Beach Community Acupuncture has a good piece today on people who think you have to "believe in acupuncture" for it to work. In my opinion, you do have to believe in acupuncture for it to work, just as you have to believe in any other medical treatment for it to work. In the dominant scientific-technological paradigm of the 21st century, most of us are brought up with a specific set of unquestionable beliefs. In fact, to question some of these beliefs is considered completely unexplainable and therefore "crazy."
For instance, everyone "knows" that when taking antibiotics, you have to take the full course, or utter mayhem will ensue.
Everyone "knows" that slipped disks, pinched nerves, muscle strains and other physical abnormalities are the cause of back pain, not an associated symptom (except thisguy, I guess).
Everyone "knows" that HIV causes AIDS, and everyone "knows" that AIDS came to the U.S. accidentally from a guy who was bitten by a monkey in Africa.
For treatment to be successful, patients must accept acupuncturists into their established belief system. That's why all TCM schools in the U.S. require their student interns to wear white coats and take blood pressure readings - we wear a costume to create the association in a patient's mind to the established image of a doctor with the power and authority to heal their sickness. That image is incredibly powerful.
Your self has a natural tendency towards health. The body, mind and spirit are incredible organic systems that work in harmony with the inner and outer world. Medical systems are designed to remind you of that, to nudge you back towards health when you forget your own power. What have you forgotten?
This is a clip from "Healing and the Mind", the PBS series from the early 90's, hosted by Bill Moyers. Moyers goes to China and sees first-hand the way qi, or universal life force energy, is utilized for healing and prevention, from daily exercises to in-patient treatments in hospitals. This excellent series is, amazingly, only available on VHS, making it something of a collector's item.
This particular clip bends towards the martial arts aspect of qi. Martial arts and healing are really two sides of the same coin, but that's a topic for a future post. For now, it's enough to say that martial arts and healing both utilize qi to bring about change in the physical body.
Speaking of which... Yosan alum Yangchu Higgins is hosting a workshop that utilizes EFT methodology to bring about change in your emotional body (which may very well lead to changes in your physical body).
Quantum Workshop: Tapping On What Others Think
Objective: 1) To apply Emotional Freedom Techniques on feelings around “What others think”; 2) To relate primate behavior to individual emotional states; 3) To clear an incident where “what others thought” elicits energetic dissonance; 4) To create a pathway of new possibilities towards others’ thoughts. Every third Wednesday of the month 7:00-9:30 1313 S. Hudson Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90019, call 323.936.5152 Cost $65
After a cold day on the tundra, there's nothing I like better than a warm, refreshing fire shower.
I've never seen this done before, but it's obviously another part of the acupuncturist's toolkit, things that can be done besides sticking needles into the body. We've already had a post about gua sha. In the future we'll cover moxa, cupping, and all the various scraping and tapping tools that acupuncturists use to access the body's meridian system. EFT is an example of a more modern tool which accesses the meridian system.
This is an intro video from the founders of Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). EFT is a relatively modern way of accessing the meridian system of acupuncture. In the video it's described as "acupuncture without needles", and that's a pretty good description, except that you may get much quicker results with EFT than with acupuncture.
How is that possible? First, understand that there are as many different styles of acupuncture as there are of cooking. To say that you practice acupuncture is the same thing as saying that you cook "Chinese food" - there really isn't any such thing. Yes, all acupuncture uses needles, but that's like saying all Chinese cooking uses heat. What is the theory behind where you put the needles? How big are the needles you use? Do you even break the skin at all? (Some styles don't.) What names do you have for the points? Do you needle symmetrically or asymmetrically? Every day or once a week? And on and on and on.
The style of acupuncture most people learn in Chinese medicine school in the U.S. is a kind of "herbal acupuncture" - the points themselves get stuck with specific functions that are always the same. But this is not how the points work. It was an herb teacher who told me that acupuncture is actually much more complex and harder to master than herbology, even though there are a limited number of points (about 400) and virtually limitless numbers of herbs (300-500 used in daily practice, but hundreds of thousands of natural substances - animal, vegetable, mineral - have documented medicinal effects in Chinese medicine). Once you learn what each specific herb does and how it combines with other herbs, you can rely on it to have more or less the same action every time you use it, adjusting for individual constitutional types.
Acupuncture points are much more mysterious. What happens when you put a needle into a person's body is influenced more than anything by the state of health of the acupuncturist - and secondarily by the meridian it is located on, how skillfully you locate it, how skillfully you manipulate it, if you get the qi, what you do with it once you get it, the time of day, the weather, geography, the doctor-patient relationship, and on and on. Acupuncture points don't necessarily do the same thing every time, and to pretend that they do is a little silly.
There are other schools or styles of acupuncture that have many followers. For instance, there is the Tung style, about which this website says:
Tung Style Acupuncture uses points different from those found in most present-day TCM acupuncture texts. While many of the Tung points are found on the twelve regular channels they are, however, in distinct locations from the 360+ points presented in the aforementioned TCM acupuncture texts. They are also largely distinct from the miscellaneous 'extra' or 'non-channel' points described in most contemporary TCM acupuncture texts.
The Tung Style Acupuncture points chosen for the treatment of any given malady are located mostly on the extremities and at a distance from the site of the lesion or pathology. Furthermore, the number of points required to successfully ameliorate any given ailment is fewer than that required in most current TCM acupuncture texts to treat the same malady.
The best acupuncturists, in my experience, are those that have a good "eye" for "seeing" blockages in various meridians. Information about blockages can be gathered in many ways - taking the pulse and palpating various body structures is one of the most reliable. When they find a blockage, they unblock it. That's it. Sometimes a diagnosis is not even necessary. Look for blockages, unblock them. Patient gets better.
EFT is a way for people to very quickly assess where the blockages are in their body. Through some admittedly funny-looking techniques (tapping yourself with your fingertips on the face being one of them) you can find blockages and release them.
If you read yesterday's post, you know that blockages can be caused by three things: the weather (traditionally called the six evil qi - wind, heat, cold, dryness, dampness, and something called summerheat), excessive emotion (that's your internal weather - anger, fear, joy, grief, worry, shock, melancholy) and external trauma caused by snake bite or kung fu battling.
With EFT, the cause of the blockage doesn't matter. With the help of an experienced EFT practitioner, you can find and eliminate the blockage very quickly.
Yosan alum Yang-chu Higgins is an EFT practitioner and is leading a workshop this Wednesday in Los Angeles called Enhancing Self-worth with Tapping. For more information, call 310-397-8523.
For more information on non-mainstream acupuncture, see these books:
