How In-Tune are You?

My practice has a new member:   a machine to measure the acupuncture meridians.  I have thought about naming him--or her.  I welcome any suggestions.

This machine, developed by a chinese medicine doctor,  gives an accurate read of how “in-tune” or “out-of-tune” the energy of your body is.  More than that, it will tell about what internal organs are imbalanced.

This, of course, has to do with chinese medicine, and it may make you wonder what is an acupuncture meridian anyway?  We could say, “It’s a pathway of vital energy that runs along certain points of the body.”  That’s true, but it doesn’t begin to answer what a meridian actually is or why they are important.  

When explaining a meridian, It is easier to take an entirely different approach.  Say for example, someone close to you dies.  You grieve, and this affects the energy of the lungs.  The vital energy of the lung emerges from the lung and runs  along a pathway of  points on each arm, ending at the thumbnail:  the lung meridian of chinese medicine.  

Why, you ask, does grieving affect my lungs?  It’s somewhat of a mystery, but not entirely.  There actually is a deeper reason too complicated for this newsletter.  For the moment, it is easier to convince you that it is true.  

If you think back to a time when you lost someone or something you loved, you may remember feeling a heaviness on the chest, needing to take deep breaths.  When you cry uncontrollably, your lungs are very much involved.  You breath irregularly, and if you tune in closely, you will feel a need to suck in air:  you sob.  

If, in dealing with a unexpected loss, you are able to sense a heaviness in your chest, you have just tuned in to a change in the vital energy in your lungs.  That change will be reflected in the energy of the lung meridian.  

But say, for some reason, the energy of your lungs is chronically low.  Feeling that way day in and day out, not having anything to compare it to, how would you ever know?  That’s the problem, you don’t know.  And it’s important.  

Why?  Because energy imbalances in your body have everything to do with the symptoms you are having--or about to be having.  By measuring the meridians with the machine, we can use this information to evaluate your current health as well as to track your progress and fine tune treatment.  

This is fundamentally different than the laboratory measurements we MD’s typically perform.  The problem with these lab measurements is that they only show up after the underlying energy has been messed up, and likely messed up for a significant amount of time.  

A vital energy pathway in your body can be messed up in one of two ways: It can have stagnant or toxic energy, or it can have too little, deficient energy.  

Perhaps you have heard of a case of someone who had lung cancer who felt a “coldness” in the chest.  People who are sensitive to energy could actually feel this lack of vital energy by putting their hands on the lung area and sensing that it is devoid of vitality.  What is this saying?  It is saying that the vital energy in the lungs is profoundly deficient in this case of lung cancer.  With the capacity to precisely measure, this lung energy deficiency would have shown up before the cancer actually emerged,  Now we are talking good medicine.  Why do you want a test to discover your lung cancer AFTER it is growing uncontrollably in you?  That’s the best you get right now.

My practice has always been an uncompromising devotion to the best medicine on the planet.  Almost four years in the planning, now I am taking another--vital--step in that direction.  Thanks for sticking around on the journey.  You will be rewarded for it.