Continuing the theme from my previous blog entry, prevention of illness can a very practical activity.  There is a plethora of literature and personal trainers etc out there who claim to give you the best regime for maintaining good health.  If we listened to all of them, we’d most probably be dead by now.

A most respected teacher of mine asks people “…. and at what stage did you decide to become ill?”  Think about it – through act or omission, we bring illness upon ourselves.  So, in your practice …….

Who owns the Illness?

Who, therefore is responsible for it? 

Your patient, that’s whom.

So I give my clients homework – things they can do to help themselves.  I thought I’d share these with you (however, this does not address those clients who believe that a ‘cure’ is in the pill given to them by the doctor, nor does it address those clients who don’t actually want to get better – both these groups aren’t interested in helping themselves).

Qigong

Again, there’s a plethora of Qigong exercise out there, teachers of which say “if you do this for 3 hrs every day, you’ll live to be 100”, or something equally as impractical.  The simplest I’ve found for holistic balancing is traditionally known as ‘grounding the Qi’, but I refer to it colloquially as the ‘Caffetiere’.

Simply stand with hands above the head, palms down with fingers pointing at each other.  Now bring the hands down imagining that between them is a fine mesh that goes down through your body – on the first pass, the mesh gathers up all the physical aches and pains (like the coffee grounds in the caffetiere) and you take them all the way down to the feet and out into the Earth (the Earth doesn’t mind – after all it is your Mother!).  Go to the start again and repeat the process, this time gathering all the emotional junk and doing the same with it by putting it into the ground.  Repeat this process a total of nine times clearing down more imbalances each time.  If you get good at it, you can do one pass with each breath out.  Do this qigong once in the morning on rising and once at night before retiring (each accompanied by a glass of body-temperature water).  It works wonders.

Food and eating

Daverick Leggett has written excellent books on what we should eat in a TCM world; namely ‘Recipes for Self-healing’ and ‘Helping Ourselves’.  I draw heavily on the latter when treating particular patterns and give them a copy of the relevant page (not forgetting, of course, to give Daverick the credit).

But many problems can be laid at the door of how to eat.  So my clients invariably get the ‘SP Qi Xu plus Damp’ handout on the basis that most of us have some of it to a greater or lesser extent.  In particular, the ‘how to eat’ lessons are particularly useful in this frantic life:

§        Enjoy your food, avoid eating when upset or worried or doing business

§        Eat to satisfy hunger, not to prevent it

§        Eat lots of variety

§        Eat regular meals, try and avoid eating late at night

§        Eat slowly, chew well (your stomach has no teeth!)

§        Eat a hearty breakfast

o       Breakfast like a King

o       Lunch like a Lord

o       Supper like a Pauper

§        Your spleen likes a warm environment, so warm foods and soups (cooked foods} are easier to digest than raw.

Ear Seeds

I draw maps of ears and give clients Vaccaria seed strips and tell them where the Antihistamine and Shenmen points are.  Brilliant!  The Antihistamine point is good for hay fever, the results of insect bites and, according to one of my clients who lives in a particularly midge-ridden area, it also reduces the number of bites she gets.

Shenmen is clearly for stress

And it provides a little light entertainment to see all these people going round with their fingers in their ears as they press the seeds for relief.

Posture

How many people do we see who have back issues that can be down to poor posture?  In Ta’i Chi one of the first lessons is to straighten the neck, tuck the coccyx under and opening the shoulder blades.  This has the effect of opening the energy gates at DU14, DU4 and DU11 respectively.  This allows Qi to flow up the spine and nourish the brain, as well as benefiting the effect of gravity on the spine.

Clearly if we held out an arm all day, we would be exhausted by the end – all for no useful purpose. Likewise, if our posture is wrong we exert a tremendous amount of energy into maintaining a posture that isn’t necessary.

So if your clients say they’re tired – have a look at their posture.  Or, even better, have them take a look!

Attitude

A positive attitude can help enormously.  We’re not counsellors but there’s no harm in dispensing a little common sense as you would to a friend.  So as well as the ‘normal’, balanced attitude, where emotional extremes affects the health of the client, is there anything we can bring from the Taoist philosophy that might help? 

Of course there is - WuWei, the act of ‘not doing’, of allowing nature and the Universe take its course.  Just as we’ve seen that a bad posture consumes Qi for no useful purpose, so does swimming against the stream (pushing water uphill or whatever) in an emotional or spiritual sense.  So if an imbalanced attitude is contributing to their issue, then make them aware of it in an appropriate manner. 

