Video Game Teaches Acupuncturists Integrative Care
Where do acupuncture and Oriental medicine providers turn to learn how to integrate? Beginning in February, they can visit the Integrated Wellness Pavilion, which is being offered for the first time at the Spa & Resort Expo / Medical Aesthetics Conference & Expo in Los Angeles or they can order the home video versionQii (pronounced chee) from Nintendo.
Nintendo announced today that their eighth generation home video game center would pay homage to the roots of acupuncture and Oriental medicine by providing a home based AOM education and training console.
A distinguishing feature of the console is its wireless controller, the Qii remote, also known as the Qiimote, which can be used as a handheld pointing device and detects movement in five dimensions. The Qiimote can be used to both detect and treat acupoints much like cold-laser therapy combined with electromagnetic resistance point detection devices.
Another distinctive feature of the console is QiiConnect4More,which enables the home training system to receive messages and updates over the Internet while in standby mode,which allows the home schooled acupuncturists to receive up to the minute innovations in educational standards.Qii brings AOM into the new millennium, it is East meets West, meets East, thus coming full circle.
According to an interviewwith Nintendo’s game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, the concept involved focusing on a new form of practitioner interaction. “The consensus was that power isn’t everything for a console. Too many powerful consoles can’t coexist. It’s like having only ferocious dinosaurs. They might fight and hasten their own extinction.”In order to eliminate the possibility of a Godzilla vs. Mothra showdown at any of the acupuncture schools, pacifist Miyamoto, designed a “safer” virtual training program.
Integration into new virtual medical centers, where human and robotic patients are treated by human and robotic doctors, is the primary training goal of Qii. “We can’t let this ancient medicine fall by the wayside,” says Butch Snowes, director of Health Associates for Acupuncture Renaissance Programs (HAARP).“We don’t want acupuncture to end up like the pyramids of Egypt, some old relic that people pay to visit, we need to bring AOM into the new age of integrative medicine.”Competencies and outcomes of the Qii programs will be measurable in minutiae never before possible.The NCCAOM will be administering the point location practicum in conjunction with the QiiPoker, a virtual needle.
Community Acupuncture has a lot to gain from Qii training programs too.Not only will CA practitioners be able to treat dozens of patients remotely from their own home recliner, to the patients’ own home recliners, but a QiiPogo, virtual acupuncture treatment pogo-sticker, will allow those CA practitioners that still want to go into their clinics, to bounce from patient to patient, setting needles in a hop and an instant.
Available this Christmas from your local OM distributor.
Gerald Vizenor
Do you know the Minnesota/Ojibwe writer Gerald Vizenor?
Please read him. You’ll have a blast.
Love this post.
My brain feels like molasses
My brain feels like molasses this morning, so pardon me if many levels of this spoof go over my head. What gave me a little laugh though is the poke at our materialistic-consumerist bent which assumes we can become Qi masters (or enlightened) via a black box computer program.
This nonsense dovetails crazily well with my memory of my one and only chiropractic treatment where the guy rolled some gizmo hooked to computer wires up my back, later giving me a color coded printout showing exactly where my blockages were – as if that were some kind of permanent fact revealed by his computer God. That’ll be $100 please! (Not meant to be a jab at the chiro profession, just over priced hyped up techno-medicine.)
Not sure where this connects but I had a dream last night where I met an acupuncturist who was also an auto mechanic on the side. (Or maybe he was an auto-mechanic doing acupuncture on the side?) He also liked to do jigsaw puzzles in his spare time. I had left my laptop in his shop while commuting to my clinic (shadows from the past), and we had a conversation about acupuncture and healing. He wanted to share his methods with me, and I listened to a point. I especially like the unusual cut of his jigsaw pieces and the picture of a harbor seal in one corner of the puzzle. At the end of the dream, I told him (or perhaps myself), that more meditation was the answer to becoming a better practitioner (and probably every other question in the universe).
All true religions seek to gain access to that level of consciousness which is not ego-bound.&a
Thanks for
the Gerald Vizenor heads-up. Just found out that he wrote the script for
Harold of Oranges, a great, but hard to find movie.
Jordan sounds like he’s been studying Brautigan’s acupuncture manual.