

Yes. I love that term normalize it. That’s why I use that too, because when you have a older patients and how do you get this healing going? Just like a young people and whether they are 60, 70, 80, 90 years. So I have a, my oldest patient now is 95 year old with chronic back pain. And she’s walking around with pain, without pain.

How I can do it because I normalize that. And with acupuncture using laser. So I love that word, Laurence, the normalizer the laser to normalize,

What are the conditions that you predominantly see in your practice? And I know there’s many out, like I predominately see gynecology, fertility, PCs, endometriosis, and I’m using my acupuncture laser.

You’re doing a lot of other conditions outside of the fertility. Can you share where your clinical experiences. The laser acupuncture along with acupuncture.

Yes. I love to talk about that because later I always tell patients that. Photobiomodulation works on cellular levels and what are not cells in our body is everything right?

So we, this laser work on muscles and tendons and soft tissue. That’s what I really like to work on because as I see a lot of these cases in my clinic, but they also work on the nerve tissues and which is very challenging for us like a neuropathy. And I wrote an article for the acupuncture today a few months ago that.

To me, it’s a, one of the best technique we can have is combined, combining acupuncture, like often and toes around the toes. But at the same time, use the light right around the toes and balls of feet, because that’s where the nerve has become dysfunctional. So this is why the nerves also offer quite very well.

Laser works on the Mito con. So for instance, Parkinson disease, sometime the scientists called the mitochondrial dysfunction in the brain, even though it could be the substantial Niagara without the they’re not producing enough dopamine, but what if you shine the light in the brain? And there’s a tons of study for that.

So why don’t you combine the. That body acupuncture, scalp acupuncture with light over the scope. And it’s wonderful combination that you can have. So this is why there’s an unlimited, sky’s the limit. Really? The sky’s the limit. When you combine in photobiomodulation laser therapy. With acupuncture.

So this is why anything you can think about you can use laser. So I don’t have any pain case that without laser, it’s always as a part of the electricity on the needles. And I always have laser around the needles and I always have a heat over the needles. So I called it the whole enchilada.

So this is why it’s a wonderful results. And that’s why we can get referrals from your clients. And from the top.

Sorry, I just want to summarize that you’ve been using it in your practice to help slow down the progression of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. And you were sharing a little bit about the mechanism.

It, it’s outside the scope of our interview today to go into detail, but there’s photobiomodulation that you’re using in your practice. So you’re using it as laser therapy. Then you’re doing laser acupuncture, laser on the points, and then you’re doing needle acupuncture. So that’s what you’re doing.

And the mechanism of photobiomodulation the laser therapy. You talked to the mitochondria, the battery, the cells. And so if those batteries of the cells are repairing, they can divide better. So there’s that healing response and what we see with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s regulates inflammation. Chronic systemic inflammation is becoming the cause of so many diseases.

So if it can help with that, Reduction in pain and then all these other disease processes, scar tissue, and adhesions. So if we think of all of those injuries with scars, and then you talked about the nerves, even nerve regeneration, and then blood flow increases blood flow to the area. So that’s why, we’ve talked, you said is the perfect marriage, right?

And then the needle-phobic patients, this just opens up your practice to everybody now because there’s probably. Close to 50% of the people that would want to see you as an acupuncture, see, to get relief, but they can’t come through your doors because their fear of needles is so bad. And so by doing non needle acupuncture, you now open your door to other people.

I often hear from our colleagues, that are doing the needle, that all, how can laser acupuncture work or is there a research that it works? You and I both have access to the needle and the laser, and we love using both. And we. The laser. So that’s why I like hearing from you because you’re not biased because you have both, you’re trained in both and you can use both and you are choosing use both, but can you share, is there research, what’s your, what are you aware of about the research on laser acupuncture, having an effect on the body similar, or if there’s any difference from needle accurate?

When I thank you again, Lauren, you’re such a good summarize a thank you. And my, when I first heard about laser acupuncture with my from my mentor, Dr. Margaret Naser in Boston, and that she published first study on the. With the laser acupuncture, you can look it up. And and she was so excited when that first heard about her and got to know her, and then she got so excited.

And then call me up since this is the first time in may journal American medical association journal that actually published a study that contained word. Acupuncture and laser acupuncture. So that was the first thing. That first time I was just blown away with what laser and laser acupuncture can do for something like a carpal tunnel, as you can see, involve a median nerve.

So what happens in front of this? I began researching more and more. There’s a study that I run into a study. They use a regular laser acupuncture, shine, the laser lights on the acupuncture point in the year to help quit smoking. And I love to see more studies and I would love to do someday in the future that I can do on the quit smoking.

I do acupuncture, quit smoking myself. But when I come to like a pain, like a lower back pain and a soft tissue injury pain, and I really have to combine acupuncture in the. And the laser member lasers there to help lower the inflammation. We don’t stop inflammation. Inflammation is a part of a healing.

That’s how acupuncture help. Okay. So when we put needles into the tissues, guess what we produce some low level inflammation, and that’s why we need. But lasers is there to help speed up that, that mechanism Becca kickstarted by the acupuncture. But when patients really have a problem with needles, for instance, you can use laser acupuncture in place of the knee points.

So you can use a red lasers on the distal points like. All these points on the fingers and the palms and the risks. And then you can use an infrared lasers on the body, like a stomach 36 and spleen six. And so on screen 10. And deeper because you want to target the third nerves underneath that acupuncture point.

So this is why we can combine laser and acupuncture or laser acupuncture by itself. So this all can come to. In the therapy

and not all lasers are created equal. And so the wavelength matters. So the color of the light’s going to matter about how it’s going to affect the cell, the tissue, and how deep it’s going to go.

The power of the laser is going to affect. The dosage of photons at the target tissue. So that’s important because how much time you need to keep the laser on the body. And so some of the lasers are, can be a large investment for acupuncturists. And this is why I love talking to you because I know Steve that you’ve built lasers because you remember everybody Steve’s a doctor or Chinese medicine, and he’s also a electrical and laser engineers.

He can look at a system. He actually helps some of the manufacturers improve on their systems. Cause he’s got that skillset. I wanted to ask you a little bit that first of all, not all lasers are created equal. So some lasers, although there are a couple hundred dollars, they’re no different than using a PowerPoint light.

You’re not going to get any therapeutic value really on it. So still. You have to invest. It seems to get a good laser. Personally, I want to share this story and then just talk about how you have found that, how this is helped your practice grow by having the lasers. And th the story I want to share with you is my first laser I invested in.

Was about $6,500. And I used it for onsite for IVF clinics, laser acupuncture because the clinic had shown that it increased implantation rates by 15%. So that was a big investment and that’s what I use it for, but I wanted to get the results, help my patients. And it made our patients more attractive to our clinic as well, because we were offering this and then I wanted to help with egg quality, and that required a different laser system and help with endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome and and engaging the relaxation.

There’s lots of things we can do with the. And so that system costs me $20,000. Now I got to share something with you that I was not expecting, but I understand why it ha it helped. Because when you create value, the marketplace, your patients will seek you out. They will. They will see you over other people.

They’ll actually people get on planes, pre COVID to are to go to our clinic, to be treated with our laser for fertility and PCRs. They’ll drive an hour in my city to come to our clinic, even though there’s many acupuncturists in their area, because they want somebody, a clinic that has the experience, the knowledge and the good quality lasers to get them results.

So here’s the quick story. And then I’m curious to hear what your experience has been I have when I introduce the laser for fertility in our clinic, several of the patients that I was treating, and let’s just say they were being charged $95 back then for acupuncture only. And I would recommend twice a week and many of them would say they couldn’t afford twice a week.

So they’d come once a week. Or some of them said I can’t afford. And they did not have. When I introduced the laser, we increased the price of having acupuncture with the laser. And so we increased the price to say one for $140. So actually it was 130 back then. So 95 for acupuncture only, or 1 35 for both.

And what we know, and it was three times a week because we were following a group that had done, had seen an improvement pregnancy rates when they did the laser fertility approach three times. In the follicular phase. And so we replicated that and that’s what we educated our patients, these patients that said they could not afford $95 once a.

Or even twice a week, it started coming in three times a week. So what I learned from that is it wasn’t that they couldn’t afford it was that they didn’t see the value in what I was doing in acupuncture, how I educated them to spend $95 a week or $95 twice a week. They just didn’t see the value there.

But when I shared how laser fertility has the potential to improve egg, quality and pregnancy rates, whether you’re trying to concede that. Or an IVF and share some of the research. They then were willing to pay 1 33 times. To get the results. So it was never always about the affordability. It was. Is there enough value to pay that much money?

So I wasn’t expecting that, but that’s what the laser has done in my practice. It has made me, it has separated me from other clinics that are just doing acupuncture because many of the patients are learning about this, get an educated, and they actually want the photo by modeling. With their acupuncture.

What was your experience? Have you found that by what you’re doing and you have a fast program, which you can introduce as well because you’re getting the results in using laser. Has that also a major practice, even that much more busier before you compare to before you added the laser?

Yes. I always say results resolved.

And as an acupuncturist and. Pretty much all the time is the last resort, a practitioner that patients see and see you, you want to produce results. And to me, laser is the is probably the only way that when it’s combined with acupuncture really get the result. And because you heal, you.

And I know sometimes it’s hard to say the word cure, but then it’s how it works. And so yes, this is a value added because you can do, you can charge you $150 for acupuncture, but if you does not if you do not produce the results, it’s still worthless. But if you add it in this so in my practice, I combined a laser and acupuncture was when fee I don’t have an additional fee for laser.

I consider as a value added so that when I produce results, They are, they’re going to see effect within a few treatments and guess what? And then when they were completely here, And they are going to refer all their friends and relatives and neighbors. And then the thought is, begin to hear about you name and they began to refer their clients to you.

So guess what? You can love busier practice. That’s how I see it. And that’s why it’s a laser is a result driven. And and I absolutely agree with you that Lauren is. I don’t think it’s really the money. It’s a, it’s the result when the patients see the result and they say they will pay for it.

Yeah. Definitely want to get, they want to get the results and adding the laser helps give you that result. And they also is the education like, so when the understand for whatever reason I just, it’s an observation. They understand photobiomodulation, it’s more modern, it’s more sciency. And when you can see the mechanisms, they understand that and they’re willing to give it a go or give it a try where acupuncture is old and they’re questioning it.

I’m not saying it doesn’t work. I use both. So it does work. And I have found that it’s. It’s something that has been attracted to patients. And I always say in my book, and when we talk at the beginning, we want to help them with integrity. So when you charge, because again, when you’re making investments in $20,000 lasers and you only have so many there’s value there.

