Day: September 7, 2014

My sister Judy called me on my birthday during my first acupuncture training in Sri Lanka. Our father had had a heart attack and a blood clot in his left leg. She was afraid he might die….

I needed a break from my studies so I went to see my parents in Kansas. This is years before I had established my acupuncture clinic in Kansas City.

My father’s left leg was cool and white. The first day I put needles in it and it turned pink and warm.

I believe had we stopped there, he would have lived to his natural death with 2 legs. However, chemical intervention at a famous clinic here in the U.S. wiped out the arteries in his leg making, sadly, amputation inevitable. It was a sad story though it brought us closer together as father and son, as I “held his hand” through the whole process.

My patient had incontinence. She’s a petite woman in her seventies who’d given birth to 5 children. She had been suffering from incontinence for several years, even having a $30,000 machine surgically implanted in her body, which wasn’t working…

I’d tried Chinese acupuncture and moxabustion with some effect. Better, but not cured. Then I tried a Japanese acupuncture treatment of tonifying the lung.

The lungs in 5 element acupuncture theory is the mother of the kidney. In this theory, the mother organ (lung) nourishes the child (kidney). This is why some people with incontinence report that they involuntarily urinate when they sneeze.

This Japanese treatment worked, but the effect was less after two days. So I had her take daily a Chinese herbal formula to tonify her kidneys. Now she is much better and has her former and natural urge to urinate before she looses control.

Her life is better.