China Japan Friendship Hospital, Beijing: Acupuncture Department with Dr. Bai, part three.

Here is another installment of some of the acupuncture I witnessed.
One old man came in everyday. He was suffering from Bells Palsy. The paralysis was to the right of his face and affected his talking, perhaps sight, his philtrum was deviated and his muscles were beginning to atrophy on that side.

I liked this patient. He was tough and stoic. Never letting out any noise, even with 30 or 40 needles hanging out of his face. Dr Bai uses a lot of needles. Although what I do remember is a lot of sweat on his forehead, his shirt being caked in sweat and tears from his ok eye as he endured pain each day.

A combination of western and eastern theory was used in all these treatments. In this case shallow needling on the effected side of the face to stimulate the nerves. But first needling was given to the good side in a tonifying process. Then the diseased side. In fact the case for specific technique was very confusing as keeping track from one patient to the next was difficult and there would always be contradictions and differences in the treatments. One technique was to needle up and down then the inner part of the face and then the outer part.

Main areas would be:
ST 1
BL1
BL 2
Stomach face points
GB 14
LI 20
Tai Yang
Ying Tang
Extra point next to the nose
Plus a host of other extra points to make it up to 30 needles or so.

In another female patient with the same condition ST4 was threaded through to the philtrum inside and above the upper lip.

Anyway I tried to track this male patient’s progress each day. After each treatment there would be a noticeable leveling out of his face and better strength in his expressions with less skewness to his features and a lifting of his muscle structures.

However he would have to endure electro to the face with no compromise. ST 1, around the nose and other stomach points. On one day, and he still came back the next day after this, Dr Bai did a needle through technique on above his right eye. Pinching the skin of the upper right eye lid and needling through the middle of this, above the eyeball and up to GB14 but underneath the eye socket bone..!
Fortunately this area didn’t receive electro.

He would receive electro-moxibustion to the effected side as well. Electro moxibustion was the use of a machine with 4 attached pads that had Moxa attached to each one in a special pouch ( see photos). They were then attached to any part of the body and the machine would heat the moxa without burning creating warmth and releasing the properties of the herbs. Absolute smokeless moxa. I have never seen them before and may get one myself if I can find them.

Just as a side note I recall this gentleman getting electro acupuncture and electro moxibustion to his face for an hour. That is a lot of electro..!