Some thoughts on seasonal treatments

A fellow five-element acupuncturist who lives in Malawi, Sophie Barrowcliff, has asked me about seasonal treatments, and this has made me think about the often tricky question of when exactly we should be giving them.  I quote here from her email:

 

“The seasons here are not just the opposite way round to the northern hemisphere, and I wanted to have your opinion on a question that has long bothered me.

We typically have a hot season, wet season, and dry  season.   The start of the rains, when everything bursts into life, is clearly spring. The hot rainy months are summer   And the end of the rains, the golden harvest time of autumn.  This is followed by our cold season (May-July), with cold winds streaming from the south and the lowest temperatures of the yearly cycle; it feels wintery. And yet it is only the start of autumn, the retreat back into the earth, with the leaves only coming off the trees in a month or two.

Sometime in August/September the winds change, it rapidly warms up, it gets progressively drier and everything feels dead and the land is parched: this is the dead inertia of winter. This is the conundrum for me - how winter here is actually hot!   So as I treat patients, I constantly vacillate as to which the best seasonal treatment is.”

I was taught about the elements and their relationships to the individual seasons in this country, Great Britain, which is in a temperate zone where each element can be allocated to a distinct season.  I have therefore never had to deal with the complications presented by the tropical weather which Sophie describes.  Her questions have set me thinking.

 

The purpose of giving horary and seasonal treatments is to help a patient’s energy attune itself better to the environmental energies around in terms of the time of day, for horary treatments, and of the relevant season, in terms of seasonal treatments.

It is easy to see that it is likely that a Metal person will benefit from having his/her Metal energy boosted during the hours of the day when Metal is at its strongest according to the 24-hour Chinese clock, which will be at that time according to whatever time-zone we are in anywhere on the planet.  The problem is how to adapt seasonal treatments to places where the seasonal differentiations are not clear-cut.  The question for Sophie is when exactly is she to decide when autumn is for her Metal patients.

 

I think it would be sensible for her to assess each seasonal treatment on its own merits, adapting to what may well be fluctuating temperatures and weather conditions.  For example, if she is treating a Water patient, it might be good to give Water its winter seasonal treatment during the “dead inertia of winter”, but not if it is hot outside.  If she feels that there is still autumn in the air, but the leaves haven’t yet dropped from the trees, she might be best to wait a little until giving her Metal patients their autumn treatment.

 

I also like to ask patients which season they feel they are in, and adjust my seasonal treatments to fit in with what they tell me. I do this because I realised very early on that each of us can have a very different idea as to which the current season is after discovering that more than half of the students in one of my classes thought we had definitely moved into summer, whilst the remainder were equally sure that we were still in spring.  Patients, too, may well have a different take on the season from us as practitioners, and we should therefore learn to adjust our treatment to correspond to a particular patient’s assessment of the season.  For example, it doesn’t seem right to give a patient a Wood seasonal treatment if he/she feels that we are still in the depths of winter.  In other words, a practitioner needs flexibility in deciding which seasonal treatment to give which patients when.   

 

And then there is still, to me, the unresolved question as to whether we should give everybody a seasonal treatment in each season irrespective of their element.  I know that some practitioners do this, but I do not.  This is because I remember giving a Fire patient a winter seasonal treatment (the Water points of the Bladder and Kidney), and for her to be one of the very few patients who told me that she had not felt well after treatment.  This made me decide not to experiment any further with seasonal treatments off a patient’s element.  I am a practitioner who rarely moves away from a patient’s element, so that giving seasonal treatments on other elements does not sit easily with me.  On the other hand, many of my fellow five element practitioners may be quite happy doing this.

I hope what I have written here helps you, Sophie.

.

 

 

 

 

 

Western Medicine confirms the existence of the Chinese Clock

I love it when Western medicine shows its surprise at discovering something we acupuncturists (and the ancient Chinese more than 2000 years ago) have known about all along.  In today’s Guardian newspaper there is an article entitled, “Night shifts throw brain and gut out of sync, research finds”. 

