Multi-bed acupuncture in China and in the West

There is a movement in the West called multi-bed acupuncture. Most clinics the past few years have been and still are only one bed, one patient at a time. Multi-bed clinics take their view from the chinese set-up, which usually is anywhere from 2-10 patients treated at the same time. There are thin screens between the beds for privacty, but it´s a more communal experience and the effect is much more positive in treating the local community as a whole rather than single individuals in it.

People hear how other people´s treatments are going, they talk about their problems, they get support and share their experiences and a stronger social network is put in place. Purely energetically, simultaneous treatments of several patientes at the same time treats the local field of energy and intent in the community much stronger than if you treat one person only. The aid-organisation Acupuncturists Without Borders have made this a specific point when treating traumatized and destroyed communities in disaster zones and after natural disasters. You can read more about it here: http://www.acuwithoutborders.org/

The multi-bed acupuncture project in the West often weaves together with something called community acupuncture too. Acupuncturists who work with this charge a sliding scale, where the client can decide themselves how much they can afford to pay. In London, that scale is usually between 20-50 pounds, but there are clinics in England who go as low as 15 pounds as well. Qualified acupuncture is expensive in the West since it is still kept outside the NHS-system. This means that people who really need it but have low income rarely can get access to treatments. The community acupuncture movement wants to change this. A clinic still has to go around, and the acupuncturist has to make a living, but with this, we can offer help that reaches those who really need treatments but who think they´re unavailable due to financial constraints.

Multi-bed acupuncture is the standard treatment in China, and has been, probably for millenia. These days, in a more capitalist China, there are private clinics where clients pay more money and have private rooms with only one doctor. In some treatments this might be necessary, but quite often the patient will actually gain more from being treated in a multi-bed clinic. In this day and age, we so easily glide more apart, human beings being small islands in an Internet sea, drifting gently but surely away from each other. The multi-bed treatments and community acupuncture tell us that we are all human, all have problems, and we can see the heart of people when they heal, just like in ourselves.

Daniel Skyle © 2011

”The acupuncture points have become my friends over the years”

Quoted from my teacher in Beijing, a doctor with 40 years experience in Chinese hospitals. Wow. I want to be as good as this...

”When I first began studying, I believed that points were just measured places on the body that might be located on a cadaver or in an anatomy text. Also, I believed that all points on the body were roughly the same: that they are all openings between the various structures of the body. Later, I began to appreciate subtle differences among the points. Some have more qi or more blood, some have less. In some places the type of qi is different than in others. Importantly, the exact nature of qi sensation that should be generated from each point varies, and should be varied depending on the desired effect. Each point actually has its own nature or personality. Once I began to truly note these differences among the points on my patientes, I became more and more interested in the classical point categorizations. It is from here that I began my explaration of the source, collateral and five transport points.

In fact, after many years, I now think of many of the points on the body as old friends. I know what they are like, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and when to call on them for help. When you get to know the points in this way, treating in the clinic is kind of like waking good friends from a slumber – gently prodding the points to wake them up and send them on their way. Also, as I´ve said before, some of the points are like jacks-of-all-trades, friends that you might call on to help with a wide variety of projects. Other points have very specific strengths and should be used in more specific cases. The points, to me, really do seem to have these different personalities.”

London: famous things

Everywhere in the world we can sing the places we live alive. Most of us forget to do this: old cultures sung the land alive through naming it, and remembering those names in stories. What a difference, to live in a living land.

London is so old that the amount of famous things in it – a more obvious naming – are uncountable. They are everywhere, some with good memories – like seeing the 300 000 citizens that protested the cuts in the march I joined (see a previous post) – some bad, like memories of the insane poverty in the middle of huge riches that Victorian London was. Some pivotal – though I can´t think of a more pivotal one than the now lost sandwich shop of Sarajevo that Arturo Princip, the murderer of Archduke Franz Josef went to after trying once to kill the Archduke, then going back, and by accident meeting their car again, this time succeeding in the kill. And with that sandwich, the first grain of sand started rolling that became WWI.

