Due to the current circumstances caused by COVID-19, the City of Salem requires  a log of employees and customers for contact tracing purposes and requires all businesses to complete a City of Salem Contact Tracing Form (https://www.salem.com/contacttracingform) at each employee shift or customer visit. 

The purpose of the Contact Tracing Form is to support possible case investigation and contact tracing should a positive COVID-19 case be traced to a particular establishment.

I will complete the form after your visit for each appointment.

I would appreciate your understanding and cooperation.

I have introduced this method to some patients who have had sinus problems. 
 
The self-care method is rubbing the frontal suture, which is a ditch on the frontal bone (Fig. 1). The length is about a inch.
Rubbing this area loosens your neck and opens your nose, and also loosens your chest and abdomen.
So if you have stiffness in your neck or sinus problems, or if you feel your abdomen is tight, try rubbing this ditch.
 
1. Rub the ditch-like-frontal suture with your fingers of one had like rubbing not the skin but the bone.
2. Open the frontal suture with your fingers of both hands. To get more strong contact, it is better to push your head toward your fingers.

If your fingers are slippery on the skin, it is more effective to place a piece of cloth underneath and rub and open the suture.
 
Watch the video for the detail of the method.

I think a lot of people feel tight on their neck when they tilt their neck to either side because of desk work or other reasons.
 
This is caused by the tightness of the muscle on the sides of your neck, which is called SCM (Fig. 1). There might be a lot of people who massage the muscle of the neck, but you couldn’t quite loosen it up.
 
So I want to share where to rub to loosen up the muscle.
 
When you rub a part of your head, you can make this SCM softer and it gets easier to tilt  to the side.
 
Where you need to rub is the coronal suture shown in Fig. 2 as yellow lines.
 
The location of the coronal suture is 4 fingers from the top of the head where is the center of the tips of the ears. When you slide your fingers back and forth on the suture, you feel slight bumps. That is the coronal suture.
 
If you feel tight on your left side of your neck when you tilt your neck to the right, rub the left side of the coronal suture, moving the tips of your fingers over the suture back and forth.
 
You don’t need to press too much. The good pressure is as strong as your nails don’t become white. 

This is also good if you feel tightness on the area between the neck and the shoulder.

Due to the stress from the surrounded situation caused by COVID-19, there are a lot of people whose breathing become shallow.

Related to the article posted in my blog: Let’s Relieve Broken Heart Syndrome caused by Stress due to COVID-19, it is also important that your nose is not stuffy to breathe smoothly.

We can only breathe deeply when you breathe in from your nose.

Please compare when you breathe in from your nose to when you breathe in from your mouth.

How did you feel? You should not be able to breathe deeply from your mouth.
That is because in the nose, the air is mixed with NO which opens the lung and softens the capillaries, but when you breathe in from your mouth, that process doesn’t happen so the lung doesn’t accept the air from the mouth.

For easier breathing, I want to introduce the acupuncture points that open your nasal passage.

1. Above the nose and about a half inch below the hair line, there is the bulge of the bone. Please massage the point (Fig. 1).

2. A half inch above the eyebrow, there may be tender points. Please massage these points (Fig. 1).

3. Please massage the base of the arms (Fig. 2).

Please massage these acupuncture points when you have a stuffy nose.

If you feel tightness of chest or difficulty of breathing, please also read the following article:

Let’s Relieve Broken Heart Syndrome caused by Stress due to COVID-19

According to CNN news, since the outbreak of COVID-19, a condition called “broken heart syndrome” significantly increases.
 
Broken heart syndrome is a temporary heart condition that's often brought on by stressful situations and extreme emotions. The condition can also be triggered by a serious physical illness or surgery.
 
Broken heart syndrome symptoms can mimic a heart attack. Common symptoms include:
 
Chest pain
Shortness of breath
 
I want to introduce a self-care method for this condition.
 
If they are caused by stressful situations due to COVID-19, the following self-care can treat the condition, which is introduced by Mr. Niki, an acupuncturist in Japan.
 
1. Find a tender point on the bone in the center of the chest at the level of your nipples, which is an acupuncture point CV-17 (Fig. 1).
2. Touch the tender point with the edge of a penny gently (Don’t press it hard into the skin) (Fig. 2).
3. Hold the penny for 5 seconds.
 
After doing this, instantly you could feel that your chest opens or you feel relaxed, and you could breathe deeply.
 
Whenever you feel stressed or can’t breathe deeply, please try this method.
 
What you need is just a penny!
 
CNN news article for reference

Chick here to check other cases treated with acupuncture treatment.

There are a lot of people who hurt their shoulders or upper back while walking their dogs.
 
The patient is a man in his 80s.
After he took his dog for a walk yesterday, the inside of his right shoulder blade started to hurt. He couldn’t sleep well because of the pain in the area last night.
 
1st Treatment
When he lay on his back, his right shoulder was floating higher than the left side and he complained about pain in the right side of his upper back. I gave him acupuncture to remove the pain from his neck to the inside of his right shoulder blade.
 
2nd Treatment (3days later)
He reported that the pain inside the shoulder blade was less and he could sleep at night without pain. I gave him acupuncture to remove pain inside the shoulder blade and loosen the area. After the treatment, there was more flexibility when I pressed his shoulder from the front to the back on the treatment table.
 
3rd Treatment (4 days later)
He reported that the pain inside the shoulder blade disappeared. His right shoulder which had been floating from the table higher than his left shoulder was at the same level as his left shoulder and there was flexibility when I pressed it toward the treatment table. I didn’t give him acupuncture for his upper back this day, though I treated his chronic hip joint pain that he had complained from the last treatment.

Check the other cases treated by acupuncture: Click here.

The patient is a woman in her 50s, who is a caregiver.
 
3 days ago when she tried to change the posture of a heavy person on the bed, she hurt her left low back. She feels pain when she walks and bend her back backward.
 
1st Treatment
When I checked her pulse, I thought this was a typical acute low back pain because her pulse was very tight. So I gave her the treatment for acute low back pain, removing tender spots on her low back and buttocks and attached a very short needle with sticker on her low back. She felt pain when she got up, so I added an adjustment of her rib cage. When I had her stand up and check her back, she felt much better, so I fished the first treatment.
 
2nd Treatment (2 days later)
Yesterday, when she moved the heavy person again, she felt pain in her right low back.  Today she feels pain in the center with bending backward and in each side with bending sideways.
 
Since she had pain on both sides of her low back and also the center of the low back, I chose to treat both sides of her low back with normal low back pain treatment. After the treatment, her low back was not improved at all. I added some needles to remove tender spots found when she stood up, but her low back pain didn’t change.
 
I thought she might have had another acute low back pain on her right side and asked her to lie on her side and gave the treatment for acute low back pain. When she stood up and checked her low back, her low back was not completely better, but was improved. I stopped treatment here to avoid too much amount of treatment.
 
3rd Treatment (2 days later)
2 days after the last treatment, her low back pain was much better. Only when she bend her back to the left, she felt pain on her left buttock. She was standing all day but didn’t do the work to move the heavy person. I treated her left low back and buttock and when she stood up, she still felt some pain with bending side way, so I found painful spots on her left buttock and removed them with a touch-up needle. I asked her to check her back again and this time she felt better. Since she felt much better on her low back, I finished the treatment for her acute low back pain.
 
At the second treatment, I couldn’t recognize another acute low back pain was happening on the other side at the beginning because I had no idea that 2 acute low back pain happening within a few days. I learned that I should carefully check the patient’s condition without preconceptions.