Song to Keep Up Your Sleeve

Hey everyone. This being my first blog entry, it would seem appropriate for me to go in to my story and maybe write a blog about my experiences with community acupuncture or something like that….that blog idea is in the shop, so I’ll save the spiel for another day and for now just say, HI! My name is Josh. Please be forewarned as well, propper grammar isn’t my strong point. I love run-on sentences, excessive use of commas, my spelling can be iffy, and I often tend to work in some slang that isn’t generally accepted or even used by anyone else other than…..well, me. Sometimes I’ll even create new grammar rules based solely on how it looks on paper aesthetically. Thanks for your dilligence in getting through it. Godspeed to you!

A Song to Keep Up Your Sleeve, a tune to hum.

A play on words, a practical tool.

Divine intervention, an ancient medical text.

I have always found myself giving nicknames. Often it’s for people, but places, things, situations, and any other type of nameable scenario might find itself a new name as well. The names often appear on their own accord. i don’t usually even know where they come from or why they do, but they do. And in the same way the appear and take form, they usually begin to change form and take on a life of their own by morphing in to continued variations on the theme. Not unlike the telephone game, a name might end up quite far from its original reference it was given. It becomes part of an oral history through time though, adapting to the needs and serving the given moment. I think of Chinese medicine and acupuncture in this regard too. Through time Chinese medicine is always born again and again, shaped by the context of the given time period, continent, culture, etc. and that is what is so powerful and beautiful about it. Its fluid. The rules by nature always change and it is a part of a bigger cycle of events than we can even imagine. As we explore and continue to dive in to its depths, we are learning not just the names of the old songs and how to sing them, but HOW to sing so that we may write our own songs.

With that said here is my current playlist of nicknames for point protocols. still trying to find the ICD-9 codes so I can bill insurance for them….

Deck the Galls: (Gb34/Beside 3 miles/GB41). Disperse!

The David Copperfield: When you’ve hand scanned the body for needles after a treatment 4x, but when they get up, ouch! somehow you missed one…and St36 of all places?!?

Full Metal Jacket: (Ht3/7, PC3/7, LU5/9). Mirrors all leg meridians!

The M.F.ML10 Experience!:(Miriam Lee 10 points). Like gettin tossed a softball for a home run treatment. Don’t ask what the needles were dipped in….

The Jean Claude Van Damme: Usually happens when you are getting too comfortable and when your face is a little too close to the foot. You needle in to LV3 and have to quickly dodge an unexpected foot to the face.

Tripple Jiao, Tripple Ow: Is it just me or is almost every point on this meridian sketchy.

Renny and the Jets:(4 doors, ren6/12 and St25s). sometimes you just gotta get things moving.

The Bermuda Triangle:(bi tong & yin tang). Because sinus congestion disappears. har har.

The Dark One Cometh:(St8s). eh.

The Krueger a.k.a. Nightmare On Well st.: (Any of Richard Tan’s 1:4 or jing well heavy treatments). You do want your patient’s to come back right?

Eureka! a.k.a There Will Be Blood… (That big fat purple vein at UB40 taunting you to a duel).

The Shenhawk:(Du20/24 and Yin Tang). Who said Punk rock and acupuncture have nothing in common?

Highway to the Danger Zone:(Ren 1/Du 1 return treatment). I heard the Zang fool has a whole practice built on this protocol alone. funny how everyone fits the Differential Dx.

The Chicago Typewriter: Your patient with what seemed to be a simple case of digestive upset is 8 treatments deep…with ZERO improvement. Oops, did I really just put in 45 needles???

The Jean Paul Sartre: You are stuck. Complex case and no idea where to begin. you start putting in needles anyway, but with each insertion you wonder WHY did i just do that point!? and it only gets progressively worse as you seem to have no mental or physical control over the process and can only bear witness to each of the next points going in with even less of a reason than the one before it….the screams in your head are getting louder and louder, demanding to know WHY!?! at the end of your shift you collapse in to the deepest darkest recesses of the known and unknown universes and swear off all human contact forever. But you eventually pull it together and come out of your complete mental collapse over the futility of it all a few days later, put your clothes back on and come down from the mountain top only to run in to your patient at the grocery store….. It was the best treatment she’s ever had….those voices again….WHY!!!???

Contraindicated protocols: 

-the schedule emptier:(at least 1/2 or Tungs points). If you’re not needling the hand/palm, face, or  finger, you are bleeding tai yang in to a bucket.

-no SHUS, no shirt, no service: self explanatory.

-talkin’ bad insertion blues: it’s bad.

Author: chaitime

Born down in a deadman's town. The city of sin itself. I was self raised on a steady diet of punk rock, social activism, and fantasies of disappearing in to the deserts of the southwest never to return again. I now find myself somewhere in between them all, slingin' needles at Tucson Acupuncture Co-op in Tucson, AZ.