One bus that passes me in the city is one where it´s added to the side that it stops by Abbey Road, where the Beatles had their studio. In Baker Street, there is a museum to Conan Doyle´s detective Sherlock Holmes; he still lives in apartment 221b, Baker Street, London. Watson is even this minute hearing the steps on the stairs that he knows will rouse his friend´s intelligence and skill again after two weeks of laziness and depression. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogpvYQYm_Zw&playnext=1&list=PL16A743C1F7302456

In Camden, there´s a low brick building where the writer Charles Dickens lived for a while when he was a child.

On the city-side of the Thames stands an obelisk of bright stone. If you walk closer, you see that on it are carved ... hieroglyphs. And if you know its story, you would be surprised, because here, constantly passed by traffic, a stones-throw from Embankment station, stands the stolen goods of the conquerors: Cleopatra´s Needle, an Egyptian obelisk 3500 years old. http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/England-History/CleopatrasNeedle.htm It hasn´t been returned, and now, as a final insult, they keep it standing there to be worn down to nothing by ignorant drivers and the fumes from their cars.

In Bloomsbury, near the British Museum, the blue signs of memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_plaque are seen almost everywhere. One of them mentions Lady Ottoline Morell, famous patron of the arts in pre- and post-war England during WWI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Ottoline_Morrell.

Churchill walked here, and in the War Rooms saved Europe from Nazism. Here you can see amazing video of him when he announces the unconditional surrender of Germany that ends WWII: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efvwJjzqKUk&feature=fvsr

In the Tower, Henry the Eight lived out his life and murdered women; outside Houses of Parliament stands, to a sane person´s horror, a statue of Oliver Cromwell, known for being party to a lot of death during his life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell. But countries move on, whether the citizens like it or not, and some criminals they turn to heroes in the beautiful lie that civilization is. There also stands on Parliament Fields a statue of Nelson Mandela – who once was seen as a criminal by those who supported apartheid.

All these places, so many many of them, and so many more places of just ordinary people living out ordinary lives filled with details and sadness and sorrow and joy.

The Liver channel and the Wood Element, or ”What the hell are you looking at?”

Our current channel is the liver channel, and since the season is also Spring, which links to the Wood Element that contains the liver and its paired organ the gallbladder, we´re going to look a bit at both.

The liver and gallbladder in Chinese medicine are linked to one of the Five Elements called Wood. Wood is the energy and action of growing, of wood, forest, trees – of intent and energy that goes outwards and away, pushing out for new boundaries, achieving new goals. The element is linked to the emotions of anger, irritation, frustration and bitterness, but also to the ability to act, enthusiasm, and compassion. But – hang on. Remember that this list of emotions also reflects how clean and balanced someone´s Wood element is. The more blocked, the more constant anger, frustration and irritation there will be, a short fuse and angry demeanor. If it is very blocked (called collapsed), this will turn to resentment, bitterness or even hate. The cleaner it gets, there is simply the ability and intent to do, freely and constantly, with a large amount of active compassion for the universe.

Anger is a healthy emotion. It needs to be alive in us, but balanced: an inability to express anger is as bad as expressing too much. Part of getting more balance in ourselves is to be able to be angry when there is an actual reason for it, and then let that anger go. In Chinese medicine, this would be seen as the Wood element working well with Metal, since Metal gives borders, boundaries and ethical lines, but also cuts and divides and keeps Wood in check so it keeps growing well instead of becoming a field of dandelions eating up your garden.

The Liver channel itself is 14 points. It goes all the way from the big toe in the feet up to the crown of the head. The primary channel follows the inside of the leg, circles around the genitals, continues up the side and then goes deep, entering the torso, connecting to lungs, stomach, liver, gallbladder and continuing up the throat to the mouth, nose and top of the head to Baihui, point 20 on the Governing Vessel, the highest point on the body.

Treatments using the liver channel often focus on creating free flow in the body. Pain is seen as stagnation that has lasted a long time, and can be released through this; the liver in Chinese medicine is seen as liking free movement, like growth in Spring, and it gets more angry the more blocked the path is.

The liver is also linked to emotions in the body. They should move freely, but often get stuck instead and create problems and blockages in us and our lives and our health. The liver has a relationship with grief, even though grief is linked to the lungs and Metal, because often our grief is held back by anger. It is also this that links the liver channel to treatments of depression, because often depression can be based on underlying anger, huge amounts of it, but locked, like layers of shale in rock.

