Ingri: OK, in this segment I’m going to show you a treatment of acupuncture on Grady who has back pain.
OK Grady, I’m going to now do your pulse diagnosis, and what’s interesting here is we have 12 different meridians in your whole system that show up on your pulses. So I’m just going to feel these really quickly. I’m suspecting what happens with your pulses when you have back pain is that they get a little bit sharper, they hit a little bit hard against my finger and that means back pain and extra tension. So it shows up in the blood vessels cause there are smooth muscles in your blood vessel wall. It shows what kind of muscle tension you have, and I just want to see how much else is going on in your system besides that. I know you have back pain and a little bit of stomach stuff. There’s been some stress lately, so that’s what we’re looking at.
Can I see your tongue as well?
Grady: Sure.
Ingri: Stick it out a little farther. What I see on your tongue is how your digestive system is and how tired you are. You’ve been working really hard. There’s a little teeth indentation on the sides of your tongue, and that just shows that you’re a little bit tired. You’ve been working really hard, and there’s a little bit of stress going on.
Let me see one more time. OK, looks good. I think you’re really healthy. The tongue coloring is good. The tongue coating is good. Just a little bit of tiredness, maybe you’ve been a little bit sick lately, and that shows up on your tongue. Your pulses are showing me a little bit of the tension that’s going on in your muscles. What I’d like you to do is lie down face down so I can checkout your back muscles and give you a treatment.
Grady: OK
Ingri: OK Grady, I’m going to be treating your lower back here and here. Let me show you what it feels like. This is the first needle. How’s that feel, it didn’t hurt did it?
Grady: No.
Ingri: You didn’t feel any pain there. This is the next one, it goes right here. Now this is where your lower back is hurting, but what I’m going to do is I’m going to treat some muscles farther up your back to help clear some of the tension that’s in this particular pathway. As I showed you on the dummy earlier, you’ve got a whole row of points up the back, and as we clear these upper points you’ll see that this helps your lower back. And that’s what we’re going to be doing here. How’s that feel?
Grady: Good.
Ingri: It doesn’t hurt, does it?
Grady: No.
Ingri: What’s neat about acupuncture is that it doesn’t hurt. The needles are going to stay in place now for about 10 - 15 minutes, and it’s very gentle, it doesn’t hurt, and it has actually a relaxing effect.
Now here’s the deal Grady. We were talking a little bit about how many treatments we’re going to do now. I want you to think of just 2 or 3 or 4 treatments that are going to really improve dramatically the symptoms that you’re having: your back pain and some of your stomach pain. So we’re going to do some symptom clearing right away. And those are fairly close. Those are going to be every other day. So the next couple of days we’re going to do some treatments just to get you feeling better. Then we’re going to do a couple of treatments, maybe 3 or 4, to work more deeply in time and clear out the cause for your back pain. All that extra tension that’s in your muscles has gotten you into trouble. We’re going to clear all that out. So even though you’re feeling pretty fine, we’re still going to dig a little bit deeper. The needles are still on the surface, and the treatment is a surface treatment, but it works more deeply into your system and clears out that extra tension that’s in your back. After that we can do 1 treatment per month or per season, as you like, just to keep you having much more energy and feeling much looser about how your muscles are working. So your want to be able to have the tension to work properly but I think an occasional treatment will just keep you really fine.
OK, in closing I wanted to say thank you for watching what we were doing. I want you to realize that acupuncture is a holistic therapy; treats everything. Any condition can be treated. We look at the acute symptoms. We also look at the causes through time. And it doesn’t hurt. It’s really painless and gentle, very dramatic, very effective.
Thank you.