Here are some quotes from it:

“The finding highlights the dramatic impact that night shifts can have on the different processes that govern the natural rhythms of organs and systems throughout the human body”.

and:

“We have a central master clock in the brain that draws on changes in ambient light to control when we wake up and when we fall asleep.  But many other organs in the body have their own biological clocks, including the digestive system.”

and:

“..nowadays we can do anything we like at any time of day, so we are giving our body clock very confusing time cues.”

 

The Chinese, of course, extended their understanding of the 24-hour body clock to cover the longer period of the 12 months of the year, linking all these daily and seasonal variations to the waxing and waning of the influences of the five elements.    

 

Guy and I needle our own horary points as we pass through the different time zones on our flights to and from China.  We both feel that this certainly helps to mitigate the effects of jet-lag.

 

Our body clock: confirmation of the existence of horary points

I was interested to read in the Guardian a few days ago that the Nobel prize for medicine has just been awarded to three scientists “for their discoveries on the molecular mechanisms controlling circadian rhythms – in other words, the 24-hour clock.”  These scientists “were recognised for their discoveries explaining how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it is synchronised with the Earth’s revolutions.”  “They identified a gene in fruit flies that controls the creatures’ daily rhythm, known as the “period” gene.  This encodes a protein within the cell during the night which then degrades during the day.  When there is a mismatch between this internal “clock” and the external surroundings, it can affect the organism’s wellbeing – for example, in humans, when we experience jet lag.”

The article quotes Sir Paul Nurse, the director of the Francis Crick institute in London, as saying “Every living organism on this planet responds to the sun.  All plant and animal behaviour is determined by the light-dark cycle. We on this planet are slaves to the sun.  The circadian clock is embedded in our mechanisms of working, our metabolism, it’s embedded everywhere, it’s a real core feature for understanding life.”

The article goes on to say: “The rhythm of day and night affects our health and our cognitive functioning.  When it is disturbed, we are. But our sense of upset, or even jet lag, is just a minute part of the whole living world’s adaptation to the alternation of day and night: animals, insects, plants and even plankton show a cyclical pattern of behaviour as the Earth turns.  This is built into their DNA.”

I don’t think there is a better way of describing the action of the “light-dark” (or as we would put it the yin-yang) cycle of the elements.  How lovely when science confirms what the ancient Chinese discovered thousands of years ago, and we use every day in our practice as we attune our patients’ energies to the daily and seasonal cadences of the elements.

A footnote to the blog above which I wrote a day ago:  In a further newspaper article I have just read the following:  "In the past decade...scientists have shown that clock genes are active in almost every cell type in the body.  The activity of blood, liver, kidney and lung cells in a petri dish all rise and fall on a roughly 24-hour cycle. ...In effect, tiny clocks are ticking inside almost every cell type in our body, anticipating our daily needs."

 

Do seasonal influences play their part in Entry/Exit blocks?

A student sent me the following queries about seasonal treatment to help her in her interesting research topic. I give it below, followed by my answer to it.

“I am doing some research into Entry/Exit Blocks and in particular whether there is any link between unseasonal or changeable weather patterns in nature and the appearance of these blocks in patients. I have only a very small amount of data so far, and one or two published articles from practitioners who note that in their practice Entry/Exit blocks tend to appear in clusters at the change of season or during unseasonable or changeable weather (though not exclusively of course).

My data does actually point to a link between the two but (being a beginner in 5 Element Acupuncture) I am struggling a little to understand whether there may be a link or if it is just coincidence.

I was wondering if you had noticed any similar patterns in your own practice over the years and if so, why is this and do you have any examples? I am looking at some of the classics with regard to Wei Qi (as this is where the Blocks are felt) and how its movement is linked to nature, and to me at least it seems fairly obvious that the movement of Qi within us could be affected and "blocked" by external (macrocosmic) qi movement which goes against the normal flow of seasonal movement of Qi from Spring through the Seasons to Winter

I did ask Neil Gumenick directly, by email, about this, and he said there was absolutely no seasonal connection, but as I said earlier, in practice, it does seem to occur. Other authors I have looked at, including Jarrett, do not include seasonal change as one of the causes of Entry/Exit Blocks.”

