​The patient had been coming to my clinic for light depression and lack of focus. One day he told me that he also had had a ringing in his left ear for a few years and we started the acupuncture treatment for the ringing in the ear as well.
 
The treatment was retaining needles at the acupuncture points specially for a ringing in ears located on the left side of the head in addition to the whole-body treatment.
 
The interval of the treatments was once a week until the 6th treatment and then every other week until the 10th treatment.
 
There was up and down about the condition of the ringing noise, but gradually decreased and since he said that he hadn’t noticed the ringing noise very much in his daily life at the 10th treatment, the series of treatment for a ringing in the ear ended.
 
I asked him about the noise in his ear when he came for his regular treatments, but it still seemed calm after that so that I didn’t give him the treatment for a ringing in the ear.

First, let's check if your spine is distorted.
​​
How to check the distortion of your spine
 
(1) Put your heels, buttocks, shoulders and head on the wall without your hands touching the wall (Fig. 0-1).
(2) Raise your right leg slowly and keep it for 5 seconds (Fig. 0-2).
(3) If you can keep your right leg up, raise your left leg slowly and keep it up for 5 seconds (Fig. 0-3).
(4) If you lose the balance when you raise either leg, your spine can be distorted to that side. If you fall to the left when you raise your left, your spine is distorted to the left. If you fall to the right when you raise your right leg, your spine is distorted to the right (Fig. 0-4).
 

​Exercise to improve the distortion of the spine - Crawling exercise
 
The points are:
 
(1) Crawl in the opposite direction of your distortion (Fig. 1).
 
When you lift up your left leg, if you fall to the left, you need to crawl clockwise (right-handed), and when you lift up your right leg, if you fall to the right, you need to crawl counterclockwise (left-handed).
 
(2) The size of the circle to crawl
 
Crawl a large circle at the beginning and gradually make the circle smaller because that makes the muscles supporting the spine slowly stretched and the range of motion of the spine wider without strain.
 
Check the distortion of the spine (Thoracic spine)
 
Extend both your arms, put your palms together and check the tips of your fingers (Fig. 1-1 & 1-2). If the tips of the fingers are misaligned, there can be distortion of thoracic spine (Fig. 1-3).

​Results after 1 week’s trial
 
Fig. 2 shows the result of 70 years old male. His back became straightened up and the flexibility when he bent forward became better by 13 cm (about 5 inches).
 
Crawling exercise not only fixes the distortion of the lumber spine but also loosens up the tension of the muscles around, improve the range of motion and makes it easier to bend forward.
 
Fig. 3 shows the result of 24 years old female who had had the distortion of the thoracic spine. Her rounded back became straighter and the line between her nose and jaw returned to vertical, which means the distortion of her cervical spine was also improved (Fig. 4). The tip of her fingers fit without misalignment, which means the distortion of her thoracic spine was improved.
 
Other 5 examinees’ postures were improved as well.

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​A patient who usually comes to my clinic for low back pain or menstrual pain came for pain in the shoulder muscle where flu shot had been injected. She had had the flu shot 10 days ago and since then, she was not able to raise her left arm due to pain in the area where flu shot had been injected and she felt tingling sensation in all her left fingers the day before.
 
When I checked the area, there were some tender points on the muscle so that the pain was a side-effect of the injection.
 
After the overall treatment, I relieved the pain on the muscle using an acupuncture point around the neck and asked her to raise her left arm. But she couldn’t, so I checked her shoulder again and found painful points in the shoulder joint.
 
It seemed like the pain in the shoulder was not related to the flu shot, but more like simple shoulder joint problem. So I checked her upper back and found a tight point along the shoulder blade. I asked her to raise her left arm with pressing the tight point. This time she could raise her arm. So I tapped the tightness with my tool to loosen the tightness and asked her to raise her arm again. She could raise her arm.
 
According to her, she has had a shoulder problem every year after a flu shot. Could the flu shot tighten the muscles around the neck, shoulder and upper back?

​Distortion of the cervical spine causes symptoms like stiff neck and shoulders, headache, ringing in ears, insomnia, etc. and distortion of the lumber spine causes symptoms like low back pain, constipation, tingling sensation in the leg, etc.
 