So if you choose to charge more. You’re doing it with integrity because Ava invested in more equipment, but your patients don’t care about that. They don’t care about your debt or how much it costs you. They care about what kind of value they’re going to get when they pay you. And so I’ve made that investment and then patients are willing to endure.

In me because I have the tools to help them get the results. I know in your practice, you have a program called fast for chronic pain, and you go off and we’ll help people under 10 treatments get incredible relief, chronic pain, and so that makes you busy, but that fat program requires laser and it does.

Correct?

Absolutely. It’s the key F a S T I came up with this idea is how to heal and again, a lot of the time you can cure these a chronic soft tissue problem, like tennis elbow, conference elbows, and people come in and say, I bought these for three months. I have these for three years.

Why? Because all the cortisones, no, the anti-inflammatories and all this, they literally stopped the healing. But the needle is there to help kickstart a healing. But how do you get this healing going in the better rate, quicker rate that could useful rate? When Joel, like when you were in 20 years old laser lasers there to help speed it up.

And so laser is really the key and to help. And so I can literally tell my patients that with intent treatments, you will be. Done. And then the pain’s all gone, all completed relief. So this is why, and I’m I’m very proud of this this program FST and you can look it up and I intend to bring it up in my conference with Aslan, which is American society for.

Lola laser acupuncture therapy asset work. And we’ve intend to have a conference in this later this year and that bring this fancy program certification program out. And I’m working on that pretty much every day, try to figure out how to get this program together and in module of structure and Lauren and I are trying to figure out how to put this one together.

Yeah, looking forward to that. And so that’s, website’s important. So if you’re looking for more information about laser acupuncture and photobiomodulation, that’s the term that’s replacing low-level laser therapy is photobiomodulation and laser acupuncture, check out the athlet website. Cause you’ll see more information available there.

And this is something. Again, I’m going to put the practice management twist on it is when something is a value and people want it. Then other people start to offer it just like acupuncture. It’s not just train acupuncturist that offer the acupuncture nurses. Do it, doctors do it, physios, do it.

Chiropractors do it. I know in our profession. Acupuncture’s don’t like it, then other people are doing acupuncture, but when something is effective, other people get it into their scope with photobiomodulation laser acupuncture, massage therapy are doing it. Chiropractors are doing our physios. They’re doing it.

So it’s out there. It’s really big in Europe, but more so in Australia, less so in north America and in Canada, in the us. But it’s great. It’s gaining a momentum so quickly right now. And so this is. Learn about this because. It’s going to be something that if your colleague has it or the physio has it, and if the physio can do acupuncture and laser, and you only do acupuncture as a public member, you’re going to go to somebody that can do both.

Steve said, one fee for both. Somebody’s going to go see him versus somebody on the same street that can only do acupuncture. So this is my invitation that. If you don’t give this some attention, there’s a possibility that you’re going to miss out and other modalities, other professions are going to have incorporated this.

So I think it’s important that acupuncturists incorporate, especially the laser acupuncture part. And as Steve said, at the beginning, it is a credible marriage. Practitioners that I talked to that are using photobiomodulation with their acupuncture. Never turned back. They love it. And again, I, my whole focus is on gynecology, fertility using the laser acupuncture with my needles.

Steve, I want to thank you again for joining me today. Can you tell us a little bit about asthma? That’s what we’ll finish off here. But just tell us a little bit. The asthma organization that you’ve created and just what’s available for acupuncturist on that website. Yes.

Thank you. Lauren athlet against Stanford American society for laser acupuncture therapy.

I came up with this idea back in 2006 and I reserved the domain name as lab. Beautiful. And it’s nice and short, and I need to have this name reserved obviously long time ago, but I haven’t had a really chance to really get him going until last year. And then this is really the year 2022.

We’re going to learn. I help bring this to the community. This is a, you can look it up and there’s a mission statement. I really want to use this as a community for Acupac. We are the acupuncture. We cannot own laser acupuncture, not any other like chiropractors was physio in massage therapists.

We are going to have it. And in order to, for us to integrate this tool into our practice, you guys need to, of course be educated. And I love to be the educator and also teach you how to sell. Lasers devices and what is technology and what is led and what’s the different between laser and the LEDs and what are all these companies they’re making all these devices, then what’s the protocol for all of these providers and so on.

So this is a community I like to have, and that’s always all for us, the acupuncturist. And then, so we can. Successfully integrate that into our practice and make like a Lauren. I know Lori is a very passionate to make us a good businessman as well. And it’s important. It’s Ian in not only need to have a good skills, but we gotta be a good businessman.

You notice this. Thank you gotta

have. You gotta have those business skills. So it’s not so many people give it a negative connotation. And we’re talking about, you just got to know how to run a practice. You got to know how to charge for things so you can keep your doors open so you can keep treating your community.

It’s just really simple. It’s matte and you can do it with integrity. And so that’s where we talk about the laser therapy today and laser acupuncture. So as lab we’ll have a conference or as a conference, it was information. Unhealthy seminars.com. We have continuing education courses available for laser therapy.

On our community library, we have many interviews with experts and researchers on laser acupuncture, Dr. Steve Liu being one and is going to be offered many more. So do check out healthy seminars.com for the photobiomodulation laser acupuncture courses. All right. You’ve been listening to. To the point with AAC and tune in next week when Sam Collins comes in and joins us on the AAC to report to the point show.

I want to thank you, Dr. Steve Leo, and I want to thank you guys for tuning in today.

Adrenal Exhaustion and the Nervous System

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Hello and welcome. My name is Tsao-Lin Moy, and I’m the founder of Integrative Healing Arts in Union square in New York city. And I would like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for putting these lives on for your entertainment and also for educating you about acupuncture and Chinese medicine.

Please and comment for today we’re going to be talking about adrenal exhaustion and burnout and the amygdala hijacking, which has a slightly different and okay. So let’s go to the slides.

Okay. There we go. All right. So today we’re going to be talking about adrenal exhaustion, burnout, and the amygdala hijacking and what strategies that we can be using with acupuncture and Chinese medicine. So here we go.

All right. So what we’ve got here is what adrenal exhaustion. And in Chinese medicine, we call that the kidney yin and yang deficiency, where the beginning young is out of balance. And what we see is elevated cortisol. We’ve got low melatonin, a lot more physical conditions, such as fatigue irritability problems with sleeping.

So we start to see the day and night shifting. It’s very common that your patients may be on some kind of prescription medication. There is a lot of tiredness and Schedule is irregular, right? So they may be taking anti-anxiety medication sleep aids, antidepressants. All right. So this we see is very common.

Most of our patients that come in have something going on with their kidney energy and given the situation that we’re in right now with the news and everything happening around the world that for sure. This is going to be coming into your practice. And we’ll go to the next slide and look at what are going to be strategies for this level.

And we’re looking at so strategy here is really regulating the yin and the Yom the nervous system, because this is where we’re starting to see that it’s out of balance. A big component is going to be sleep right for regulating the circadian rhythm. We can address it with diet, right? Making sure that our patients are drinking enough water staying away from alcohol getting some exercise.

Very important is going to be detoxing from social media because that actually gets people really upset. And to clear those cookies as I call them that type that tend to follow another what we’re looking at for your patients is acupuncture for sure, because we know that it’s. The brain chemistry and the neuropeptides that actually allow the body to go into that deep, relaxed state herbal medicine.

Some of it, yes. Definitely supplements. If you. The basic we call the formulas such as the shadow side, the free and easy wander or something like way P tongue, where there’s going to be a lot more worry. So this is going to be, for someone who is relatively healthy that they’re just going, that they’re out of balance, right?

So we’re like, Like the exhaustion, it’s a little bit different from the Western, what we call exhaustion, where they may be given anti some kind of steroids. But here we have an opportunity for the person to shift back into balance and go into some more state of relative balance. We call it and as a practitioner, We also do social support therapy.

We talk with our patients about how to balance their life really important. A lot of times when people are very stressed out, it’s very difficult for them to do something like meditation. And what I have found in my practice is really offering them breath work. And that could be the 4, 7, 8 breath work.

There is also Wim Hoff, which is has been. Become very popular. There are lots of videos of how to do it, and if somebody is feeling stressed out, all they need to do is to shift their breathing. The other thing too is to really look at taking time in nature. And at this moment when you’re working with your patients that are in this particular kind of imbalance, they actually are pretty open to listening to suggestions.

The time in order to stabilize, I would give it three to five months really consistently coming in for treatment and then also to create and cultivate different habits where they can manage their stress and become aware of it and actually be much more proactive in it. So the next slide.

Now burnout is what we look at is a whole other level of kidney depletion, right? Compared to adrenal exhaustion, which is a little bit more of the physical is such, we’re looking at more of the emotional, and here we’re seeing that this is this more inward and racing thoughts, but also the trouble of blue sleeping.

So I’ve underlined sleeping because that is a huge problem. And this is going to be really a key for addressing something with your patients, like where can you start? So when someone comes in with so many symptoms, it’s very important to keep your treatments. Another thing that we see with burnout is that there’s more depression going inward.

Even self-medicating the people may be on a lot of medication. The essence is being drained. And then we also see with the physical manifestations, we start to see things like chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia auto-immune really like depletion, and really. Feeling defeated. And so here is we’ll go to the next slide, like how we’re gonna let’s change to this next.

Okay. So as I mentioned, oh, we want to go back one, let’s go back one. We can very similar to adrenal exhaustion. The idea is you want to. Rescue them in a way, strengthen the mind body connection and their ability to really connect with their body. So this is a place where, we would use acupuncture and for all of you that are live.

I would be very interested to find out like, what acupuncture points would you choose? Because right now this person is really so depleted. What kind of points would you use? And the thing with the more exhausted that a patient is, and this can also happen from a recovery, from an illness that, you know, they.

You might want to do a lot for them, but in fact, the less is more. And the areas to really focus on are going to be the really deep and restorative sleep, because that is where their nervous system is going to be able to do a reset. If they can do a practice like meditation or yoga just to get their chair moving and to build up their energy formulas would be for someone.

Adrenal exhaustion. You want to support the kidneys and also the stomach and spleen, a very classic, maybe the blue Jong ichi Tong, really to help them to nourish. And again my recommendation is. To for them to add in something like breath, work and breath work is we can see it. If you’re exercising that you actually do get really good oxygen saturation, which will help with deeper sleep.

But for someone who’s really exhausted, you really don’t want them to. To, I wanna say encourage them to go back to a, in a adrenal field way of living where they’re running marathons all the time, or getting up and trying to do too much. And in fact, the more serious let’s say or the condition, what we’re looking at with the adrenals, you really want to offer them something very simple because they can’t really take any, anything more.

