There is a patient who visits my practice every two weeks. She came with knee pain last time. After the treatment, the knee pain disappeared, but I judged that one treatment was not enough to heal her knee and told her to come back in a week instead of two weeks. She came back in a week. I asked her a usual question, “How do you feel today?” She said, “I forgot why I came last week.” “You had knee pain last week.” “My knee is all better.” It is good to hear that her knee was improved so much that she forgot what her symptom was. Cozy Acupuncture is located in Witch City Mall in Salem, MA, specializing in pain management such as knee pain, low back pain, sciatica, neck pain, shoulder pain, menstrual pain, etc.
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After each acupuncture treatment for the patient with pain in the lower body such as low back pain, knee pain, ankle pain, etc., I usually ask the patient to stand up and move the body to check the area where has been painful before the treatment. At this point, if the patient feels tightness, uncomfortable feeling or a little bit of pain, I touch a point on the abdomen with a round-tip needle with the patient standing. After a few seconds of touching with the needle, I ask the patient to move the body again. In a lot of cases, the pain or tightness goes away or gets better. Before I had found this abdominal point, I asked the patient to lie on the table again and tried to find tightness or painful points and gave a treatment to remove them. But now I don’t need to have my patient lie on the table again, so I feel this abdominal point is very convenient and effective for touch-up treatment. Cozy Acupuncture is located in Witch City Mall in Salem, MA, specializing in pain management such as knee pain, low back pain, sciatica, neck pain, shoulder pain, menstrual pain, etc.
Call today to set up your appointment: 617-584-8703 Book now Online I’m treating a patient with hearing loss by acupuncture. She has had a hearing loss for a few years. She wants to talk with her grandchildren without trouble when they visit her. I treated her 3 times for hearing loss. After the second treatment, she said that she could lower the volume of TV and could hear more clearly when she talked with her friend. At the beginning, her left ear had weak hearing, but in the last treatment, hearing of her right ear was weaker. Hearing loss is an ear problem, but I’m not treating around ears though I treat around ears in the case of ringing in ears (tinnitus). I hope that her hearing will be improved more by continuous treatments. Cozy Acupuncture is located in Witch City Mall in Salem, MA, specializing in pain management such as knee pain, low back pain, sciatica, neck pain, shoulder pain, menstrual pain, etc.
Call today to set up your appointment: 617-584-8703 Book now Online 2.1.4 Yin and Yang (Taste)
Let’s think about the Yin and Yang of tastes. Sweet, sour and spicy hot belong to Yin taste. Salty and bitter belong to Yang taste. Yin taste loosens up your body. Yang taste tightens up your body. When you feel tense, if you take something sweet, you can feel relaxed. When you cough because your bronchioles are tightened up, drink a glass of water with some drops of vinegar, and you will ease the cough. You need to be careful about the spicy hot taste, because most people think it warms up the body. Yes, spicy hot taste temporarily warms up the body, but after that, it chills the body. Spicy hot is good to take in the summer, but if you take it a lot in the winter, it will be a cause of coldness in your body, resulting in various kinds of disease. That is why spicy food is usually eaten in hot countries. Korea is not a hot country, but Korean people eat a lot of spicy food; for example, Kimchee. Before red pepper was sent to Korea from Japan, their Kimchee was not hot. Since they started eating a lot of spicy food, it is said that Korean women have had a lot of gynecological diseases, because it makes their body cold. In western medicine, salt is treated as a bad guy, but salt is very important for the body. What you need to do is take good salt instead of refined salt. It is recommended to take good sea salt, because good sea salt contains a lot of different kinds of minerals and will not cause high blood pressure. Salt contracts our body. If you are lacking in salt, you can’t move your body. Also, salt can stop bleeding. If you have a bleeding stomach ulcer, it is good to take sea salt and ground sesame covered by a cachet. Salt also has the power to sterilize. If you have a urinary tract infection, it is effective to put a handful of salt in the bathtub and warm your lower body. Bitter taste has the function of neutralizing the taste in your mouth. If you eat spicy food and still feel heat in your mouth, you can take something bitter and the spicy taste in your mouth will disappear. Salt tightens your body and get rid of water from the body so it is not good to take salty taste too much, but bitter taste just tightens the body so there is no too much to take bitter taste. I was talking about the Yin and Yang of the 5 tastes up until now, and I would like to talk about one more taste which is very important. That is astringency. This taste may not be familiar to you. When you eat a young persimmon, you experience this taste. Astringency has very strong Yang energy and has the function of contraction. Dried persimmons have even more Yang energy because water, which is Yin energy, has been removed. So when women eat persimmons after childbirth, their uterus and abdominal muscles get firm, resulting in having early menstruation. Persimmons are also effective for continual diarrhea. Even if the persimmons are not dried, as long as they are all natural, they are still effective. In the case of bleeding within the brain (cerebral hemorrhage), it is good to drink the extracted astringency of persimmons in order to stop bleeding. Astringency of a persimmon