Treatment Modalities

At every visit, a customized, personalized sequence of modalities will be chosen for you. Here is a list of the most common ones that I use.

Acupuncture

Just as a guitar has strings that are tuned to a specific tone to create beautiful music, your body has lines of influence that run through your muscles, organs and connective tissue, connecting you into one whole instrument from top to bottom. When these lines, called meridians or channels, are at just the right tension, you are in tune and the resulting music is expressed as a healthy, harmonious life. When they are too tight, or too loose, you experience pain, fatigue, emotional difficulties, and other symptoms. Acupuncture is a retuning of your body, relaxing what is too tight and toning what is too lax.

In addition to classical acupuncture, I often address musculoskeletal and painful conditions by inserting the needles into trigger points (hardened, painful knots of contracted muscle tissue) or motor points (sites where the nerves that control the muscles are particularly accessible).

Tuina Massage and Manual Therapy

Tuina ("tway nah", traditional Chinese massage) forms the backbone of my approach to manual therapy. Tuina creates space in the body, between bones, tendons and muscles, so that blood, body fluids and energy can flow smoothly. Spasms relax. Free movement is restored to joints. After receiving tuina, you feel lighter, freer, longer, and more grounded. Relaxed, but more awake.

Many techniques are included in the art; pressure is applied with the fingers, wrists or elbows, muscles are gently pulled away from bone, tendons are plucked like guitar strings, joints are moved through their range of motion or subtly tractioned, and individual limbs or the entire body receive rhythmic vibrations to relax tensions.

In addition to traditional tuina, I incorporate many techniques from modern manual medicine, including manual trigger point releases, myofascial release, gentle joint movements and muscle stretches.

Chinese Herbal Medicine

Herbal medicine is a specialized way of looking at nutrition. Instead of the foods that we normally consume, less common but more potent substances are used to influence the dynamics of the body. Bark, roots, berries, leaves, flowers, twigs, minerals, and animals all nourish the organs and fluids, expel pathogens, and correct imbalances. Whether taken as soup, powdered concentrate, tinctures, or pills, herbs are an integral and vital part of Chinese medicine.