Tag Archives: Practical Advice

Graduation!!!

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It’s been about 6 years since my first acupuncture treatment, which in the scheme of things, isn’t actually all that long. I got acupuncture at first for Bell’s Palsy, paralysis of the half of my face, a purely aesthetic issue, but we all like to put our best face forward and so it felt important. Acupuncture changed my life – it actually brought me closer to myself, it helped me strengthen my connection to who I am and my life’s purpose and, well, landed me here today. Ironically, I never resolved the original symptoms and I stand here today with a somewhat asymmetrical smile.

Every one of us has a story about how we arrived here. Some of us came to Chinese Medicine through martial arts, I know that many of us were disappointed in some way or another by Western medicine, maybe we saw our sister get pregnant and have a child with the help of acupuncture, or a parent get relief from back pain, or a sibling recover from a car accident – we all recognized that this is some special medicine, and we all knew that we wanted to help others, to play a supportive role in people’s journey back to health.

And some of chose SWAC because we were already living in Boulder, or because we toured across  the country looking at all the schools and liked it the most, or because we knew someone who went here. I transferred from New York when the city became to much, we’ve got transfers from Florida, and Denver, and Albuquerque and Hawaii . I remember walking in on the first day of class, and thinking to myself, “Oh, everybody already knows each other, I’m the awkward new kid” (I’m still awkard I’m just not new anymore) but then Koji came over and welcomed me in, and slowly but surely the collection of awesome people that make up our class befriended and welcomed me, just as the would any other person, because that’s who we are, and that’s how we roll.

And I sat through my first class with Michael Young, blown away by his insights on dysbiosis and leaky gut, and so my education continued. Tristan would diligently go over each any every acupuncture point, and give us meticulous tests (which I was grateful for when it was time to talk the board exams), and Jia Yu would pound into our brains “don’t treat the symptom! Treat the etiology!” And we poked each other in class and we poked patients in the clinic, and most people got better, but some didn’t, and we learned a LOT. I mean come, on, over 350 points, and over 30 herbs a few hundred herbal formulas,  pattern differentiation, 3600 hours of study… lets give ourselves a little round of applause here.

And now, we move on to the unknown.

First, we must take a pause. To rest, to recollect, to replenish and reflect.

And then no do doubt, we will stand up tall, connect to our will power, acknowledge our fears, recognize the wisdom we’ve gained, and move forward. With guile and gall we’ll muster the courage to start a practice, to treat our first patient with a supervisor, and then the second, and the third. And it’s gonna feel awesome!

And there’s a couple of things I hope we can all remember as we head out on our own.

This Medicine is Incredible! It’s so powerful and so diverse in application, and we happen to be in the midst of a changing of conscious which is going to create endless possibilities. We live in a time when our medicine can be Magic AND Science, not either or. Our medicine can speak so many languages, and WE can speak many languages. We can talk in Biomed about hormonal pathways and neurons firing, and we can talk the words of Shaman penetrating through matter and into the world of spiritual vibrations. We can talk about IBS or “leaky gut syndome” or SP Qi Xu or hungry ghosts. We can say that an herb is a diaphoretic or that it releases the exterior – and that’s good, because it’s both! We can hold one perspective in each hand and work with each patient accordingly.

We’ll be able to get rid of a patients back pain so she can go back to teaching at school and treat the children with more kindness and compassion because she’s not constantly taxed by her pain – but maybe we’ll never talk to her about fear or spirit.

And maybe another patient will still have trouble sleeping through the night, but he’s living a brighter and happier and more grounded life than ever before, because for the first time in a long time, he’s had the opportunity to open up a bit and share and discover and process some of his emotional blockages.

We are the makers of our medicine, engaging in an ancient tradition, with our own new modern flare, dancing whichever dance our patients need – sometimes it’s the samba, and sometimes its the waltz – but it’s always a dance towards health and wholeness.

This medicine is also mysterious. We’ve been studying in for four years and only barely brushed the surface. And some patients, respond immediately and dramatically and boom! they’re better. And some patients don’t see any change at all, for weeks, and eventually stop trying – and we don’t always know why. But it’s not just this medicine that’s mysterious, it’s healing, and it’s life – sometimes, we just have to learn how to sit with the mystery.

This medicine came from people who watched nature and the earth – and we still have lots to learn from the natural world. For instance, our recent understandings of ecosystems teach us that diversity is the key to resilience. If we look at the world around us, we will notice (if we pay attention), that there are many many different plants and animals living together in any given environment. They all have different roles to play, different functions in keeping the balance of resources flowing and growing within a system.