has the function of dissolving blood clots, so in the case of chronic cerebral infarction or hemorrhage, it is good to do the following: Put ground persimmon (1 lb.) in one cup of black or brown rice vinegar (200 cc) and keep it over night. The next day strain and drink it by the amount of one quarter cup (50 cc) everyday. However, you need to know that unnatural persimmons, in which astringency is removed by alcohol, have strong Yin energy. Therefore, on the contrary, they make the body cold. Overview The patient is a 36 year-old male presented with mild alcohol addiction. He can’t help but drink at least 3 bottles of beer a day. He also has depression, low energy, poor concentration in the afternoon and seasonal allergy. The acupuncture treatment included Individual Acupuncture Treatment for Adult to strengthen his Liver energy, treatment for addiction, and symptomatic treatment for seasonal allergy when the symptom showed up. His desire to drink gradually decreased and from around 10th treatment, he didn’t need to drink even in social settings. His emotion became stable and happy, energy became higher and his concentration in the afternoon was back. When he was suffering from seasonal allergy symptoms such as sneezing, runny nose, the treatment to control the symptoms were added. At the 14th treatment, the course of treatments for alcohol addiction was finished. Discussion He didn’t have any pressure-pain points on his body when I checked his body, so I didn’t address removing the painful points. Instead, I tried to improve the flow of his energy. I used ear acupuncture points for addiction. I left needles on those points for about 30 minutes, so while I was treating his back, the needles were retained on his ears. I also used one or two press-balls on his ear. There was up and down about the amount of alcohol, but it gradually decreased and his urge to drink was gradually lost as well. His mood became stable and he seldom felt depressed. The symptoms of addiction like smoking, alcohol or other mental problems like anxiety, light depression seem like decreasing and being controlled after 10 treatments or 3 months of treatments. If you want to stop or reduce cigarettes or alcohol, we’re here to help!
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Neck pain is a common symptom in acupuncture clinic, but in the case that there is radiation to other parts of the body, the condition is sometimes complicated. In this case, because of the recent onset, it took a relatively short time to heal. The patient is a 36 year-old woman presented with 3 weeks of pain and tingling sensation from her neck to her right arm, fingers, chest and upper back. She wakes up every 2 hours due to burning pain. She had 3 acupuncture treatments within 11 days, and pain and tingling sensation in her neck, arm, fingers, chest and upper back disappeared. Acupuncture Treatment Detail The acupuncture treatment is based on Acupuncture Treatment for Adult. [Treatment 1] When I asked her to move her neck, she felt pain inside her shoulder blade when she bent her neck backward and also felt pain in her right shoulder when she bent her neck forward. Fig. 1 shows the painful points with pressure on her body when I checked her body during diagnosis. The treatment included strengthening Liver energy, leaving 3 needles on her head for 10 minutes and touching some points with a round-tip needle to remove the painful points with pressure. After the treatment, her painful points disappeared. [Treatment 2] She reported that the next day of the first treatment she felt pain, but since then there was neither pain or tingling sensation. There was no pain in her back and right shoulder when she bent her neck forward and backward. The treatment was similar to the first treatment, but much fewer acupuncture points were used to remove the painful points. [Treatment 3] She reported that she felt tingling sensation once, but other than that, there was no pain. On this day, she had headache on her right temple and back of her head. She said that she maybe drank too much wine last night and she had had migraine headache occasionally. Fig. 2 shows the painful points with pressure on her body before Treatment 3. The number of painful points decreased considerably, compared to Treatment 1 (Fig. 1). Maybe because of headache, I strengthened Spleen energy instead of Liver energy. The treatment for the pain was similar to the previous treatment. After the treatment, there was no abnormality in her neck and headache also disappeared, so the course of acupuncture treatments for pain and tingling sensation from her right neck to arm, fingers, chest and upper back was finished. Part 1
Body Temperature And Strength of Immune System Before you read below, please check your body temperature. How was that? If your body temperature is lower than 97 degrees F, it is considered as low body temperature. Simply speaking, if your body temperature is low, you are in a condition of disease or your immune power is weak, that is, you easily get sick. On the contrary, if your body temperature is high, your immune power is strong, that is, you don’t get sick easily. So how can we raise our body temperature? 1.1 Low Body Temperature There is a similarity among many people who have chronic diseases. It’s that their body temperature is low. Please try to check your body temperature. If it is less than 96.8 degrees F (36 degrees C), then your body temperature is too low. If your body temperature is low, this means that your immune function is not strong enough, and this results in an internal environment which easily becomes imbalanced and gets sick. I will talk about the details of this in the next section. Here I would like to introduce something you can do at home to improve your low body temperature - taking a bath. Bathing makes your blood circulation better and your body temperature higher, resulting in the strengthening of your immune power.