Okay, so we’ll go to the next slide. My little clicker is not working here. So here is an example of breathwork. So breathing, we’re doing more than just regulating the nervous system. You’re also reducing the cortisol levels. And this is really important when we’ve got something going on with our adrenals and our kidney energy.

And again, when we breathe in, we’re actually looking at that lung and kidney relation. And here studies have shown that this higher level of oxygen actually encourages deeper and restorative sleep, which is known as a slow wave sleep. And why is that important? Because people with extreme adrenal exhaustion and burnout have, will tend to maybe sleep a lot, but not get the restoration there.

So all right, we’ll go to the next.

So here is a don’t know what happened to the top of it, but here’s, I wanted to show a picture of what somebody looks like when they’re really terrified. And this is actually a kid who is on a rollercoaster. And what is happening is the wa eyes are wide open. The heart rate is increasing.

They start to breathe, very shallowly, dry mouth sweating. And then what we look at is the tightening of the extensors. And this is really the do check. So in all that stress you see with animals when they get stressed out that the back of their neck tenses up. And so we see a lot of our patients come in with neck and shoulder, tight neck and shoulder TMJ.

And that is, innervated by the cranial nerves. So we’re looking at this connection with stress levels and then how it manifests in the body. So we’ll go to the next slide. So what are we looking at? We’re looking at the kidney and heart being out of balance. We’re also looking at the liver and spleen out of balance. And so this is this water, fire relationship. The water really would, your kidney energy really helps with your heart energy, that connection. And when you’re, it’s out of balance, we’re looking at too much fire, right?

Not enough of the balance of water for two cool things. We’re also looking at the wood and earth relationship out of harmony. So what happens is we end up with things like emotional turmoil the worry of the spleen, the fear of the kidney actually cause the heart and the psyche to like escape.

And then we have the. The liver, which is the wood and responsible for the smooth flow starts to control. Everything goes out of balance. And we realized like, Hey, what’s happening? The liver energy is trying to control everything. And so what we see is a lot more of that literary and. And at this point, I invite a lot of comments.

What do you think, what kind of points might you use when you see this? What’s, what is when you start to see this happening and I’m sure it is in your practice what point prescriptions might you use? So I’m very interested for your opinion, please come right. Or we’ll go to the next slide.

All right. So here the five elements chart, or we see the liver’s role is the smooth flow of cheap emotions and blood and interesting studies recently show that the liver does have a regulatory function with the central nervous system. And there are fibers, both sympathetic and parasympathetic fibers.

That are linking to from the liver, going to the brain. Very interesting that right now we’re looking at, Hey, the liver does have access to, the brain chemistry. One of the things in Chinese medicine, as we know that the liver stores the blood while we’re at rest. And what that actually means is it actually helps to filter it.

And then when needed the blood the clean blood actually goes out to the. When that’s not happening, such as when stress hormones are increased they actually increase enzymes in the liver and cause inflammation and toxicity. And so we see this with women that are, pre-menstrual a lot of that those emote, the strong emotions come from inflammation of the cytokines, which is like right before the bleed aspect of the cycle.

We’ll go to the new.

So what happens when we’re under prolonged stress and I’m putting in fear what happens is that the brain starts to remodel and we get a lot more systemic change. And this is as we’re going to be moving into, what is the definition of an amygdala hijacking or a takeover? The amygdala is a almond shaped a part of your Olympic system or your reptilian brain.

It’s about emotional survival. It filters all of your senses. And the more that it’s triggered, it actually grows larger. And then what we see is an underactive hippocampus, which has to do with a lot of memory starts to shrink. And so what this does is that it. Causes the individual to not be able to regulate themselves, it interferes with self-regulation and we see things like a systemic decline. So some of the symptoms are also the memory problems, a lot of distortions of paranoia, things like conspiracy, more angry and manic behavior. And this is, these are. Behaviors. We also see with patients that have early onset with dementia and something like Parkinson’s right.

And also we look at there’s an increase in this amygdala activity in patients that have bipolar, especially during their manic episodes. So we’re looking at here’s this connection, the more exciting. A person gets and more this fear, the swinging, the extremes that we’re looking at, the amygdala is involved in it and causes can cause a lot of turmoil.

So we’ll go to the next.

So the amygdala is this almond shaped structure in the brain, and it’s involved with processing the emotions. So going back to where the five elements are. When the amygdala is triggered and hijacks the person we call the, or the brain that those emotions are distorted. And so there are the two structures that are, there are part of each one of the brain, and they’re located near the base. And what we see is when the. Amygdala hijack brain parts, brain, no longer function. It actually just shuts it down, but without the ability or the use, and this is in the frontal lobe, which is like decision-making a person is unable to think clearly and they have confusion.

And they’re not in control of their responses and we actually need, we see a lot of it. We see a lot of it that’s been happening in the news where people are having outbursts and screaming, and everyone says this person was like a really nice person. I don’t understand. But what happens is they got triggered.

We’ll go to the next.

So the amygdala engagement, the more that it’s engaged, the more difficult it is for someone to think clearly. And self-regulate so when you get the amygdala hijacks, a control of a person’s ability to respond Nat rationally. It’s tapping into fear oriented perceptions and views, most things as a threat.

So this is where we’re looking at. It’s a real serious Shen disturbance because the liver is out of control, right? So the more things are out of control seem out of control. The more that the liver energy starts flaring up and Causes the the mind or the shin of the heart to leave in the, and that’s like a disturbance.

The response usually tends to be aggressive and can be very violent. So we look at episodes where someone may have anger management issues or sudden outbursts and blow ups. So what’s the next.

So here is a picture of someone who is like the earlier picture that I had there, where there was a little boy who was actually showing fear where you could actually, that was that momentary fear where what happens is the eyes are opening up and the heart is racing and here is actually a picture of somebody.

Who is actually in this state where they’re acting extremely irrational. So when some parts of the brain are revved up, others are shutting down and this, like the fear can actually cause the areas of the brain to the. Have judgment to just not be there. And so it’s very difficult for the make a good decision.

So here is actually a picture of what has been known to be as a Karen. She is this woman who just lost it and then it is actually terrifying some people in their own car. And I’m sure she’s a very nice lady. However, she went off and this is when you actually see this irrational behavior.

So we’ll go to the next excellent.

So how can we rescue this? I checked the medulla. Technically when the amygdala is engaged, it takes about six seconds or like the chemicals to recede. So this is, so that we don’t live in this state for a long period of time, whatever the problem is, if it’s triggered over and over, we start to see that it grows up there.

And then what happens? We get this perpetual behavior that continues to be reinforced. So if you have a patient that’s coming in, because they’re, they, they’re having a lot of problems that what’s important is to help them become aware of what’s happening in their body so they can take steps to prevent it.

And really important is going to be. Addressing the liver. And even though this is what we considered a Shen disturbance we may want to give all kinds of calming Formulas, but the problem is that the liver is gone wild. And until that can actually be stabilized, that we start with the end of just treating some of the symptoms.

So it has to be at least two or three pronged where Getting rid of the inflammation that is literally in the liver and we’re coming up upon spring. So this is a really, we may start to see more of this energy coming up because of the season. And what you can do is have your patients start drinking things like nettle tea, dandelion, and burdock, really to help clear that out.

The other is to do some breathing and breath. So this is going to help to reduce the cortisol levels. It’s going to also help address their. Acupuncture. Definitely. The thing is if they are really in a heightened state that actually you could trigger something with them, with acupuncture very interested in, which possible treatment strategies.

Could be aggressive energy treatments might be the thing is if you start needling on the back surface, that’s the sympathetic area. So you actually might have. Actually stimulate something more with the do channel being in excess, you might want to think about treating Ren the fund, the front more funds to bring energy more towards the part of the body.

With herbal formulas again probably less is more definitely there issues when people have. These outbursts that are related to low things like low vitamin D vitamin C. So you might recommend some of the supplements if you are unaware of what supplements there are a suggest or how they work to do a little bit of research on it.

Sunshine, we need a lot of sunlight that actually is going to help also with the liver, right? The liver process is D No processed foods. We know that causes a lot of inflammation. We want to avoid alcohol and a lot of other stimulants. So let’s go to the next slide. Comments. All right, here we go.

Stress negatively impacts our body, mind, and spirit, and really long-term stress affects the body’s ability to regulate itself and actually makes changes to the brain and these negatively affect cognition and are also connected with mental disorders. And including dementia and previously I talked about PTSD.

So in the case, Also in the case of something like PTSD, we really look at how the brain chemistry is altered. We see this, this is one of the challenges is that it’s not as easy as when someone just has an adrenal exhaustion to actually go back. And balance themselves that we are actually dealing with someone who their brain is functioning a little bit differently.

However it is possible to help them to to heal right. To heal. Just as a quick, PTSD is more of a site that is considered a psychiatric disorder. And it’s related to someone having an experience or a trauma that then they will relive over and over again. So they have that flashback and that becomes a barrier for them to use.

I would love to hear some comments. I’m sorry if my the presentation got off to a Rocky start we had a little bit of an adrenal surge when we didn’t know whether the The computer was going to work or the mic. And I’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council. And for next week we have Lorne Brown that is going to be joining the American Acupuncture Council.

So hopefully you can join us next week.

Easily Incorporating Facial Acupuncture into Your Practice

So the topic of today’s talk is the benefits of incorporating facial acupuncture into your practice.

Click here to download the transcript.

Hi everyone. My name’s Michelle Gellis. I am a board certified acupuncture visit. And I would like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for giving me the opportunity to present to you today. I’m going to go right to my first screen. Thank you. So the topic of today’s talk is the benefits of incorporating facial acupuncture into your practice.

A little bit about me. I was on faculty at the Maryland university of integrative health, formerly the Thaisa FIA Institute since 2004. My undergrad degree is in computer science and I have been published several times in the journal of Chinese medicine. And the Maryland acupuncture society newsletter, the acupuncture desk reference, and several other publications.

Here are some of my publications listed. You can get all of this information on my website, facial acupuncture classes.com. I have listed here. All of the classes that I teach, some are cosmetic acupuncture. Some are treating neuromuscular, facial conditions, facial anatomy facial acupuncture self-care and.

Safety course. And most recently I am offering a course in microneedle Lang for acupuncturists and also. An advanced certificate course in facial acupuncture. So today we are going to talk about incorporating facial acupuncture into your practice. So we’re going to go through an overview of what is involved and incorporating facial acupuncture into your practice and the importance of training.

Documentation safety, red flags. What tools might you need? Is it important? What sort of tools you use when you’re doing cosmetic acupuncture? The benefits of facial acupuncture, not just for your practice, but also for your patients. And also why providing a full body treatment is important. Whenever you are working on the face.

