Now I’m not talking about doing Acupuncture while the patient balances on one foot.
I’m referring to the often forgotten concepts of keeping your treatment “balanced” including the ideal position for your client to be in.
If you haven’t been thinking about keeping your treatments balanced – you definitely should be. It not only helps you work out your point selection, it may even improve your patient outcomes.
Balance Your Treatment
Although it isn’t incorrect to have your needles all in one place, it is preferred if you can spread things around a little.
Some leg points, some arm points, something on the abdomen or back. You don’t want to see only points on the lower body, or just the upper body (unless you are simply treating pain…perhaps).
Keep this concept of balancing your treatment in mind when you are refining your Acupuncture point selection.
Simply put, we want to be careful with encouraging too much energy to ascend or descend without considering our patients diagnosis. For example, people get headaches, most practitioners will add points to the head area to treat the headache. But what if the headache is caused but too much ascending energy (i.e. Liver Yang rising) and we just put needles at the top of the body? We may be making the problem worse by encouraging more ascending energy unless we add some points on the lower body to “balance” things out (i.e. LV2 or LV3).
Consider which direction the energy is for your patient and needle the different locations of the body appropriately.
Patient Position
What about the patient position? Which position is best for the issues you are treating? Should they be face up or face down or side lying?
Most clinical cases which come in will make it very obvious as to which position the patient should be in.
For example, if someone comes in with issues surrounding their back (neck/back/posterior shoulder pain or perhaps menstrual pain around the sacrum or sciatic pain etc.). Your client will certainly expect to get treatment on the back.
Likewise, if your client has digestive concerns, chest/lung concerns, stress and anxiety – you are likely to treat them supine or face up.
Bottom line, your treatment should somewhat reflect where the chief concern is located – and the patient position should accommodate this accordingly.
Yin and Yang of Body
Other theories which may influence which position your patient will be in involve the Yin and Yang of the body.
Yin is the more supple anterior part of the body…if you are wishing to nourish Yin you may want to treat face up.
Yang is the harder posterior of the body and if you wanted to nourish the Yang of someone, perhaps treating the back is more idea – theoretically speaking.
Side lying positions almost entirely involve the treatment of pain such as sciatic nerve related pain or perhaps for those who are later on in their pregnancy.
The concepts of Yin and Yang are not hard rules by any stretch but merely theoretical suggestions.
Acupuncture Point Selection
Choosing the right Acupuncture points for a given diagnosis can be hard for most students. Consider the above concepts to help refine the number of points. Remember, you want to choose somewhere between 6-8 points for most internal disorders (when treating pain, it may be more).
For more on these concepts on how to master Acupuncture point selection – take the Acupuncture Point Selection Mastery online course!
You can be a better Acupuncturist!