Ashi Acupuncture – Education and Training Acupuncture and dry needling information, training and education. Medical based acupuncture with an emphasis on anatomy and technique.

Be a Great Acupuncture Clinician Luckily nowadays there are many people that are giving great coaching advice on how to have a successful acupuncture practice. They are experts in marketing, goal setting, psychology, “inner game”, and “outer game”. Their advice is truly valuable, but there is a piece that is often overlooked or assumed to be in place already. That is ...

Patient Communication If you are in practice for any length of time, you quickly realize that you are repeating the same messages over and over again. I mean over and over and over again! I call these “dialogues” or “scripts”. Taking some time to analyze and fine tune your dialogues is a very valuable exercise. Try to make them as ...

Photo by Rodrigo Senna https://www.flickr.com/photos/negativz/ My mentor has always been ahead of the curve in so many ways. It was nearly a decade ago that he stressed the importance of avoiding NSAIDS when receiving acupuncture. NSAIDS (Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs) are a group of drugs that include: Acetylsalicylic acid: aspirin, Bufferin, Excedrin Ibuprofen: Motrin, Advil Naproxen sodium: Aleve, Naprosyn These drugs counter inflammation ...

Qi Bo: “The earth is below man and within the Great Void.” Huang Di: “Is it supported?” Qi Bo: “The Grand Qi holds it.” This passage from Chapter 67 of the Su Wen1 illustrates a big part of what I am trying to convey about the word qi. It is being used to describe a specific force with a specific ...

Making a Practice Pad When I was in acupuncture school (in the late 80’s and early 90’s), little emphasis was placed on developing “hand skill” i.e. improving needling skill. I hope that has changed, but it probably hasn’t. It wasn’t until I met Dr. Naiming Chen, head of the acupuncture department of the Shandong provincial hospital, that I was seriously ...

Dry Needling History Dry needling is a term coined by Dr. Janet Travell in the 1980’s. This term distinguishes between trigger point injection, where an anesthetic or other substance is injected into a trigger point (a tender focal area of tension within a muscle or other soft tissue), and simply piercing the trigger point with a needle (hypodermic or filiform). ...

What the heck is qi? I’d like to throw some thoughts out there about qi. I hope this will start a discussion that could deepen our understanding. 抛砖引玉 Is qi real? It seems as though many practitioners in the west believe that qi is something like the picture above (a human hand with electricity coming out of it): Something akin ...

Huang Di In Michael Turk’s Library On May 31, 2014, I met with my mentor Michael Turk in his enviable library! With his help, I finalized my version of the first paragraph of the 13th chapter of the Huang Di Nei Jing Ling Shu. We also consulted other translations listed in the endnotes that influenced my rendition. Ling Shu 13, ...

Problems of the body can be divided into 2 broad categories, whether we are talking about ancient Chinese medicine or Modern Western medicine. Those categories are: External Medicine (orthopedics)- problems of the muscles/skeletal system or Internal Medicine– problems of the internal organs, glands, etc. We could further divide things but this is the basic concept. Some practitioners specialize in internal medicine and ...

How did acupuncturists in the West get the idea that there is a mystical energy that flows along certain invisible lines in the body?! Let’s explore the subject of “Qi” and “meridians” by looking at excerpts from three well respected textbooks; the CAM book (Chinese Acupuncture and Moxibustion), the “Shanghai Text” (Acupuncture a Comprehensive Text), and “A Manual of Acupuncture.” ...