So I’d like to start out by giving a definition of facial acupuncture because most of us think of facial acupuncture as something that is done for cosmetic reasons. Facial acupuncture incorporates both cosmetic acupuncture and also acupuncture for any neuromuscular facial conditions, such as Bell’s palsy, TNJ trigeminal, neuralgia, stroke, ptosis, any conditions that affect the face.

Facial acupuncture can use acupuncture, needles, facial cups, wash Shaw tools, Derma rolling, and or micro-needling. And facial acupuncture is not some new trendy technique. It has been used as early as the some dynasty. There are several historical references in the PSU when regarding treating the face both for beauty and for other reasons.

And there have been some studies done on facial acupuncture, both for cosmetic and for neuromuscular conditions. And I’ve listed some of them here.

One of the questions I get asked all the time is, does it work? So I put up a few before and after pictures. Sometimes I’m reluctant to use before and afters because myself, I don’t have a professional photography studio in my acupuncture practice. So my photos are only. Good as my camera and my lighting.

And so I, as much as possible, I try to use the same lighting when I take pictures. But this actual, this top left picture here was taken in a class. I was teaching. One of my students was doing cupping on someone’s neck. And you can see just from releasing. The SCM, how the lines on the side of the neck relaxed, this is another patient of mine and they had a deep scar right in their nasal labial fold and through treatment.

And over time, the scar dissipated quite a bit another patient who had. Chin wrinkles. And the sides of her mouth will really turn down and through treatment. The chin wrinkles really smooth down and the corners of her mouth started to turn up. And this is a demonstration of using some intradermal needles to help, to break up the melanin that can cause some of the dark spots that we can.

A couple more before and afters. So the patient who had deep four headlines and through treatment, both body points to clear up some stagnant liver Che and some local points. Her far had smoothed out quite a bit, and this patient was concerned because her eyelid. Had started to droop and her eyebrows.

And I just treated one side of her face, the left side of her face. And you can see how much more lifted the one eyebrow is.

So what’s involved in bringing app facial acupuncture into your practice. Many practitioners are reluctant to consider bringing cosmetic acupuncture because they have misconceptions. And one of them is that it’s extremely time consuming. And if done properly, you can actually have two rooms going at once.

With facial acupuncture, you put the needles in one patient while they’re resting on the table, you put the needles in another patient, and then you can go back to your first patient or your cupping and guash Shaw. And then you can go back to your second patient, so you can have two rooms going at once.

And also the pricing should be when you’re pricing cosmetic treatments for. Facial acupuncture. Your pricing should be one and a half to two times what you would normally charge for a regular treatment, depending on what you are offering. For micro-needling you can charge two to three times some, sometimes more what you would charge for the same amount of clock time in the room.

Many practitioners are charging three to $500 for a half an hour microneedling treatment also from a marketing standpoint. Facial acupuncture. It opens up your world. You can convert your patients who are currently coming to see you for whatever they’re coming for, conditions, aches, and pains.

They can become your cosmetic acupuncture patients, and also you can specialize and capture that. Market of people who have neuromuscular facial conditions and specialize in that if the whole cosmetic thing is not what you’re interested in doing

before you begin or embark on a practice of facial acupuncture. It is really important that you get trained. And if the American acupuncture council is who you have your insurance through, they do want you to get trained in cosmetic acupuncture. And part of the reason for that is there are special forms questions.

There is a unique way of documented. Before during and after treatments, when you are working on someone’s face in that capacity, you want to be able to document any previous procedures they’ve had. You want to be able to screen them for any red flags, Contra indications, and this can be really important.

When you’re talking about putting a lot of needles in someone’s face and head unlike most forms of acupuncture although you can cause harm when treating someone just in general, when you’re working on someone’s space, the skin on the face is very thin. The skin, the space. Highly vascularized. And facial acupuncture brings a lot of energy up to the head.

People can suffer a migraine, have a headache. There’s even the potential. If you’re doing techniques. Improperly of the patient having a stroke or fainting, and these are all things you need to be able to pre-screen for also the anatomy of the face. Although we do learn about it in school. Most of us don’t spend a tremendous amount of time noodling the face.

And as I mentioned, the face is highly vascularized. There are over 44 muscles on the face. Far ahead. And then, working into the neck, you’ll probably want to work on the neck as well. So you’ve got veins and arteries, facial vein temporal vein nerves, the two major nerves that go into the face, tiny little capillaries.

And of course we know the face tends to bruise very easily. So learning how to. Take the proper precautions and learn the anatomy so that there’s no danger of harming or even injuring or causing unnecessary bruising to the face. And part of this has to do with needling technique, learning what to look for and.

Also, I’m not using so many noodles I seen, and I think I have a slide in here. I seen untrained acupuncturists take a stab. Pardon the pun at doing cosmetic acupuncture without being trained and sometimes the results or. A little scary looking and really unnecessary. You should not need to put hundreds or even dozens of needles in the face in order to effect a good result.

So here’s some examples of either poor technique or just too many needles. Here, this is a neck and these needles are very deep. And some of them are very close to the juggler vein here on the left. This person’s far ahead, has way too many intradermal needles in it. There are ways to work with lines and wrinkles without using that many intradermal needles here, the intradermals aren’t inserted in a way.

Actually it would be building college in at all. And then over here, this person just has way too many needles. Really just unnecessary. So here’s a couple of pictures I took. My students had needled in class. This is one way that I teach to help, to smooth out a deep line. And this is through submuscular needling and using special needles.

Designed for for the face to work with crow’s feet. And here is a technique I teach and it is submuscular needling to tighten the . I have a quick video. I’m going to show of another skill that I teach and it has to do with the anterior dynastic muscle. So I’m just going to, it might be a little jumpy, but I am going to hop in and get it rolling.

And I’m going to have to talk about. Because the sound is not going to work. So in order to is gastric muscle, let me turn the same. We’ll use one finger, Michelle. The sound is being picked up very pretty well. If you want to leave the sound on the video. Great. Let me start it again. Is.

In order to locate the digastric muscle, you will use one finger and you will locate that mastoid process right here. And you also want to locate the hyoid bone, which was right. But you want to do is draw an imaginary line between the two of them and then using your index finger, you’re going to pal pay along the line and you’ll find a very thin muscle right here.

And that is the posterior die-cast. And if you draw an imaginary line between the hyoid bone and the underside of the chin, you can palpate for the front of the digastric muscle. So the dyad strick goes from the man, the ball, and then it takes a turn here and attaches back here at the mastoid process.

So the part of the gastric muscle that we’re going to needle using submuscular noodling is right here underneath the chin. And this will help with the if someone has a lot of excess or laxity there. To feel the digastric muscle on the, and here, you’re going to ask your patient to open their mask, go ahead and open your mouth and then close it.

And you can feel the underbelly of the digastric muscle. It’s about the width of a pencil. So again, it comes from here and then. Comes up to the height and then it attaches here. So what you’re going to do is once you found the muscle,

you’re just going to grab it with two fingers and you’re going to just use a half an inch red Saron needle and get right underneath like that. And you can usually get two needles and just like that. And then they’re gonna come along on the other side

and you’re going to be right here. No, you get it right underneath the muscle like that. One more

get right underneath like that. And then you’re going to do the same thing on the other side. See how there’s the one muscle is right over here. And then the other one is here. So you would just crisscross the.

Okay.

Oops, sorry. So that is

that is a demonstration of how you would do some submuscular needling under the chin to help tighten the chin area. So let’s see tools. There are tools that you need that are different than you might use. Regularly. Good needles are really important. I love sirens. My experience has always been that they have a very smooth insertion and there are specialized needles for the face.

Really very tiny. Also when you’re doing any facial cupping using glass cups and specially designed guash shot tools. I love Jade very much a part of our tradition and during the lockdown period of the pandemic, I designed a cutting in wash up. And that can be found@acculiftskincare.com. Also, you need tweezers.

I liked the wide grip tweezers. Those are used to put intradermal needles and then arnica gel is my favorite to help. Bruising also, there are things that you can either use in your treatment room, or you can sell to your patients for at-home use like Derma rollers the, these items right here off to the right as a hydro roller in a Hydra needle.

And I don’t want to get into it. Now there’s information about these products. They’re great for infusing CRMs. You can even put Traumeel and different types of homeopathics in them to infuse it into the scan, but it really helps to revitalize and refresh the scan. And you can use these for some of the neuro.

Conditions as well. Microneedling is very popular right now in our profession. In most states, it is within our scope of practice and it works on the skin level to take care of scars. Discolorations fine lines, even on the body for stretch marks. And that is an entire class and topic onto itself.

But there’s just a wealth of information and it’s a great add on, and it doesn’t take a lot of time in your treatment space. So this is a and tool that you’re looking at and two batteries, the cartridges, which are disposable. That’s the new. Tip. And then this particular, the AccuLift micro pen comes with a court, so you can plug it in if you choose the intradermal needle.

Require a little bit of scale to learn how to use. And these are put around this is a picture of some encroached fee and this was a picture I saw on social media of someone trying to teach themselves how to do it. And really again, on necessary way too much. Okay, so just to wrap it up they shall acupuncture can bring a reliable stream of income into your practice.

It’s cash because we’re not working with insurance companies. Insurance does not pay for cosmetic procedures. And people tend to spend money on cosmetic things before they’ll spend money on their aches and pains. And it is a way for you to widen your scope of practice gives you a unique skill set. You can learn facial motor points, scalp acupuncture, specifically designed to help with neuromuscular facial conditions.

And as I mentioned before, you can really capture that niche market and set yourself apart because not all practitioners are going to do cosmetic acupuncture. For your patients, cosmetic acupuncture. Is a way for them to revitalize their appearance with Al injectables or fillers or toxins, they get a full body treatment.

So it helps their digestion. Their immune system helps to reduce inflammation and it’s all done. Naturally. We don’t put anything into the body. We don’t take anything out of the body. It can help with double chins. If they’ve had a facelift, it can help their facelift to last longer. And it stimulates college in naturally.

This was a patient of mine who had eyelid ptosis. And as you can see her one lid is lower than the other. And through treatment, both of her lids became more even, and she was getting married. She was very self-conscious. She didn’t want. To have this drooping eyelid, because especially as she got tired, it would get much worse.

And she was told she’d have to have surgery, but she didn’t need to have surgery. I mentioned things like skin conditions here is someone who had cupping and wash Shaw on one side of their face, not on the other. And you can see just right there on the table, how all that heat dissipated. So things like rosacea molars, melasma acne can all be helped with facial conditions.

