Points Newsletter - January 2005

As the holiday season comes to an end, we may have over-indulged in plenty of candies, sugar-filled deserts and pastries made from refined flours. Certainly it is generally more difficult during this time of the year to maintain your healthy eating habits, so here is a gentle reminder: contrary to your beliefs, you do have control over your health because good health is a choice. By making proper food choices, you can avoid developing degenerative diseases and avoid unnecessary suffering down the road. In this edition of the newsletter, I have chosen to discuss a condition called syndrome X, also known as metabolic syndrome or pre-diabetes which affects as many as 22 percent of American adults, or some 47 million people. Syndrome X significantly increases a person's risk of developing life threatening chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and stroke. More...

Many Americans will try to lose weight this year and several will fail. This failure frequently occurs because of the difficulties of changing one’s lifestyle. Lifestyle changes can be a great boost to one’s self-esteem and it can be a simple process as long as the change is incremental. Changing your diet should also be a simple process as long as the dieting process is not so strict that you will have difficulties following through. Unless one is severely obese, strict diet and implementing dramatic changes tend to have little lasting success. More...

I was taught acupuncture by my own acupuncturist who did miracles with me and lots of other patients. His treatment was mainly based on pulse diagnosis and season points.

First he would do a pulse diagnosis to see if there was a problem with the meridians themselves or if he would just have to treat local points (for back pain for instance) plus some distant points. Depending on the meridian pulse (you know there are 28 different ones), he would treat the meridian if it was affected. He would also use the season table (Fig. 1) to treat the meridians preemptively: when we change season, the properties of some points change, and also some meridians are more likely to be affected than others (like lungs and large intestine meridians in Autumn). More...