3 major factors causing distortion of the spine
 
(1) Bad posture
(2) Decline of the muscle
(3) Osteoporosis
 
Especially distortion of the spine caused by osteoporosis is very dangerous. Osteoporosis causes a fracture without any impact and subjective symptoms. According to a research, 63 % of women with the age of 60 and over whose spines are distorted have had a fracture.
 
The bone with osteoporosis can’t resist the weight of the body and is crushed. When one bone (vertebrae) is crushed, the bone directly under it is crushed and then the next bone is crushed as shown in the above, because distortion of the spine becomes greater and more weight is applied on the bone. This is called chain fracture. If chain fracture is progressed, a bent back can’t be restored.
 
The peak of bone density is at the age of 20s to 30s and after that, it gradually goes down. Women’s osteoporosis patients are 3 times as many as men’s patients because around age of 50, women’s bone density suddenly goes down due to the decrease of estrogen caused by menopause.
 
Eating a red food and a white food together helps absorption of calcium
 
The main cause of osteoporosis is lack of calcium.
 
The calcium absorption ratio at the age of 10s is about 45 %, but it becomes 30 % at the age of 30s and becomes the half at the age of 70s. So even if the same amount of calcium is taken, absorbed calcium deceases with age.
 
The red food is Umeboshi plum (Fig. 1) containing citric acid that raises the absorption ratio of calcium. Calcium is difficult to be absorbed in the body. The calcium absorption ratio of milk which is considered absorbing calcium very well is only about 40 %. 60 % of calcium is discharged from the body. Fish’s ratio is about 30 % and vegetable’s ratio is about 20 %. But citric acid raises the absorption ratio of calcium.
 
The white food is Shirasu, which is the young of sardine, herring or eel, containing 5 times as much as milk (520 mg/100 g).
 
Eating Umeboshi Plum and Shirasu together raises calcium absorption ratio by about 1.5 times.
 
Shirasu also contains vitamin D a lot which raises the absorption of calcium.
 
The amount of calcium required for a day is the same as 600 ml of milk, which is equal to a cup of rice in soup with Umeboshi plum and Shirasu (Fig. 2).
 
Japanese stock without salt is good enough because Umeboshi plum contains salt, or you can spread bonito flakes before pouring hot water into rice with Umeboshi plum and Shirasu.
 
Another red and white food is Umeboshi plum and mayonnaise which is made of eggs rich in vitamin D. The recipe is mix Umeboshi and mayonnaise 1 to 2 ratio. You can dip some food in it. (Fig. 4)

​Other effects of Umeboshi plum
 
Mumefural contained in plum flesh extract makes the blood flow smooth and vanillin contained in plum flesh extract has an effect on burning fat.

​A patient with the age of 60s came to my clinic complaining pain and tingling sensation from the neck to the right shoulder.
 
Spurling test and Jackson test, which are the examinations to check if there is cervical nerve root compression which cause neck pain, were positive, so I expected that this case would be hard and take long
 
But against my expectation, after the first treatment, both tests were negative and no pain or tingling sensation with the movements of his neck though tingling sensation happened occasionally.
 
At the fourth treatment, there was no tingling sensation, either. When he came back for check-up in 2 weeks, there was still no pain and tingling sensation so that the course of acupuncture treatments ended.
 
At the first treatment, I used a tool, which gave a little strong vibration by tapping, on the tightness around his neck. From the second treatment, I just used touching needle technique with round-tip tools since the tests for cervical spondylosis were negative, but he got better much faster than I expected. 
​

When blood clots (Fig. 1) circulate in our body and reach the brain, stroke is caused.
 
Blood clots cause life threatening condition, but recently it has turned out that there is a method to remove blood clots.
 
In our body, there is substance that dissolves blood clots so that we can dissolve blood clots by ourselves.
 
The substance in our body is t-PA.
 
Actually medication using t-PA is practicalized in the field of Emergency medicine.
 
A woman with the age of 50s was brought to the ER because of stroke. She was not able to raise her arm and not able to make a fist with the hand. 2 hours after the administration of t-PA and catheter treatment, her condition was dramatically improved by dissolving blood clots by t-PA, and she could raise her arm and make a fist.
 
If you can secrete t-PA that is produced in our body well, you can have the constitution that is hard to form blood clots causing stroke or heart attack.
 