Doing a full body treatment is really important because you don’t want to just treat the superficial signs of aging you want to get underneath. And treat the zone and the Fu the substances to help the body to get back out of disharmony and into harmony. Dealing with the emotional underpinnings of why we get some of those facial expression lines.

I have an entire class called the anatomy of expression, which gets into that and looking at something like fear. Which muscles are used. And what points might you use to help to relax the face? Because when the face relax, the body relaxes, there is a feedback system between the face and the body. I mentioned micro-needling.

This was me doing some needle Lang on someone who had sun damage on their chest, a microneedle. Again, it’s very quick. And there are a lot of benefits and the results are very, long-term and they only have to come once a month between treatments. Here is my 2022 practice schedule. All of my classes are.

And then you can come for an optional hands-on practice session if you choose. And if you sign up for my advanced certificate program, the hands-on classes are included. That is all I have for you today. And again, I want to thank the American acupuncture council. For this opportunity to present and give you an overview of bringing facial acupuncture into your practice.

Preventing and Treating Alzheimer’s Disease Naturally

to speak to everybody today and to give them information related to my latest book, Natural Eye, Natural Brain Support – Your Guide to Preventing and Treating Alzheimer’s and Dementia and Other Related Diseases.

Click here to download the transcript.

Hello there. Good afternoon. My name is Michael Edson. I am a licensed acupuncturist practicing over 20 years in presence of natural eyecare. And you see the website, naturaleyecare.com. I like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to speak to everybody today and to give them information related to my latest book, Natural Eye, Natural Brain Support – Your Guide to Preventing and Treating Alzheimer’s and Dementia and Other Related Diseases.

I am a filling in for Virginia Duran today. And I’m excited to speak with you. The book. Is was the reason I wrote the book for a number of reasons. One, because I have had relatives with Alzheimer’s who are passed away from Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. And one of the main book from natural eye care that Dr.

Grossman and I co-wrote he’s my partner is natural. I K you got to healthy vision in here. That book is an 800 page book and goes into how to treat eye disease naturally. And while doing a lot of the research for the book, what was really amazing to me was that the nutrients that actually support the retina and the rest of the eyes and the optic nerve when I was doing, looking at the research I kept on coming with.

Additional research related to the fact that they, these nutrients, of course, the blood brain barrier. And we’ll talk more about the blood brain barrier shortly, but it went to the brain and the brain uses these nutrients to keep the brain healthy. And the critical for preventing Alzheimer’s preventing dementia reducing brain fog and just keeping a healthy cognitive.

So I started collecting all that research and gathering it. I’m sorry. I have to find my pen here. Okay. And gathering it and accumulated over 3,200 peer reviewed research references related to how to keep the brain healthy and in the book. And we’ll go into more detail. I cover over four 50 nutrient.

And those nutrients, it gets complicated because a lot of nutrients have many different functions within the brain. So there’s a chart with over 19 19 categories of what different ways that these nutrients can help the brain. And I have an X mark in each category for each nutrient, and we’re going to go into many essential nutrients during this conversation.

Okay. I think we can start with. All right. So that is the name of the book. You’ll see. That is fruit and vegetables during critical to keeping healthy. Okay.

All right. The brain is really an amazing organ. It’s the most physiological active part of the body. As you can see it only 2% of the body rate represents 25% of the nutrients. With a hundred billion brain cells and sinaps seven to 10 synopsis per second. And we’ll talk about what a synopses in tobacco with seven to 10,000 cells a second.

We’re talking about trillions of interactions per second, and it’s really, if you think about that, how is this even possible? So there’s a lot of chemical activities that go on between neurotransmitters and hormones and. Interactions between the brain cells. But the only way that I can think of, and this is theoretical is that it’s some form of light.

Cause that’s the only thing that could travel that quickly, that can do so many transactions. And so that leads me to we’ll talk about chill all the time. So maybe that is what also what she is, and that travels that quickly in the body to help promote these types of choices or transactions that go on in.

Which is quite remarkable. And I talked about the eyes and the relationship to the eyes and the brain, the optic nerve is actually brain tissue. So it makes sense that what affects the optic nerve affects the brain. What affects the brain affects the optic nerve. The retina was created in the womb and the womb from from brain cell from brain cells.

So this correlation between. Healthy efficient and healthy brain function is very strong. As a matter of fact, from an eye exam that can often seen, they can also see early signs of Alzheimer’s, which is the beta amyloid buildup in the retina before it’s ever diagnosed as Alzheimer’s not withstanding multiple sclerosis, hypertension, diabetes, and many other conditions.

Appear on the retina often before, before it becomes obvious that it’s a health condition

it’s Alzheimer’s disease epidemic. And particularly related to the fact that people live in LA. And it’s for the most part nature related disease. In my opinion, there is a genetic aspect that we’ll talk about for sure that usually appears more people who are maybe 40, 60 years old. But the reason that these types of diseases are happening as they get older is the underlying causes of what can cause or contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.

Now, withstanding poor circulation. Inflammatory conditions, auto immune conditions, poor digestion. We don’t produce it many times in our system to break down the food. People become more sedentary. Maybe the emotional balance is not, they’re not, don’t feel as engaged in society. All these things play a part in both vision and brain health.

As you see that of 6 million people today. And it’s growing dramatically every year. It’s really an epidemic. Okay.

It’s a multi, multi neuro neurodegenerative disease, which means that there’s many parts that take place that cause dementia and Alzheimer’s and other types of improv, consents, and other types of brain illnesses. And it really needs to be looked at that. Because you can’t, it’s not a single issue problem, even though beta amyloid builds up in the brain and you also have something called tap protein in February and fibers that cause brain damage.

Why is that happening? And in order to really deal with Alzheimer’s and dementia and prevention, you have to look at the underlying visas, why that’s happening. And I mentioned a few here. Let me mention a few before, which is chronic inflammation. Blood-brain barrier, compromised blood brain barrier is what prevents unwanted materials from reaching the brain.

And that would include pathogens and metals and other types of materials that you don’t want to get to the brain. And when that gets compromised, then materials are getting to the brain that are causing brain damage as well. I mentioned nor epinephrin here, cause it’s one of those.

Hormones, essential hormones that acts as a neurotransmitter, the brain neuro-transmitters what passes information from brain cell to brain cell. And so neuro-transmitters are really critical. We’re going to go into more of that and it did mention that bit amyloid, neurofibrillary, tangles. HyperCat protein.

I was, what’s seen in the brain through MRIs when they see Alzheimer’s disease cow protein in a normal balance helps keep the micro structures of the cells to have that gets effected than the self structure start. The weekend. Beta amyloid in normal amounts is very important for motor transmission and brain function.

But when it builds. It starts damaging brain cells, also affecting mitochondrial function. And I know all of, what mitochondria is, it’s the energy cell of the body. It’s the battery of ourselves that keep the battery at the end of the cells functioning and energized. So my mitochondrial function, I was supposed to be looked at by.

And in the book I go into the nutrients that support the mitochondria support, the blood brain barrier, reduce inflammation also help reduce beta amyloid plaque and hyper phosphorylated tau protein and neural or tangles. These can be done through diet and exercise. The 40, the 3,200 plus studies in the book that are all in the, and the neuro neurological Magazines.

And then the research is in there. So it’s not, it’s medically proven, but it’s not really followed by the medical community.

Let’s start with diet and lifestyle. Cause obviously these are really critical. Eating a healthy diet is essential. What is a healthy diet? What like what the best diets having. Is to have lots of fruits and vegetables. Green leafy vegetables are really great. It’s very low in refined carbohydrates.

Obviously you’re avoiding fried foods and unhealthy oils, and we’re going to go into the fried foods and what not the foods to avoid. So you want to keep a low carbohydrate diet particularly all the white foods. What do you have? White rice, white pasta, white bread all the refined carbohydrates.

You want to keep a low sugar diet? Stevia is a good alternative if you want to sweeten something up. So there are different diets. The Mediterranean diet is good. The south street diet is good, but again, the common thing is a low refined, very low refined carbohydrates sugars. And. Some people like meat, I say eating meat, it should be as best as possible grass fed organic needs.

And and then foods to avoid avoid diabetes is, is an epidemic in society. And I think the numbers are up to 70% of people that have diabetes or have. So high sugar is one of the really severe detriments to, to the brain. What happens when we have excess sugar in the diet, the brain actually produces along with the pancreas its own insulin.

That’s how important insulin is to energy production within the brain. So when this excess sugar, that means the brain has to produce more insulin to break down the show. Insulin also keeps beta amyloid in check. So if you’re not having the insulin available to keep the in check it’s one of the reasons beta amyloid can increase and stop causing brain damage.

Insulin is also critical for other functions of the brain related to cognitive function. So avoid all sugary drinks, even juices to limit a very high in sugar aspartame and artificial sweeteners. They’re toxic to the brain. They produce as pertain produces a Spotify acid and methanol, which is toxic to brain cells.

And And it causes also hyperactivity in the brain. So you want to avoid those at all costs. Again, Stevie is a good alternative avoid generally foods that are in aluminum cans. Okay. So cause aluminum producers aldehydes and aldehydes prevent the breakdown or. Cause increases in production of protein in the brain.

And that is that would, could include amyloid plaque and tau protein and diminishes the body. The protein analysis is the body’s the brain’s ability to break down protein. It restricts the body’s ability to do that. Keep meat down to a minimum. The studies have been clear that diets, high meat.

The likelihood of the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. So meats are not withstanding, but with the hormones and the pesticides that are added and void fry foods. So five foods cause damage to the brain toxic to the brain and they also they. They increase ROS reactive oxygen species, which is a very aggressive form of free radicals that put down healthy cells.

So we all know that free radicals have a, have an extra electron at the end, and they will Quip that electron from a healthy cell causing it to be unhealthy and die. And that’s why the antioxidant is just because the antioxidants provide the extra electron to neutralize the free radicals. And we’re going to go into antioxidants and essential nutrients such as gludethyon which is a master antioxidant.

This is one of the few along with superoxide dismutase that can neutralize the full spectrum of free radicals in the body. And it’s the, actually the antioxidant. And the greatest quantity in the brain and the studies have shown that people with Alzheimer’s are significantly deficient include a thigh on the brain.

So you wonder why the doctors are telling people to minimally supplement with glutathione, but that’s only one of the many ones that are deficient, while I’m on the topic. The other ones that are deficient B complex is between. Vitamin T3. Some of the minerals such as magnesium, selenium sink these are all critical and when deficient, they can cause a brain damage because the free, radical, the cause of the free radical activity.