2.5 Heart Energy
The Heart sends Blood all over the body. The Heart belongs to Fire energy within the 5 organs’ energy. (Liver=Wood, Spleen=Earth, Lung=Metal, Kidney=Water) Heart energy is Fire energy, which means Heart energy is hot. So Heart energy is the strongest Yang energy within 5 organs’ energy. The Heart repeats the movement of contraction all day without any rest and generates heat which is necessary for the whole body. So in the case of menopausal disorders, when the Heart energy stagnates, we experience heat rising suddenly from the chest, causing a hot flash, palpitations, and profuse sweating. In Western medicine, our mental activity is regarded as controlled by the brain, but in Eastern medicine, it is regarded as controlled by Heart. So when we have some trouble in our mind, we feel tightness in our chest, or when we are nervous, our heart rate gets faster. Mental disorders, hallucinations and auditory hallucinations are considered to be Heart energy problems. As the Liver controls the eyes, the Heart controls the tongue. If there is dysfunction of the brain, speech becomes unclear, so it is important to move the tongue a lot for preventing senile dementia. The organ which has strong relationship to the Heart and also has Fire energy is the Small Intestine. So if there is a problem in the Small Intestine, the tongue gets some pimples or gets rough. Recently there is a doctor who states that the heart is in the Small Intestine. Overview The patient is a man with the age of 40s. When he played basketball 3 weeks ago, he felt pain in his right buttock. He started to feel pain from his right buttock to the outside of his lower leg a week ago, went to ER and took prescribed medicine, but the pain didn’t go away so that he visited my acupuncture clinic. The pain at the time of standing walking gradually disappeared. He had severe pain appearing especially around the outside of his right lower leg while he is sleeping, but it disappeared after 6th treatment. Remaining tightness around his right buttock and the back of his right thigh disappeared after 9th treatment, so the course of acupuncture treatment for the sciatica from his right buttocks to his right lower leg ended at 10th treatment. Acupuncture Treatment The treatment is based on Individual Treatment for Adult. There was weakness in his Liver energy, so I strengthened his Liver energy by using Liver points on his leg. Painful points with pressure were located on his right buttock, around IT band and on Gall bladder and Stomach meridians on his right lower leg. The number of painful points with pressure gradually decreased and it also became gradually easier to remove those painful points. I only used distal points with round-tip needles to remove the painful points with pressure. As a home therapy, I marked 2-3 points and had him put a penny or aluminum foil on the points for 30-45 minutes every night. Discussion After the first treatment, he felt a little better so that when he went back home, he did gardening and the condition got worse. Before starting the first treatment, I explained him to be careful at the beginning of treatments, but it was not enough. It is understandable that you want to do something more when you feel okay to do that, but that can make the symptom worse and the time of healing longer. But since then, he didn’t do anything making the symptom worse, visited my clinic for follow-up treatments as I instructed and got better as I expected. If you are suffering from sciatica even after you have tried various things, we’re here to help! Cozy Acupuncture in Salem, MA specializes in Pain Management.
Call today to set up your appointment: 617-584-8703 Book now Online The patient is a 6 years-old girl.
She sometimes comes to my clinic with symptoms like sleeping problem or stuffy nose. This time she has had dry and rough skin around her left wrist for a few weeks. She also has 5 bug bites on her legs which are red and swollen. According to her mother, she got the bug bites the day before. I gave her pediatric acupuncture treatment shown in the video of Pediatric Acupuncture. In addition to Pediatric Acupuncture Treatment, I touched around the area of rough skin with a round tip needle. For the swelling due to bug bites, I tapped around each bug bite with another round tip needle to remove heat. When she came to the second treatment, the swelling and redness around the bug bites were all gone. The roughness around her left wrist decreased. So I gave her pediatric acupuncture and only additional touching needles on the rough skin around her left wrist. On the third treatment, the roughness around her left wrist was almost gone except only a part of it so that I gave her the same treatment as the second one and ended the treatments for the rough skin. [discussion] I think the rough skin around the wrist was caused by the weakness of her Lung energy because she had signs on Lung related acupuncture points, though she didn’t have any cold-related symptoms. In the case of adult, I usually use heart therapy called moxa for bug bites, but tapping around bug bites was as effective as moxa for pediatric treatment. Reference: Pediatric Acupuncture at Cozy Acupuncture in Salem, MA |
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