When bleeding from a wound, a scab is formed by solidifying blood. Blood has the solidifying function to stop bleeding. Blood clots are the same as a scab. The solidifying function is important even when there is no bleeding, because the inside of blood vessels is always damaged by the smallest things and what covers up the damage is blood clots.
 
What makes it easy to form blood clots?
 
One day of a 43 years-old woman’s life was observed and after some events, her blood flow was checked. When she was eating breakfast with her son, he knocked over a glass and spilled the water. Her blood flow after this event was shown in Fig. 2. When she found a cockroach made of rubber that was placed by a staff of this experiment, her blood flow was checked as shown in Fig. 3.
 
Blood clots are easily formed by slight nervousness, stress or fear.
 
Long time ago, human beings were living by hunting. They had to fight against a bigger prey and that heightened the risk of injury, so when they felt the risk of injury, their blood was prepared for it in advance, meaning blood was easily solidified.
 
How to increase t-PA
 
The method to increase t-PA dissolving blood clots is walking.
 
The point is fast walking. When you walk fast, the blood flow becomes faster and the inside wall of the blood vessel receives strong stimulation and t-PA is secreted more and the power of t-PA is elevated.
 
There is a research result that 3 months’ aerobic exercises made the speed to dissolve blood clots became faster by about 20 %.
 
If you make your stride the length of your shoe wider, you can walk as fast as recommended.
​

​What do you think the cause of high blood pressure?
 
One of the major causes is too much intake of salt so that a lot of people try to reduce the intake of salt.
 
But it has turned out that people who have high blood pressure because they can’t discharge the salt from the body are increasing.
 
High blood pressure is the condition that the pressure against the wall of blood vessels is high.
 
At present, if the top number is more than 140 mmHg or the bottom number is more than 90 mmHg, it is considered high blood pressure. If the condition of high blood pressure continues for a long time, the blood vessel which was soft becomes hard and fragile, which is hardening of the artery. In near future, it can cause heart attack or stroke.
 
The high blood pressure preventative measures recommended conventionally are (1) reducing salt and (2) doing moderate exercises.
 
(1) Reducing salt
 
When you eat salty food, the amount of salt in the blood increases, water is absorbed and the amount of the blood increases. As a result of that, the pressure against the wall of the blood vessel goes up. On the contrary, if you don’t take salt, the blood flow becomes calm and the pressure against the wall of the blood vessel lowers down.
 
(2) Doing moderate exercises
 
When you do moderate exercises, your body tries to deliver more oxygen to the muscle and the blood vessel becomes wider. That makes the blood flow calmer, resulting in the pressure against the wall of the blood vessel lower down.
 
But there are people whose effort to carry out the above preventative measures comes to nothing.
 
People who can’t improve their blood pressure with reducing salt and exercises are difficult to discharge salt from their body. Even if the intake of salt is small, their blood pressure goes up because salt remains in their body.
 
If you can’t discharge 80 % of salt through urine excluding sweat, you are considered that you can’t discharge salt properly.
 
The difference between people who can discharge salt and people who can’t is how to sleep at night.
 
What kind of sleep leads to storing salt in the body?
 
If you can sleep well, you can discharge salt, but if you can’t sleep well, you can’t discharge salt.
 
If you can sleep well, you don’t have stress, but if you can’t sleep well, you have stress.
 
The key to cause high blood pressure is hidden in the saliva secreted while sleeping.
 
The saliva of people who can’t sleep well with high blood pressure contains cortisol a lot. People who secrete cortisol in the middle of night try to raise the blood pressure using salt so that they can’t discharge salt and salt is stored in their body.
 
How to improve sleeping quality to promote discharging salt in the middle of night
 
The method is one nostril breathing method.
 
Basically, when we breathe slowly, we can expand alveoli in the lung and activate the parasympathetic nerve. Breathing through one nostril makes breathing deeper and activates the parasympathetic nerve more.
 
One nostril breathing method:
 
(1) Hold one nostril with your finger and breathe in from another nostril for about 10 seconds (Fig. 1).
(2) Breathe out slowly from the same nostril.
(3) Repeat this breathing method alternatively (right, left, right…) for 10 minutes before sleeping.
 
Experiment
 
3 persons whose salt discharge had been less than 80 % and quality of sleep had been not good continued the above breathing method before their sleep for 3 days, and their salt discharge ratios were improved by more than 20 % and they became able to sleep well through the night.