But also what’s really fascinating is that deficiency in somebody in these nutrients can actually mimic Alzheimer’s dementia. So in fact, for people that are that have a diminishment of. They may look like the habit and they may be being treated for it by the doctors for Alzheimer’s.

But yet, if the efficiency is just because of the nutrient deficiency, that could be the underlying cause. And not that they actually have dementia Alzheimer’s exercise cuts across all. I mentioned 19 categories. I mentioned that I have in the book, it cuts across all 19 categories. By the way curcumin does as well.

Ashwagandha’s really good. They basically a thigh on these do cut of course, most, if not all the categories of what they help to help with the brain stress. We live in a society, highest stress. We know it. And I was looking at a study this morning that said 3.2% of people in the United States are suffering with PTSD.

And that could be the trauma that can be due to the chronic stress associated work relationships, money, and stress can actually reduce the size of parts of the brain, including the Mignola, which among many other things, processes our emotional memory. Stress is important to keep that under control meditation, yoga, Qigong.

These are all taking regular walks in the words. These are all really important breathing. Remember to breathe. When we get stressed out, when we get upset, we stopped breathing. Stop, take some nice long breasts, calm down, get everything going again. Emotional balance. We know that the five elements of Chinese medicine, wood fire, earth, metal, and water.

That keeping emotions in balance are really important. Being angry and stressful cake is excess cortisol production in the brain and cortisol and causes excess hyper excitability. And that can actually be as a point of cortisone is for neurotransmission can cause destruction in brain cells as well when it’s, when there’s too much in the brain.

The colon archaic system is essential for brain functioning. And for neurotransmission is the communication between cell, the cell the brain cells a set of colon. I mentioned because that’s one of the critical, among many actually born into critical neuro-transmitters in the. Coleen is one of the underlying precursors, the acetylcholine.

And what’s interesting about set of Coleen is that’s one of the main treatments that the drugs try and address is the imbalance of a set of calling through a set of colon. Esterase so set of colon esterase and shed a calling, keep each other in balance. So what the does. Is it helps reduce acetylcholine, acetylcholine esterase to try and keep the set of calling up.

But the drugs don’t work. My, my relatives got the drugs. They just continually get worse because they’re not looking at the wider picture of what the underlying causes of the imbalances are and addressing the underlying causes which can be again, stomach them inflammation chronic stress.

Metal exposure to environmental exposures. The inability to interference with neurogenesis is the body’s ability to produce new brain cells. And we can do that up until the 1990s. I didn’t think that they thought that the brain cells that we were born with were the ones that we would die with.

The brain produces to produce new brain cells all through life until we die. And then a lot of nutrients, including ashwagandha and many others actually promote neurogenesis, new brain cells epigenetic. Epigenetics underlying is the thought that again, they thought that genetics, the way we were born, not only was the way we looked, but we were controlled the diseases we got later on, but, and they thanked the fact that epigenetics is environmentally also causes cells to turn on.

So that how well we were nurtured us children and fed and how well we take care of ourselves through our lives, actually prevent, can prevent not all time, but many of the times, certain cell genes that we don’t want turned on or turned on. mentioned some of the food sources for Coleen. The book talks about food source for different antioxidants as well.

I mentioned the culinary system is related to Alzheimer’s practices, hunting. And many other psychiatric disorders as well.

We did talk about mitochondria as being critical, to relate to all these diseases I missed. I looked this year and when beta amyloid builds up as associated with Alzheimer’s, it actually can create this function within mitochondria and quiz, a cycle effect. So the more mitochondrial dysfunction, the less energy is available for the cells to function properly in a more self-study.

As well as oxidative stress, we talked about the free radicals that need to be neutralized with with antioxidants essential antioxidants. I mentioned some of the nutrients in here that support mitochondria alpha-lipoic acid cocuten some of the B vitamins resveratrol, and this is all in the book, Shandra.

Magnesium by the way is also very important for managing and breaking down a beta amyloid plaque. So create division beta amyloid plaque. That’s another reason why you can get an increase in bid on what plaque as well. So I’m really talking about a whole body Prototron health story. That’s a whole body approach act function for doing that for 3000 years.

And in order to deal with Alzheimer’s and prevention, you have to take a step back, who is this person related to this disease and what are the underlying causes of it that may be related to that. And then dealing with that, because the drugs I mentioned Donepezil and another one Mateen which has to do with reducing GABA.

So that That it helps balance out the corner metric system and GABA can be increased through foods as well. So again, whole body approach, the body’s meant to be meant to heal is trying to heal. What can we do to help that along?

I mentioned the blood brain barrier critical it’s mentioned things here that, that caused a breakdown in the blood brain barrier. Astrocytes. Cells in the body that are cells in the brain in relative high amounts, the part of the glial system and the critical also for keeping the blood brain barrier healthier.

I mentioned aspartame and artificial sweetness. They also break down astrocytes it also prevents the excess glucose from reaching the. Some, I mentioned the vitamin, a vitamin C that help keep the blood-brain barrier already healthy. A B6 B12 baseline is in robot, obviously in resveratrol.

We already talked about this and we talk about a number of the nutrients. There’s quite a few of them that can help keep everything in balance. We talk about yin and yang. And part of it is really keeping everything in balance in the body. And a way to do that is through food diet, exercise, Chinese medicine, even I bet a medicine yolk, which Yukon gut-brain connection, very powerful. The gut represents 70% of our immune system. There’s a very strong connection in your gut, in the brain to the gut and actually produces on neurotransmitters and hormones. And communicates with the brain all the time through the Vegas nerve. It’s a big problem within society that there are gut imbalances that can lead to candidiasis and leaky gut syndrome.

And these can be caused tremendous inflammation can also cause a breakdown in the blood brain barrier and neurogenesis the diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s so walking causes. My microbiome microbiota break down, excess sugar, poor diet, excess dressed emotional balances medications obviously excess use of antibiotics.

So we really need to focus on that. If there’s a whole community of doctors right now called functional medicine doctors, that really start with the gut as being the basis of where disease starts from gut imbalances. Okay.

Central nutrients are making these already. That tend to be deficient. I also add here cookie 10, taurine, DHA. These all are critical for brain functioning for Alzheimer’s dementia and other, and Parkinson’s as well.

Chinese medicine practitioners out there pretty much. I understand that’s what the organization is. So the kidney Meridian overrules the the, our hormone production and endocrine system. So the home, we have a lot of hormones that reach the brain that are in the brain and act as essential.

Neuro-transmitters among. Function. So that’s willing to look at the hot Meridian. Obviously we know it has to do with spirit and Chen and all circulation, but also long-term memory. The spleen Meridian has to do with short-term memory, as well as analysis and concentration, the dual Meridian overalls, all neurological activity.

So we’re obviously looking at older meridians, but these are the four key ones. I just mentioned a couple of PA patent formulas, but there are many more out there. The Buena Juan brain tonic, or the GN now on oh, good ones to look at. But when you do your intake, we’ll figure out where you want to go with with which herbal formulas might be most helpful for your patients.

It’s different complimentary medicines. I didn’t talk much about essential oils, but they play a big role. In terms of helping support concentration reducing common symptoms of dementia and Alzheimer’s is poor sleep, anxiety, poor social skills pound community paranoia poor concentration, poor ability to make decisions, analytical functioning.

So essential. Either applied directly or in an ad, Mr. Fire can do a long way and really balancing out those imbalances associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

So stem cell research is still in progress. We don’t, I think it’s got a ways to go. If this account, my contact information, you can order the book from natural eye care.com, even from Amazon. If you want to reach me, have any questions, I’m here to answer those. You have my email address as well as my phone number.

And I thank everybody for the patients to listen to my rapid discussion today. But there’s a lot of material to cover. I want to give you a sense that we can do a lot to help people and the doctors are not doing it

and also join us next week. Bring that back up again for on Friday. Yair Maimon will be here giving a presentation as well. Thank you so much.

Acupuncture in the Treatment of Cognitive Impairment Outstanding Evidence in Cancer Patients

So today we’ll talk about a very interesting topic, which is the TCM ability to treat Cognition in Cancer.

Click here to download the transcript. Click here to download the slides.

Hello, everybody. Good to see you. I don’t see you, I always feel that I talked to people and first of all, I would like to thank the American Acupuncture Council to putting up this show and providing this information. So today we’ll talk about a very interesting topic, which is the TCM ability to treat Cognition in Cancer.

So let’s start with the slideshow and it’s quite an eutopic and in the same time, it’s all topic. I would like to follow more the research, but also to speak about the TCM diagnosis of cognition and the specialty of cognition of treating cancer patient because cancer related cognitive impairment is.

Quite as specific topic, which is relate most to the cancer and very much of the different treatments starting from chemotherapy. Everyone now knows the chemo brain which people sometimes suffer for years or definitely months, the difficulty in concentrating differently in doing the cognitive things that they were able to do before they would feel.

Head is foggy. No, he’s like foggy and they find it really difficult to do the tasks that they were able to do before, even just read newspaper or to do mathematics, et cetera. So it’s a, quite the debilitating aspects of cancer and cancer care and cancer related cognitive impairment is huge topic in breast cancer.

Three out of four survivors was suffering for some degree. Of cognitive impairment. So we’re talking about quite a large numbers of cancer patients. So especially chemotherapy is the one that is effecting the cognition. And I would like to start with a recent research. Or a few research that has been coming up on that topic.

And I must say from an Chinese medicine point of view, cognition is very specific. It relates added to deficiencies, and we’ll talk about spleen and kidney deficiency, spleen more for the short term and kidney more for the longterm, but there is other, also other deficiencies like blood or cheat and chemotherapy can create this deficient.

There’s also access and access will usually relates to dampness and phlegm, but a lot of time to toxins. And that means that many of the drugs that are using captains are more related to the toxins part and they’re causing this kind of problems in cognition. So there are some more type of access. And the last things is more to consider the heart, the Shen and.

And I’ll come to this topic of the diagnosis and treatment. When we look at the research. So this is a research that looked at the effect of acupuncture in treating cognitive impairment in cancer patients. And what is interesting about this research? They actually monitored the effect of the research through some questionnaires about also BDNF, the Saron brain derived.

No Tropic factor. And so they evaluated both the cognition as you do, like in different tests, but they also look at biomarkers in the ceremony, this patient to see if there is a difference. So this study and gain, there were like 39 and 36 people in the real group and the treatment. And they look evaluated the difference between the two groups.

This is the point the use. And here we are coming back to the diagnosis. Some studies, especially research, we’ll go deeper into the Chinese medicine diagnosis and some research is more like symptomatic. I’ve I have a lot of interest in cancer care both in treating cancer, patient producing research.