I like to go hiking in the mountains, and every time I go I’m blown away about how many songbirds, singing different songs and different insects, pollinating different flowers And it’s important that we don’t forget how similar to the songbirds and the insects we are – and what I’m trying to get at, is that as we all step out into the world we should remember to feel free to be ourselves, different from others, filling a unique niche that will be bring it’s own balance to the ecosystem of humanity.

Some of us may be like honeybees, buzzing around with a communal mentality, “pollinating” many flowers of all shapes and sizes, producing a great sweetness in our community. Others may may, like a particular moth only work with a particular orchid as their one-and-only specialty, which will also bring great beauty to world as well. Without honeybees the world would not be complete, and without moths and orchids the world not be complete and without each and everyone of us the world is not complete. 

Friends, or should I now say Colleagues, how about Fellow Acupuncturists!

I think I speak for all of us when I express a great gratitude to be living on this great planet full of an abundance of life, to be living in an era with an incredible abundance of information, to have an abundance access to the resources to acquire a unique and very powerful set of tools that will allow us to transform individual lives and entire communities for the better.

And I really have to say thank you to our teacher, staff, and all those that paved the way for us.

We all dedicated our lives for the past few years to developing a strong foundation to be pivotal members of our communities. Our hard-work and devotion in school and the fact that were all here together today are proof of our ability to persevere and achieve what we have committed to.

Now lets get out there and heal the world!

An Acupuncture Case Study

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Recently I’ve been reading what may be the best Chinese medicine textbook I’ve read thus far: Applied Channel Theory in Chinese Medicine. This book is superb both in terms of how it is written and its content and has been upgrading my understanding of the meridians, their functions and how to use acupuncture points therapeutically.

One of the great things about this book are the case studies, and one of them stood out to me as worth discussing on this blog. I want to look it at is less as a way to explore the details of theory and techniques used, and more to illustrate how acupuncture works and what patients can expect in terms of the rate and quality of their healing process.

The patient at hand is a 50 year-old male with chronic intestinal inflammation (colitis). The patient had been experiencing fatigue and diarrhea for 5 years, but in the past year they became worse and accompanied by weight loss. The patient was treated for 12 weeks; twice weekly for the first 3 weeks and once-a-week after that.

“His appetite started to recover by the 3rd treatment. The diarrhea decreased in frequency and volume throughout the first month, with stabilization of bowel movements by the fifth week. The patient showed considerable weight gain by the end of the second month of treatment, and was able to discontinue treatment 12 weeks after initial presentation.”

One of the main things I wanted to show was how acupuncture worked for something akin to IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), aproblem many Americans suffer from with little support from Western medicine. In fact Robertson and Wang exclaim that this case “represent one of the most effective disease categories for acupuncture treatment.” However, it’s also important to note that it took 12 weeks (3 months) for full recovery, and he was going twice a week for the first 3 weeks. Is that a long time? It depends what your expectations are, and what your point of view is, and how you choose to weigh in the fact that the patient had been experiencing symptoms for 5 years. It’s also worth considering that during and after the treatment, the patient was not dependent on medication, and that the issue was fully resolved, he was truly better.

My impression is that many Americans don’t necessarily have the patience (or the financial resources when unfamiliar with community acupuncture) to follow through with a complete treatment and see full results. I’m not trying to make generalizations or put blame on anyone, I just want to explore a different cultural paradigm and how whether or not Acupuncture has a chance to work is influenced by that. If somebody is familiar with how acupuncture works, knows what to expect, and is willing to be patient and committed, one can see results. However, if somebody expects one or two treatments to fix whatever ailment their experiencing (like taking a pill to make the pain go away), they may end up disappointed (this of course does depend the on disease at hand, some problems can be resolved in one or two treatments). That said, one should see some improvement within 2 or 3 treatments, and if they’re not, they may want to consider another acupuncturist or a different modality of healing.

Hopefully this is helpful to those of you out there wondering what to expect from acupuncture and trying to decided whether or not it’s for you.

Advice to an Interested Undergraduate

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It looks like it’s the season to be turning e-mails into blog-posts… I’ve been pretty busy just coming out of mid-terms and starting to focus on studying for our Comprehensive Exams that come at the end of this semester and cover all the material we’ve learned up until now. I just got an e-mail from a friend asking a few questions about “alternative medicine schooling.” I figured it might be something a wider audience would be interested in… so, for all those potential students of Chinese medicine out there…

I like these questions, they’re very practical, and they’re important things to have information about.

a) Recommendations for what to study undergrad to prepare for such graduate work. Would community college be a reasonable direction to take?