The ”external pathogen” for the Wood element is wind. An external pathogen is simply something that effects us from the outside of our system instead of starting inside. Wind is also something energetic that can go inside our system and create physical changes and domino-effects. Internal wind can be started from the inside or initiated from the outside, and it is when the emotions run wild and unbalanced or symptoms keep coming and going restlessly, never manifesting in one single place. This might have started in the liver or will be affecting the liver.

The Wood element and liver is also linked to the health of our ligaments and tendons, and in the old days the liver was called the General in the body, as it controls and governs movement. The heart was called the Emperor, since everything depends on it and it rules all else in the body.

Treatments on the liver channel itself is used for, among many other things, regulating menses for women, clearing up eye-problems, clearing up pain, clearing up external or internal wind, releasing tissues in general and releasing distension and pain in the chest more specifically. It can be used to calm down rebellious energy in the stomach – that is energy going up instead of down, seen as heartburn or digestion problems. It can also help treat specific organ problems with liver and gallbladder, but in Classical Chinese medicine things are not reductionist as in Western medicine, and treatments for liver and gallbladder would often involve other meridians and Elements to balance them with an organic whole and restore the health of the entire inner world of the patient, not just excise or focus on one single part of it.

Holding pattern

There are four planes circling the night sky above London as I walk the last street home. Four big planes, I can see their lights at different heights. Can´t see if there are more. Four, just the slice I can see, so probably more ... Heathrow? Hope nothing has happened.

  Four planes, in a holding pattern in the dark sky above London.

Chinese medicine and Western medicine: differences. The 0-100 principle

The difference between Chinese medicine and the current Wester medicine is more fundamental than one might think. They are two different paradigms; two very different views on reality. And from their respective views on reality they perceive health and illness in very different ways, and then base their treatments on that decision.

I have mentioned it before in this blog, but I think it´s worth taking a deeper look at: the 0-100 principle of health and illness.

Picture that the health of an individual can move between 0 to 100. At 0-10, the person is just normally healthy: they are balanced within their life, have a reasonable harmony with their surroundings, and their physical health works fine for their work and chosen way of life. (Chinese medicine would treat, by the way, and is able to treat, all those areas). The higher up on the scale, the worse the situation has become and the deeper the illness will have gone into the mind and body of the person. The higher up on the scale, the deeper the illness will also have had time to go to put an imprint on that person´s personality and emotions.

The current Western medicine mainly focuses on the range of 70+. An illness is not actually seen as an illness until it is very clear and present in the person. Sometimes not even this stage is treated, and often has to wait until higher up towards 80-100 before something is done. Then there are a variety of treatments, mainly focused on pharmaceuticals or surgery. Some of the knowledge and treatments Western medicine can offer here are incredibly good. On the downside, there is also a high (and silenced) degree of mental and physical injury as well as fatalities due to wrong dosages inside the healthcare system and by patients themselves. (One argument that has been made for why acupuncture most likely will not survive with high quality and on a broad spectrum in the West, is that the pharmaceutical companies would not permit it. If you think this sounds paranoid, start reading up on the major pharmaceutical companies and their reach in the Western medical system.)

The old Chinese medicine focuses on the range of about 10-100. Since at least 200 BC they have stated that the most skilled doctors treat before it´s a disease – in this discussion, somewhere in the 10-20 range, before it even gets to 30. They see health and disease as a spectrum where the first small, small signs of a coming problem are visible in their diagnostic techniques. However, Chinese medicine has a weakness in the extreme range of 80-100. Here, Western medicine has some treatments that work with great efficiency, but there are also treatments at this end in Chinese medicine that seems impossible to Western medicine – such as one Western who recently saw an old man come in with a left-side stroke into a hospital, and two hours later be able to limp out, quite well, supported by his daughter. He had been diagnosed and treated immediatly, treated by acupuncture and the specific techniques for working with strokes that Chinese medicine has. This worked, as usual. But as a general rule, Chinese medicine has a weakness in this range compared to Western medicine.