Really teaching worldwide acupuncture and especially oncology acupuncture help in then I’ll talk a little bit more about teaching. So if you look at this research, what they, if you look at it poisoned, they choose. So they choose do 20. So this is more related to the. The city St. John, this is four points around two 20, so also relates to the Shen, relates to the mind, do 24 chanting.

This one, especially relate to the Shen, but also other points to strengthen the cheeky, like stomach that is six, the strengths and the kidney three, kidney four and gallbladder 39. Interesting point because it works on their domain, but more on them. Because it’s the viewpoint for marrow. So you sees a kind of interestingly designed combination that treats all the different facets and aspects of.

Cognitive impairment in patients. We are more focusing on the cancer patient that obviously some of these ideas are relevant to other people who have cognitive impairment. So in this research, they did the whole battery of questions, and this is like the different questions to. The cognition of the patients and they check the BDNF in the serum of this patients perceive the difference between the real droop grid group and the control group of this cancer patient BDNF by itself is very interesting factor because it’s it is secreted by the narrows and it is a significant component in the synaptic pluses.

So it’s secreted, eh, primarily in the brain, but also in other areas. And it’s been very, a recognized biomarker to show cognition and the higher the numbers. The more you can find in this. The better the condition is, and the whole idea of checking biomarkers, I’ll discuss also, it’s very interesting to monitor the effect of acupuncture.

And this is just to do as BDNF. It’s been evaluated in the huge range. Disease from depression, outsider, Parkinson, and think tone disease. And again, as they say, the higher, the BDNF level, it shows the better cognitive function, even in also bipolar disorders and others. So there’s a lot of reference to the relationship of the BDNF levels in the serum.

And. So in this study, they had this two groups, the control and the real group, and this were the results. Very interesting and promising cause they look both on the questionnaires and they show that they could commit cognitive functions were ameliorated in the acupuncture. They also showed that the serum BDNF level was elevated.

And if you compare it before and after treatment, and there was a very strong correlation between both. So people who scored more on the test also had a higher BDNF level. So you can see, again, the relationship between somebody is scoring well on tests and the BDNF. And this was compared to the control group.

The 10, no. Before treatment and after if you compare it to the acupuncture group. So the conclusion was that acupuncture is effective therapy in the treatment of cancer related cognitive impairment. And this was in breast cancer patient. And the mechanism may be related to this release of BDNF for activating neurons in the brain.

I was quite surprised to see more and more studies related. Yes, acupuncture studies related to biomarkers. And here’s specifically when we talk about cognition related to BDNF, this is like a hard core, very promising evidence. It’s not subjective, it’s not objective biomarker that you can also monitor it later on after even few months or a year.

Here is another study that was done with a bigger, eh, number of participants, 160 participants. It wasn’t just not just focused on cognition, but also on sleep problems. And it was a comparison between the insomnia comparison between as psychological intervention. And acupuncture and randomized trials.

So very good trial and again, published in cancer. And again, there was acupuncture was significantly increasing the BDNF level and had a positive effect on cognition. Recently, there’s going a big trial. Then you can see the clinical trial. Golf a registry on the effect of acupuncture and cancer related cognitive difficulties.

And so I believe in few years we will see a larger tries and focusing on different aspects, both biomarkers and other aspects to show the effect. And it’s a very promising effect of acupuncture on this very serious condition. And it goes far more than effecting cancer patient. It also talks to. People who have other disease, like Alzheimer’s et cetera, that have a commissioning permit and that is study.

And I’m just going through the studies, not just to talk about this topic, but to show also where research is going. And and I think this is what will happen in the next few years. We’ll see more and more stuff. On specific topics and at the studies will be very rounded with checking different aspects, including different biomarkers.

They chose the efficacy of acupuncture and also the sustainable efficacy from some studies, biomarkers I’ve been following followed for few months, half year and sometimes longer. And there’s a difference between groups not in cognitive and other studies in. This is a very small study to real pilot study of gynecological cancer survivors that demonstrated a lower neurocognitive performance and lower structure.

Also a connective compared to healthy controls. The reason I’m showing this study is just really to give the idea of where the breakthrough new acupuncture research is going. So this was a pilot study, but they look at more aspects, both on biomarkers. They looked at what people like different questionnaires, so like a subjective subjective objective measurement, but also even the structure in the brain.

So in this respect, it’s a kind of very innovative study because they also look at the structure itself. If acupuncture can affect this. The led the occupant trees use different points, as you can see, all of them are in the head. In my opinion as an acupuncturist, we are missing the diagnose, the part, we don’t look anymore in the efficiency’s access.

We don’t look at the, do my, we don’t look at the way acupuncture can affect the marrow, the brain. We’re more looking at the points that potentially can increase cognition or brain function, but still the points are selected that are known. So again, we have cecinct and

like the four points around do 20 we have in tongue and young points on the head. We have a gallbladder eight, so we have gallbladder points too, that can have an effect and can increase. How would they like what to just go bloody nine personally? But gallbladder 15 gallbladder, 20 blood AGV, 20 stomach eight.

So they let the acupuncturist choose a point. According to their preferences, to the patient. As a it’s a pilot study, that’s very few people in each group. They did it twice a week for 30 days. And they followed that they did from four to six kind of cycles of treatments and then seconds per patient, 10 sessions per patients.

So as I said, very small group, eventually three in each group. So it’s a pilot of pilot, but the results are interesting because they also look at three different li. Parts of checking the difference in the patients between the treated one and the control group. So they look at the, again, neurocognitive tests and they look at the multimodal MRIs.

So it was more in MRI checking there, especially changes in the structure of the brain and they look here at the different BioMarin then. And they, the NAA, which is a game then kind of neural marker that have a correlation to a neuron density neuron function. And it’s a lot of the markers that can be checked also for cognition.

And when they looked alone in this very pilot study, they said that there is a different in the intimate, micro, structural, white matter in the brain. It was lower than in the healthy control group. When they look at the NAA, the, again, it’s specifically the left hyper Calamus. We won’t go into areas in the brain.

They compare and see that there is a again, results in difference between. Healthy controls. He was the controls were healthy to the cancer patients. This is what they’re looking at, the micro structure and really the reason I brought this very pilot studies to show that they’re trying to compare.

Acupuncture and the effect of acupuncture in disrespect on cancer patients compared to the healthy patient, also assessing cognitive function and looking at structural of the white matter in the brain and to look at different kinds of biomarkers and property. It was the NAA before the BDNF. So this is a very interesting way to assess acupuncture and I believe we will see more and more.

Future studies that have different aspects of checking the efficacy of acupuncture and. And I think this will be a great breakthrough, especially for the skeptics, because if you affect biomarkers or if you affect structure, it tends to an impact which is much greater than any subjective effect.

And especially in areas where Western medicine is very little to offer. For cognitive factors, There’s merely nothing that Western medicine can offer. So it’s, I’ve seen really by now hundreds of constipation, and I know the effect and sometime the effect is almost immediate. People will come up after our acupuncture treatment, constipation was saying, oh my head is not fogging anymore.

I can concentrate. I can read. I came from the treatment and I started reading books, which I’ve read for the last few months. So it’s also very fulfilling for us as an acupuncturist. And I think research especially this type of kind of innovative research will be very Supportive and will strengthen the effect of sending people for acupuncture, especially cancer patients.

As I say before, I’ve been heavily involved over the last years in both treating cancer patients, doing a lot of research publishing more in herbal medicine but also teaching oncology acupuncture Luckily through the zoom I can sell around the world. It was also before, but I have to travel more.

Now we have really people from four continent graduating from this course and having a lot of huge international companies. More than 500 people who can just share their experience. And as we know for cancer, there’s no borders. And also for acupuncture and teaching, there is no bones. If you’ll be interested in the program like this, you’re welcome to check it out.

And and I hope any way that you will find this information in ideas, very useful, as I say, because they’re go beyond just treating constipation, but any other patient.

I would like to thank you very much for watching this show. I would like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for putting up this show. Next week there is a Sam Collins, so we are welcomed to watch it, and I wish you all the best of health and healing. Thank you very much

Astrology as a Branch of Chinese Medicine

I don’t know if you knew this as a practitioner, that astrology is a branch of Chinese medicine. Oftentimes we think about Chinese medicine as just being acupuncture…

Click here to download the transcript. Click here to learn your Chinese Zodiac!

Hello and welcome. My name is Tsao-Lin Moy. I am a licensed acupuncturist and herbalist with a brick and mortar office in Union Square in New York city. I would like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for putting these Facebook lives on for your education and for your. Today we will be talking about astrology as a form of Chinese medicine and I hope you’re going to find it very interesting.

I find it very interesting and it’s a great way to talk about Chinese medicine that people also get very interested in. And okay. So we’re going to go to the first spot. I don’t know if you knew this as a practitioner, that astrology is a branch of Chinese medicine. Oftentimes we think about Chinese medicine as just being acupuncture, herbs TuiNa or bodywork.

Food lifestyles, some cheat gong, meditation but also something like functions way is also the art and science of placement. And we look at cosmology. And so here we have a quote, heaven is covered with constellations earth, with waterways and man with channels. And this comes from the yellow emperors classic, the Suez nudging.

And we know that was somewhere 300. BC or older. And so please if you are interested in this, definitely make comments, ask some questions. Okay. And next, okay. So let’s do a movement of cheap. So for over 3000 years, the Chinese Zodiac calendar has been used to predict the future to influence businesses, marriages, wage wars.

Predict how good the crops were the health and the prosperity and the ancient times, right? Even older than probably 3000 years. And still today, it is a very popular looking at astrology, looking at the celestial movements. And this is because they offer insight. And another view of these forces from heaven, from.

Outside of the earth outside of us. And that actually influence us as we’re going through life. And w as a full moon can actually change the levels of the seas and also bring out intense emotions and transformation. We even have a full moon. There’s certain flowers that bloom only in the full moon.

So you also may know when this is going on, you might not feel like yourself. Sometimes I call this like werewolf people feel that way aggressive and Anxious. And we can forget also mercury retrograde, which is something that we’re actually in right now where it creates a lot of chaos with communication.

So if you’ve been finding, I don’t know, your Instagram got hacked like myself or a messages aren’t getting through, or all kinds of interruptions of this is in part to mercury in retrograde, at least that makes you feel better that, it’s going to pass. So it is the stars above us govern our conditions, this quote from Shakespeare from king Lear and we’re looking at the 16th century.

So even then in the west, there was this association of what is going on in the stars that is actually affecting us.

And this is actually a small video that has a chose moving. It might not be moving here. But it’s actually, as the earth is turning, we’re looking also outside in the cosmos Things are shifting all the time. And we love to look to the stars for all different kinds of answers. And, we’ve got the Hubble, we’ve got all of these huge telescopes looking for life on other planets.