As far as undergrad goes, I would say that you can probably study whatever you want to, but it would be very very helpful in terms of both saving time and money to take as many bio-science classes as possible (similar to a pre-med major – but the way that usually works, is that you can often major in anything: English, Philosophy, History, while taking pre-med classes). These classes will be accepted as your Bioscience classes for your school and you’ll have a firm foundation and understanding of the sciences. That said taking some electives somewhere along the line about Eastern thought/philosophy, Confucianism, Daoism, or Chinese History could also be helpful is setting up an understanding of where the Eastern medicines come from philosophically and culturally.
Another really important thing: not all schools require a full-undergraduate degree. So my current school (PCOM) for instance only requires I think around 60 undergraduate credits, and graduates then receive a Bachelors and a Masters when the graduate. Other schools like the one I’m transferring too (Southwest), do require Bachelors. I think community college would be a great way to go for undergraduate. You’ll save money and most likely get a good enough education to have the foundation you need for grad school.

b) Thoughts about what a person who’s interested in the field should do to prepare themselves
Self-cultivation. I would strongly recommend focusing a substantial amount of energy on figuring out who you want to be (as opposed to only thinking about what you want to do). You can practice being who you want to be every day, no matter what, and doing what you want to do should be an outgrowth of that.
Having a “spiritual” practice is important (meditation, prayer, yoga, qi gong), as is learning/knowing how to take care of your physical self (getting enough sleep, eating well). Spend the time leading up to school learning how to cook, learning what type of exercise is most enjoyable/fun for you.
Personally, I’d also recommend spending some time in some form of psychotherapy. This may sound a bit strange, but the more whole you are as a person, the more you’ve done to mature and understand your self, the better you’ll be at helping others and understanding others. I spent around 8 months in therapy my senior year of college and learned a tremendous amount about myself, patterns that I may have, weaknesses, strengths, etc. Getting to know yourself is important.
Touch people! Not in inappropriate ways (haha), but seriously, the more experience you have getting to know other people’s bodies with your hands, the better off you’ll be. To me this mostly means giving massages to your friends and family, being comfortable sharing your touch with them will help become comfortable eventually sharing touch with people who are initially complete strangers.
Read “The Web That Has No Weaver” and flip through some anatomy books.
Be treated by whatever modality you’re interested in. If it’s acupuncture, go get some acupuncture, from one person, from several. Get a massage or two or three. Talk to a few practitioners, find out what they like about it, what they don’t.

c) Thoughts about what the awesome things and the harder things are about going to alterna-medicine school
This questions is pretty fascinating to me, because a lot of the awesome things about school are the harder things about school. The awesome things about going to complimentary medicine schools are that you’re learning to help people heal. You’ll become part of a community of people who are working to help alleviate suffering. You’ll come to understand yourself, other people, and the world in new ways. Assisting others on their path to health is a fairly large responsibility, you have to know and understand a lot about how the human body works, from a Western scientific perspective as well as from an East Asian perspective. A lot of the concepts of the medicine may be foreign, some of them may not really make much sense at first, but eventually you’ll get it.
Also, I think it’s important at some point to do some research on the job market, and understand how much money you can expect to make and what it might take to either find a job or start your practice.

I’m always open to fielding more questions… and interested in hearing other people’s thoughts…

Stay warm, and don’t forget your Vitamin D!

Vitamin D

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I tried to think of a clever title for this one, but alas, I’m keeping it simple.

This is the first weekend that I’m really feeling the shortening of the days. And so I remembered the teachings of my anatomy teacher: in the winter months, at this latitude, we simply cannot get enough Vitamin D from the sun. Some of the reasons vitamin D is important is because it helps strengthen the immune system, ensure stronger bones, and help regulate the body’s metabolism. As important as those things are, my biggest interest is in its ability to help regulate moods. I’m amongst those who are challenged in the winter months by the reduced amounts of sunlight, and if I don’t take preemptive steps I can find myself somewhat depressed. So this winter I plan on eating a lot of fish (cod, salmon, and mackerel have the most vitamin D, with tuna not far behind) and eggs, but I’ll also be taking a supplement (it’s hard to consistently get enough Vitamin D from your diet).

Fortunately, I’m learning in school many other ways to help overcome the wintertime blues. We all know about the basics: regular exercise, a healthy diet, enough sleep, but if that’s not enough regular acupuncture treatments are a good place to start to get some help. Hopefully, as my herbal knowledge increases I’ll be able to share some insight into that realm of the medicine as well.

So, soak up the sun while you still can, but maybe pick up some Vitamin D supplements from the store on your way home from your last time at the beach.