It’s Mother’s Day. The style of acupuncture I practice invokes a principle from the Chinese Han Dynasty Canonical Text, the Nan Jing (the Classic of Difficult Issues) . . . in the case of depletion, treat the mother What does this mean? Chinese Medicine is...
I came across a research article recently from China documenting impressive modern biomedical evidence that acupuncture had positive effect on bone density in patients with osteoporosis. You might ask yourself how that could be possible. Aren’t bones hard and solid,...
Wednesday, December 21, 2016 Today is the shortest day of the year in earth’s Northern Hemisphere. Tomorrow, the incremental lengthening of daylight in the long slow transition towards summer begins. Superficially, this reality runs counter to our experience. Here in...
Monday, 21 December, 2015 For years, on concluding a series of treatment sessions with a patient, I’ve joked . . . “I have one of the only jobs I know of where I get to say ‘I hope I never see you again’ and it’s not an insult”. It’s Christmas in a few days - a crazy...
Wednesday, 25 November, 2015 Here in the Northern hemisphere, we are now well into the darkest part of the year, that slow slide towards late December and the shortest span of daylight in the diurnal cycle. For most of us, this means waking, getting up and getting...
Monday, 16 November, 2015 There is a lot I could say about sugar from the perspective of Chinese Medicine. But on this occasion, I’m not going to do that. I am going to stick with simple modern physiology and some basic numbers. It’s very important we are all very...
Monday, 29 July, 2013 “The mid- level physician believes this knowledge to be something attainable. The lower physician believes this to be something easily acquired. It is the superior physician (alone) that understands the true difficulties of (its study).” ...
Friday, 17 May, 2013 I have had 14 years to accumulate a full picture of the relationships my patients (and the patients of my colleagues) have with their physicians about acupuncture. What has clearly emerged are three distinct categories of relationship. At one...
Monday, 24 September, 2012 This is a followup to the previous blog post, ‘Am I Getting Better?’ A present case from my clinic serves well to highlight many of the finer aspects of determining progress during treatment. A mother recently brought her 9-year old son to...
Friday, 31 August, 2012 These are critical questions. You should be asking them regularly with the full awareness it takes to arrive at an answer. To be truthful, you should be asking them critically during and after ANY intervention - whether pharmaceutical,...
June 6, 2012 Almost every time I see a new patient, within minutes of the acupuncture treatment starting, their digestive system starts to rumble. I’ve been observing this reliably for 12 years now. What does this reveal about acupuncture, my typical patient and the...
Monday, March 7, 2010 I am sitting in the Charlotte (North Carolina) airport as I write this. Several times a year, I leave PEI to get more training, insight and inspiration. You simply cannot practice this kind of medicine without that kind of ongoing...
September 5, 2009 The Fall Season is upon us. Chinese Medicine, through its Taoist roots, has much to say about the movements of the seasons and how, as we stand positioned between Heaven and Earth, they are reflected in us. One legacy of Taoist cosmology is...
Tuesday, May 5, 2009 Spring is unfolding. Chinese Medicine, through its Taoist roots, has much to say about the movements of the seasons and how, as we stand positioned between Heaven and Earth, they are reflected in us. One legacy of Taoist cosmology is...
Monday, June 2, 2008 A Classical Acupuncturist is trained to look at you as a whole person, regardless of what ‘malady’ brings you to the clinic. In the world of Classical Acupuncture, it is rare that even the seemingly simplest musculoskeletal problem is not tied in...
