Decocting herbs on a warm full moon night with an eclipse...how auspicious!

Me having pulse taken and Warren doing his thang
Five packets of herbs, decocted three times each, 15 days of herbs :)

Herbs close up with formula. You can work this backwards to the diagnosis, if your some kind of genius..!

Today I booked in for a practitioner consultation at the herbal clinic. Taste test coming up and mind boggling ingredient soon! The good thing about this is a special deal on the raw herbs, getting to know the lecturer a bit more, experimenting and finding out more about the herbs and then checking them all out as the packets are prepared in the dispensary and so on. I must admit having an extra 8 pairs of eyes on you, all the students join in the consultation, is at first a bit daunting. But no one is judging you-simply finding out more! Especially about you- but anyway! Everybody took my pulse and Warren, the lecturer and practitioner for herbs, asked me a few questions and everybody looked at my tongue as well.
I must admit I have had herbs before. This load I’m drinking now is ok. Think of coffee without the milk, less bitter with richness and fruitiness. Actually this one is quite drinkable and I’m enjoying it as I’ve got more of an idea why I am drinking it and what supposed to be happening. Maybe he let me off easy on my first consultation!

It’s a great time to check out and experiment too. As my herbs were made somebody got a brew on and we all watched as some kind of seed thingo that was placed in the hot water surprisingly expanded to much bigger than its first size. That lead to the comment of different ingredients in herb mixtures and somebody stated they actually had drunk BAT DUNG as part of thier herb decoction..!

Acupuncture first needling

Sydney harbour last week...

Sydney harbour this week...

Feels like the beginning of Spring today, went for swim in the harbour after uni. Beautiful sunset.

First practical acupuncture workshop today! That means the first time for inserting needles…
Was a bit hesitant, as I must admit I do not like needles-who does? But medicine is not supposed to taste good if you know what I mean. We tried on ourselves first. Interestingly we were told to find a non-acupoint. Suddenly challenging as everything before that has been acupoint orientated even though there’s more skin than points! Pain-not as bad as I was worried about. At one point we were told to rotate the needle 360 degrees a few times. No pain. However try removing it- you cant! It gets stuck due to wrapped muscle tissue. Nothing worse than having a needle you feel as though can’t remove! This problem is solved by waiting a short time before removal. Another person told me they had practiced already: “On who?” I asked, her dog…
Anyway we progressed to pairing up and needling three points on some one else. Glad to report the whole process was zero drama and a lot easier than I had imagined.

“De Qi”, BTW, is the arrival of the Qi. This is the sensation felt with needling by the patient. A practitioner should notice it before the patient reports it and should be able to differentiate from any pain sensation!

Finally our lecturer, the ever up beat and non-cynical ( sarcasm) , he who must be obeyed ( own words, deserving of his own blog entry at some point) left us with this quote from one the greatest practitioners of the Qi “ Do or do not, there is no try”. Yoda.

Got to love spontaneous massage

Also today…
At lunch some kind of festival of culture spun into UTS. Wu Wei (the UTS Chinese Medicine Club) had a stall and a spontaneous massage event was created. Wu Wei means the art of non-doing doing, sort of a natural flow of a creation BTW. On the stall are examples of herbs, Demet is massaging wearing a styled up Wu Wei t-shirt and James is looking cool, right before he rips off Michael's arm…Tsering, in the background, is meditating…as she is Tibetan...

Tongue Diagnosis-Strong Heart Qi, front end tongue flip

Talking about tongue diagnosis this happened today: the 180 degree front end flip. Sophie, fellow TCMer, amazed me with this. I thought I’d seen heaps of variations, but never even heard of the front flip before today. “ Manifestation of healthy HT Qi …the tongue having a red body and being free in motion” ( Garvey 2007, p49.). Red and bendy, congrats on having the best HT Qi in the southern hemisphere, if not the world.

Ref:
Garvey, M., 2007, Chinese Medicine Foundations 2: Course Notes: Semester 2, 2007. College of TCM, UTS, Sydney.

Tongue Diagnosis-intense Heat, possible Liver Fire...

It was nice that in my Western Science practical lecture today we cross referenced to Chinese medicine tongue diagnosis. Lucky to be in such an open minded place. Apparently western science is taking more note of it and doctors will examine a tongue with more of those principles in mind.

We checked out this tongue diagnosis link:

http://www.giovanni-maciocia.com/tonguegallery/default.html

Incidentally Giovanni Maciocia is definitely Italian! I must admit I was surprised when I first saw his name amongst the books in the library, however he has a lot of Chinese Medicine experience and his books are well known. In fact I picked up a book today called Chinese Materia Medica Combinations and Applications, written by Xu Li and Wang Wei and he'd written the forward for it! I didn't even think twice about it until I was writing this. That's inspiration for non-Chinese back ground people!!!