Acupressure

GB31 for sciatica, P6 for stomach issues, SJ3 for tinnitus, LI4 for pain, ST36 for energy, SP6 for period pain and so on ….. we all know the points that we can use ourselves (although I did try DU20 upwards before my final exam at NCoA but to no great effect!)

So, where appropriate, I show the clients the ones they can use for themselves.  A cotton bud or blunt end of the pen serves, but I prefer Phil McQueens’ suggestion that you get a round ended chopstick, but with an edge on it so that as you press and twist, it picks up the skin and turns it.  Works a treat.

Equally, other techniques that exert pressure or influence (heat, magnetism etc) can be just as effective.  Let them work it out for themselves.

Cups, moxa sticks, plasters and books

You may recall my story of a local farmer who stung up a heat lamp (used for helping early lambs) in his kitchen to help his back ache as he lay underneath it.  Well, there are physical devices which you can pass on/loan/rent out/sell etc.  Cups with rubber suction balls are a big hit, especially with those clients who have soft tissue stagnation. 

And other devices which require a more detailed knowledge, and a more in-depth briefing as to their usage, are moxa sticks and Jin Si Gao Herbal Plasters – very useful for the client to manage themselves, but you must know how they will be used.

Beware the loaning of books – they rarely come back.  That said, I always have a copy of Angela Hicks’ ‘Acupuncture Handbook’ in the clinic waiting area; it’s surprising the number of clients who go away and order one for themselves.

Meditation

Listening to the body/mind balance is essential for self-help.  Being able to differentiate between the Yin and Yang (as directed by the Tai chi Classics) can lead to a degree of self-awareness that then can be used to regulate our actions.  Awareness of excess and deficiency, for instance, is something we all know we should do, of which we are all aware, and of which few of us take any notice. 

Maybe ‘everything in moderation’ or ‘go only to 70%’ and such are pieces of advice the benefits of which not only our clients would benefit.

Client understanding

Clearly, the use of TCM jargon can be confusing – watch the colour drain from someone’s face if you say “your kidneys are severely depleted” or some such inappropriate expression.  However, they are very interested in recovery – witness the number of time you’re asked “and how many treatments will I need?”

So I have drawn a sloping Sine wave graph (if you don’t know what a sine wave is, then go to Google Images) that represents Improvement against Time – neither axis has numbers on it.  But what it does depict is that everything is cyclical and improvement is not a linear process.  Indeed, improvement will most likely be followed by a slippage back – hopefully not as far as from where they started – only to be followed by another improvement, and so on.

In doing this they take on another part of the self-healing, namely the monitoring process.

Age aspects

‘Death comes through the legs’ is reputedly an ancient Chinese saying.  Like T’ai Chi’s ‘Walk like a cat”, it’s meant to be allegorical.  It means that  as we age we stop moving as much – this leads to conditions that restrict movement, so we don’t move as much – and so on.  Lack of activity as we age can lead into a declining spiral; so it’s very important for older folks to keep up the exercise

One very useful exercise for the elderly, that they can do anywhere, is the ‘T’ai Chi walk’.  It strengthens leg muscles and engenders confidence – one of my clients, a lady in her mid-70s with Parkinson’s, went from walking with two sticks to no sticks and a much less shuffling gait in nine months by doing this.  Simply pick up the back foot and let it hover for a second or two an inch above the ground, move it through and let it hover, then place it down till it rests on the floor with no weight in it, then move your weight onto it.  Repeat the process – often.

Other very good leg-strengthening exercises exist – go and have a chat with your local friendly physio.

Similarly, Yin deficiency in women becomes more pronounced in middle years, so encouraging younger women to eat appropriately or maybe take Yin and Xue tonics would help in later years (Floradix is good for the red stuff).

And remember, in life we have three components of time, health and money – only two of which you have at any one time.  In our youth we have time and health, but no money.  In our middle years, we have money and health but no time.  And in later years we have time and money, but failing health.  Or to put it another way:

Man in his youth

uses his health

to gain his wealth

In old age

he uses his wealth

to regain his health

So there you have it – my toolbox for the clients to help themselves.  You may not agree with it but, hey, it works for me – AND for them!

Metta