In these two main paradigms of focus, a classically trained, fully skilled chinese physician would remark that if someone was your patient for a long time and actually ended up in the 70, you don´t know what you are doing, while a Western doctor usually, through his or her training, would not even look at the first 70 as anything much of interest at all – at best a preserve for physiotherapists.

The Chinese version is non-invasive, in the Western sense of the word. The primary treatment techniques are herbal medicine, acupuncture, tuina (when well trained, this is a high-tech version of massage that can also put organs back in the right place and open up very locked areas in a patient and restore blood-flow and energy-flow to them), and qigong. Acupuncture can treat a large range of problems and illnessess. It can treat chronic illnessess through increasing the physical and mental health of the patient, and decreasing the wear and tear from the chronic illness itself, even though it can´t remove it. Herbal medicine is usually seen as most efficient when it comes to reach greater depths in a person´s health, but it is very difficult to find skilled herbalists with good herbs in the West.

Classical Chinese medicine treat disturbances in health which they view as usually being something organic, something that coagulates: the longer it is left in place, the more it will go towards what Western medicine would call an illness or disease (external pathogens such as viruses are not seen this way, but your susceptibility to external factors can be changed and treated). Chinese medicine treats the range of 10-70 with a precision, skill and effeciency that Western medicine simply does not have techniques for right now. When you get up into the 70-100 span, Western medicine treats some things that an acupuncture doctor cannot do at all, and has great knowledge of crucial parts of physical health through Western science. When the Chinese version works well, and with good quality, it means two main things: 1) the person´s body, mind and life don´t become shaped by an illness; instead it is dealt with and balanced out so early that it never manifests and damages more. 2) It effectively treats general well-being and harmony in life too, including emotional imbalances, which means that good treatment will give the patient a greater ability to enjoy and savour their life.

From seeing patients and students over the last decade, and how they have fared in the two systems here in Sweden, I have to say that there has been a marked and strong bias for better health in those who used the Chinese medicine version in the hands of someone with long training and high skill. There have also been cases among them where Western medicine has been needed – and has treated the problem really well, since it fell within its specialized remit. But even then, the post-op healing from surgeries, for example, has been visibly increased by skilled Chinese medical treatment. I have also seen a range of treatments being done by Chinese medicine for things that Western medicine either couldn´t treat, or, worse, openly scoffed at – insulting and attacking the patient´s dignity for even daring to claim something was wrong, which is a horrible thing to do to a sick or injured person, especially from the position of power that doctors and nurses have in our society.

Any treatments within the range of unease and low-level mental lability or anxiety I have also seen better treated by Chinese than Western medicine during this time. Most cases have simply not registered as a problem within Western medicine at all – it is so far outside the locked box of the 70-100 that it is not seen as a problem, and there aren´t really any treatments for it. If the anxiety becomes bad enough, it might be treated with pharmaceuticals, but that´s often the end result today, when the system for Western medicine is kept being cut back ever year.

Discussing this becomes difficult without going into patient notes, but I offer the 0-100 model as something to think about and see in your own health. The programming we get in the West makes us only start seeing and reacting to problems once they are very, very visible: the current Western system indirectly tries to rob people of the knowledge of their bodies and innate minds, giving power to the hierarchy within Western medicine to decide what is right and what is wrong (if you choose to give it, of course. It´s yours to keep or give away. Or take back). There is a large and practical potential for treatments in the 10-70 range, long before you might end up with a more serious problem or illness. Does it cover everything? No. But if done by skilled professionals with long training, it does offer a vastly different, more vibrant version of health than the current Western system does.

In hospitals in China we can see what is probably a utopian model: the Two Wings, one with Western care, one with Chinese. The staff in each dedicated to their own unique skills and treatments, and patients free to go to either, or start in one place and then shift. The Western side has Western medicine doctors (xiyi yisheng), the Traditional side has Chinese medicine (zhongyi yisheng) doctors. Well ... sometimes I have a dream.

On edge

Edges, borders

we´re sitting on an edge tonight,

the universe, balancing, hesitating

all these lives in this big city, all these lights

hanging, thinking about the foot in the middle of the step,

one fall to the right, one to the left

one will be bad

one will be

balanced

everything is on edge

tonight

I am sitting here

waiting, watching

the edge

a guardian

hoping for balance,

on edge