And of course we are continuously moving through space as a galaxy.

There we go. Awesome. This is where we’re looking at a strong enemy versus astrology. So the definition of astronomy is the scientific learning of planets and other celestial objects to study their origins, interrelationships and future movements. Who knows why we’re doing, but why we want to know all this information, if it’s not going to affect us.

Astrology is also the astrology. Different is considered a pseudoscience that’s in the west, and that uses the scientific movement of the planets and stars to divine, meaning and significance in people’s lives. And the question that I have is does this mean that natural science. Has little meaning or significance in our life?

I don’t think so. I think we, we already know that we have issues with climate change. We’re concerned about solar flares what that is going to do for us and how that is going to affect us. We can say that it’s, I don’t think it’s superstition. I think that’s actually really called scientific.

And it affects us.

So a little bit about the Chinese. Okay. Great. So this is an intro. You might know some of this the Chinese Zodiac is part of Chinese medicine is composed of 12 animals, Zodiacs that are paired with one of five elements. That’s the earth metal water, fire, and wood. And these, we know in Chinese medicine as the five elements, as we’re looking at in terms of diagnostics, The 12 Zodiac animals, the rat, the ox, the tiger, which we’re in, we’re going into the tiger rabbit.

In some other Asian cultures might be considered a cat, the dragon, the snake, the horse, the sheep slash goat monkey, rooster, dog, and pig. So the Chinese Zodiac is based on a lunar calendar. Each lunar year, we’ll also have an elemental cycle that rotates. So the 12 year cycle actually follows Jupiter’s orbit around the sun, which takes about 11.8 years.

And this is why we’re always moving when the new year is. And this difference differs from the Western astrology, which follows a approximately four weeks. 4.2 week cycle. And most people, when they think of astrology or Zodiacs, they’re really thinking about, things like a Libra or a Scorpio or a Capricorn.

So there are also fixed elements in the five elements that are associated with the Zodiac sign and those represent in terms of meaning young character. And as we know in Chinese medicine or it’s really, or. Looking at the balance of union young, we always look for that dynamic force and how that plays out in terms of character and personality traits.

In addition, each year is going to have an element, one of the five elements that changes, therefore the year has a Zodiac sign and an elemental site. And there are 12 five cycles of 12, which means you go through 60 years before you returned back to the original Zodiac and elemental. Now Zodiac signs are an indication of the planetary energies you were born under, but not only born under, but also we’re influencing your development in the womb, right?

Because you’re floating in water. And this is considered that prenatal G not just what you were getting from your parents, but also as you were developing, there were actually a cosmic forces at play.

Okay. So this year is the lunar year also known as coming up as the spring fence festival in Chinese medicine. Over 2 billion people actually celebrate Chinese new year or this spring festival. And that’s 25% of the world population. Now the new year is going to be starting on February 1st. And for those that are born after February 1st, it will be the year of the tiger and the element is going to be.

So here are the two parts make up the Zodiac need to be, they need to find harmony and balance and understanding the nature that these forces help will help you navigate. For a prosperous new year. There will be, the year of this year is the year of the water tiger. So the water element will have a powerful influence on all of the Zodiacs and also then the year of the tiger characteristics.

Okay. Health and wellness and abundance and the tiger year. So here, we’re going to look at first the water element because of that is going to be in, in my opinion. And what I’m sensing also is that the water is going to have a huge impact more so than previous years. It is the element of. And the water properties allow it to be solid liquid and gas, meaning that it can transform, adapt and move.

It is a powerful force that can also be very destructive. As we’ve seen with floods and tidal waves. But it is also necessary for life. 71% of the earth surface is covered by water and the human body is over 60% water. So water is actually part of our physical and biological makeup. And water also, as it’s representing the yin, the dark, the cool and the feminine, the stillness water element in Chinese medicine is also related to the bladder and kidney.

In Oregon’s and meridians, I’m going to put like more Meridian, Oregon for the new year. The theme be like water, go with the flow. Don’t fight against the current because they can drain your energy and life force. Excuse me. And in this case, we’re talking about the GI and referring to the kidney essence.

And in Chinese medicine, draining that kidney essence, the DJing is really akin to the adrenals and those that those actually sit on top of the kidneys. So really we got to look at not burning ourselves out.

So the next is the next part of the Zodiac is the tiger Zodiac. And that is young and natures. So here we’ve got yang. The character is very courageous, very bold action-oriented they tigers are independent thinkers and can be very impatient waiting to leap in and to take control of a situation.

They have a straightforward nature and are able to really focus on a goal, very tenaciously once they sink their teeth in and claws, there’s really no turning back. And this will be important to really balance that impetuous nature. And the young energy of the tiger when making big decisions about life and career.

So you need to like, look before you leap into a turbulence. See, now we actually can see in some like a tiger mom, that’s always used a tiger mom. Really will fight for her children, push them for perfection. And on the one hand, That’s really good to, to have that support. And then on the other hand, if it’s too much, then it has a very destructive nature.

And then the tiger Zodiac, as I talked about earlier, has a fixed connection to an element. And that is actually the wood element and that embodies those characteristics of beyond that very strong, upward kind of movement that springtime movement.

So looking at the health forecast for 2022. So if we can look at the Zodiac as a. Ancient personality test, Chinese medicine. And here I’m going to is often met with skepticism and even called something like a pseudoscience, because it includes a lot of practices that might be considered spiritual.

We’re looking at the whole, we’re looking at the entirety of your health and also the forces that may be influencing it beyond what we can see in this more physical realm. As an aside, it’s our job to educate the public on how this can benefit them. And speaking to your patients or anybody who’s really interested this could be a very nice introduction into Chinese medicine.

And we also have to educate ourselves as practitioners to not think of just treating and helping people as a. Again earlier, oh, it’s acupuncture or to just herbs. And to not think that we’re separate from the environment or even the celestial movements that are at play. So we need to really check our own prejudices and superstitions around these practices that are considered outside a monotheistic idea.

And I actually, so this is something I created a quiz. And later on, if you want the transcript of, for this talk, there’s going to be a link to it. You just need to text needle 7 1 4 3 3 2 6 9 2 6. It’ll be later. And I’ll repeat that after too. So if you want to take the quiz that I made, there’s going to be a link to it.

So both young and young are part of the Zodiac and are actually are divided into the yin and yang dominance. So I made the list. The young, the more young, predominantly young signs are the monkey, the tiger, the rat, the horse, the dragon, and the dog. They also have yen in them. The in signs are more rooster rabbit, pig, snake, ox, and go.

Acupuncture chow channels as celestial maps. So earlier in the first slide, there was that quote from the sew-in aging that was talking about, how the channels are there maps on humans and, We didn’t really touch on this. When I was in school, it was glazed over somehow missed the aspect of the the cosmology or the astrology aspect of Chinese medicine.

And so this is, part of what. Mentioning earlier that in our education, there’s all of this idea of like things being separate. And then we have to make those links. The links are already there. So the challenge, the channels, the Meridian channels are actually named according to their degree of yin and yang.

So we go back to yin and young we’re we’re back to the time claw. So as we know, there is the Ty young zone or the meridians called Thai young shall young Ming. And then we’re looking at tie in, shall she weigh in? And all of these terms actually describe phases and positions of the sun.

So we’ve been using these meridians and strategies with maybe not making a connection to, what the larger picture is, the universe picture of actually our health and this is also the clock describes our circadian biology, biological clock that relates to day and night and also seasonal.

So of like how we are in a different seasons, which has to do with the Earth’s orbit around the sun. And so we already know we, we treat preventatively in the summertime for, so that will be strong or it will have really strong lungs in the fall when that is going to be more of the time of the metal element and more susceptible to like cough and cold.

You’ve already been doing it and you didn’t even know it. So here I created a chart that like looks at what the Zodiac sign actually is correlated with the different meridians. So for instance, the tiger is associated with the law and that’s the metal element. And according to the time clock, this is the more yin, even though tiger is set itself is young, but in terms of it gets very confusing, right?

It can be, there’s always the yin and the yang aspect of it. So this chart is going to be available in the transcript. So I’m not going to read through. To read through it, but I think you’ll understand how this is how this works right. As a practitioner. And then you can look into it a little bit.

And then here is the chart of the five elements where we look at the wood, the fire, the earth, the metal and the water. And what is coordinated with the different planets. We’re looking at Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Venus, and mercury. When you, the points that are considered from the DJing points to the hussy points, they are also known as the antique points.

Those are all really correlated with different planets and planetary movement. This is an extremely in-depth. Study into, astrology the Zodiac and how you might use it with acupuncture points. As we know that some practices they’re going to treat the long at 3:00 AM, or, treating different times during the day or during the night and using certain points that’s not really so convenient in the way that we practice.

But and I don’t know if anybody still practices that way. But that is a thing. Maybe not so much used, but you never know, maybe we need to investigate it. Definitely. Okay. Hopefully you’re gonna be more interested. You can contact me. Maybe you want to do a study group. I find this is becoming more and more fascinating as how it relates to how we practice our medicine.

So here’s the question. Did you really know about these deep connections before? I really. I didn’t know as much as I know now, as I was studying and putting together something for mindbodygreen and writing about astrology and making it digestible. And how does it relate to Chinese medicine that we really need to make those connections?

So I want to learn much more and hopefully you do too.

So here’s a picture of the Milky way. And we are a thousand years ago, or 2000 years ago, the position of our galaxy was not the same. So we are always in a process of shifting and moving. If. One thing that I think about is like with science or astronomy, is the idea that we’re in a fixed point and the we’re looking at the stars from a fixed point.

And that is a really in a way, a very old way of thinking that during the middle ages was that they thought that the earth was at the center and the sun was rotating around. But the fact is that we are also at we’re constantly. In some orbit, a smaller orbit of a greater orbit, and we’re actually moving, moving through the universe.

And so there are so many more, forces at play. The only way we really. Can understand where we are is to look at our environment and observe the different changes that are happening and how does that relate to us? And so we’re always looking for something to be predictable. Which is not so easy, right.

But these ancient practices or really about observing and using them as a way for longevity, promoting health and wellness, and really being connected to more than just what was in front of us, but to our communities. So I hope you enjoyed the presentation and next week we’re going to have Virginia Doran.

She’s going to be hosting another interesting topic for you. And I’d like to thank again, the American acupuncture. If you’re interested in a transcript of this presentation, you just need to text needle. That’s N E D L E two, the number’s 7 1 4 3 3 2 6 9 2 6. And thank you for listening and please make comments and contact, and I hope that you’re going to go and take the quiz and give me some feedback how you liked the quiz.