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Many elite runners get acupuncture. Here’s an article in ‘Runner’s World’ in which the author describes first getting acupuncture after competing in a marathon in Japan, where it was made available to every participant in the race. He says that he used acupuncture to recover from an injury and as regular part of his training regimen. The article says that acupuncture is as widely used as massage by Asian athletes, and while some elite American runners use it to for existing ailments, it “may prove most beneficial as preventative medicine”.
I posted before about acupuncture for sports performance and recovery, and there are links to some research that show that it’s a good idea there.
Magnolia buds are out in Melbourne. We use them for the nasal congestion of colds, sinusitis, and hayfever. The hairs can be a little irritating though so the buds are put in cloth bags when we brew tea from them.
The drawing is from “Famous Flowers of China”
There’s an albizzia tree in my neighbourhood. We use the flowers and bark to loosen up mental and emotional blockage, and the physical conditions that can occur with them. The flowers work more on the emotions and lift mood, the bark acts more on the physical conditions that come from getting hung up about things.
The flowers are gorgeous on the tree, but they go an earthy brown colour when they dry.
Hung up. Does anyone say that these days?
Sometimes ‘old-fashioned remedies’ make more sense, like using a topical treatment for localised infection.
Recently I went to a GP because I had a blind cyst in my ear lobe. Naively I expected that he would lance it, but he said they didn’t do that kind of thing anymore and gave me a prescription for an antibiotic. Don’t get me wrong, antibiotics are an indispensable weapon in the fight against potentially fatal disease, but most people are now aware of both the personal and population wide consequences of unnecessary antibiotic use. And it seems like the nuclear option to use a systemic anti-bacterial to treat a small local area of infection.
I applied a poultice of ground herbs called San Huang Xi Ji and after three days the cyst was gone.
The next time I went to a GP it was because I thought I had an ingrown toenail, and expected to get a referral to a podiatrist. But because the tissue next to the toenail was inflamed an antibiotic was again prescribed. San Huang Xi Ji was not the ideal poultice to use, but I had some ground up so that’s what I went with. Four days of application overnight relieved the inflammation.
The picture isn’t of my ear, and nobody wants to see my toenail.
As if to order, The Guardian is running an article on anti-biotic resistance this weekend, it seems to be a major concern of England’s chief medical officer.
A journalist recently asked me for some explanations of people’s expectations of Chinese Medicine. She had been commissioned to write an article for the LUX* Resort group, and she probably hope for some pithy quotes that she could tie together in a brief wrapup. If only explaining Chinese Medicine were that easy.
The journalist asked me because I’m going there, I’m on their page.
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The Moxa Punk will often show people how they can keep themselves well. Here’s a video showing how to do Japanese rice grain moxibustion. Thanks to Michael Warren.
Join me in the cosy, ecologically friendly warmth of the Van Raay Centre at CERES to learn how to cup and scrape. We Chinese Medicine practitioners use these methods to treat a range of conditions, but historically they are folk medicine practices used by regular folk. So this workshop is intended to teach people who are not health professionals how to use these methods to keep themselves, their friends, and family well.
Come dressed so that you can expose your shoulders and upper back.
Just 16 places for this one, get in quick.
The fruit looks enough like Christmas baubles to make this timely. And the liquid amber fruit near my house is fruiting. We use liquid amber fruit or lu lu tong 路路通 to relieve pain and regulate menstruation. It is particularly good for breast pain and can help free up the flow of breast milk. It is used with star jasmine vine in Nanjing to relieve the pain of herpes zoster. And it’ll look good hanging from the Christmas tree, glittered up a little perhaps.
Michael Phelps shows off his cupping marks. We Chinese medicine practitioners use cups to treat muscle tightness and pain, and pathogenic illness. It can be very effective alone, and can work even better when combined with acupuncture.
From our point of view the cups draw bad stuff out from deeper layers to the surface, whether it’s blood that has thickened because its flow has been restricted in a tight muscle, or external pathogenic factors that are associated with colds and flus. This explanatory model is common to traditional cupping practices throughout Asia, Europe, and Africa. A possible bio-medical explanation of how cupping helps with muscle tightness and pain is that it encourages phagocytosis to remove partially clotted blood. In his article “A Cupping Mark is not a Bruise”, cupping guru Bruce Bentley reports that a tissue sample taken from an athlete that had been cupped at the Australian Institute of Sport, was analysed as containing “old blood” (http://www.healthtraditions.com.au/uploads/212-cupping-proof.pdf).
I love doing cupping treatments. Not only do they work really well but they turn people into walking advertisements for Chinese Medicine. Not many of my patients expose their marks to as many people as Mr Phelps has though, nice one Michael.