Here is my reply:

"You’ve posed an interesting question about Entry/Exit blocks. So here are my thoughts on this, although I had not until now really considered this question in any detail, so it has set me thinking!

When I find an E/E block, as well as clearing it I always think which officials are in trouble and why this might be. Sometimes we simply don’t know, but in most cases I can work out why this particular block may have occurred at this time. I tend to think more of the psychological or physical reasons, rather than seasonal reasons, although I have thought of these, particularly if the block relates to the patient’s guardian element. For example, one of the most frequent blocks is Co/St (Co 20, St 1). If it is a Metal patient who is blocked in this way, I think of what the patient can’t let go of, or if it is an Earth patient, what the patient can’t stop thinking about or transport. But I have only thought about a seasonal connection if the patient is in their element’s season, i.e., Metal in autumn or Earth in late summer. It might cross my mind that the block has been exacerbated by the season, but I don’t tend to think of the season as causing the block. I will not think about the season at all if I find a block in a season not related to that patient’s element, i.e., a Co/St block for a Fire patient in autumn (but perhaps I should!).

But, and it’s a big but, I am sure that the extra inflow of energy to any particular element from a seasonal influence must affect in some way how those elements manifest in us, since each element will receive the influence of its particular season, just as it receives the influence of its particular time of day. That’s, after all, why we do horary and seasonal treatments. I am not sure, though, how obviously the subtle changes in the balance of the elements as they move from season to season can be detected on the pulses, for example, or even how far they will lead to an E/E block. An E/E block is a sign of a great build-up of energy in one meridian which is unable to discharge it to the next along the Wei cycle. As felt on the pulses, it is a strong build-up, and therefore it seems to me unlikely that a simple change from one season to the next will affect this enough on its own (otherwise we would have E/E blocks all round the year as season changes to season!).

So in theory it is likely that there may be a subtle influence of the season on the energies of the different elements, but in practice, in my view, it is only likely to add to an E/E block if there is already a block building up. Unfortunately for your research I don’t think we have the means of assessing whether this is so or not, so I think this may always remain a theoretical discussion, without practical proof.

I hope this explanation helps.

Seasonal treatment

I have a reader of this blog, Sean, to thank for prompting me to write the following, in answer to his question about my treatment of a Wood patient: “I’d like to know why you choose AEPs of Wood, especially for an autumn seasonal treatment.”

The error here is in thinking that I was giving “autumn seasonal treatment” to this Wood patient. The only seasonal treatment I do is treating a patient’s guardian element in the season of that element, and with its own element points (for example, St 36 and Sp 3 (Earth points within the Earth officials) in late summer for an Earth patient). No other points, including therefore AEPs, have any connection with seasonal treatments, except of course that any treatment we do in an element's season will have that little extra effect because it is drawing on nature's contribution to that element.

I know some people give seasonal treatment for patients of other elements apart from the element whose season they are in. In other words, for a Fire patient they may give a Metal seasonal treatment, LI 1 and Lu 8. I do not do that, as I see it as unnecessarily moving away from the patient’s own element. An element in balance should be able to deal with any seasonal changes through strengthening treatment on its own points. But the guardian element is always under greater strain than any other element, and will feel this load particularly in its own season. This is why we try to help it by doubling up the support we are offering, in other words by adding more Metal to Metal in autumn, or more Wood to Wood in spring, which is what we are doing when we do seasonal treatments.

All this applies, of course, to horary treatments as well (treating a Water patient with Bl 66 and Ki 10 in Water time, between 3 and 7 pm). And to be able to do a seasonal treatment in horary time is said to be the best treatment of all (you are in effect trebling the amount of help you are giving an element). For logistical reasons, this is difficult to do for some elements (Wood and Metal in particular), since patients would have to come to our practices in the night. JR encouraged us to arrange for several patients to come together during these anti-social hours, which, as a good pupil, I started doing, until I realised that a few patients who had loyally turned up between 11 and 3 in the night for their Wood horary treatments turned out, with more treatment, not to be Wood after all! I have since, for obvious reasons, not least my own health, discontinued this practice.