Editor's Note: The following interview was conducted by Acupuncture Today columnist Pamela Ellen Ferguson. It is submitted / published outside of her regular column.
Q: Jack, scores of us have enjoyed your Whole Circle CEU and PDA courses over more than a decade. What prompted you to stop the wheel at a time when Covid has required all of us to seek endless courses online?
A: The Whole Circle went live on 1/1/06, but the design began when some were still using dial-up to get on the web. Bandwidth was a crucial issue and compressed mp3 audio downloads were the most universally-accessible way to reach a wide audience. Well, the world has moved on and many CEU / PDA providers have made video-learning easily available. I just didn't have the juice after 16+ years to redesign the whole system. It was time to close the Circle.
Q: What are the most important gaps you feel you have filled in continuing education within Asian medicine, reflecting your 50 years of experience as an acupuncturist?
A: I was acutely aware of the schism between so-called Five Element and so-called TCM in the ‘70's. I found this disturbing. My mission, self-adopted I suppose, has been to reveal the unity of Yin / yang and the Wu Xing with the Zang/Fu, the Five Shen and the Substances.
Q: Could you share a solid example of your unified diagnostic approach?
A: A young woman of about 35 years of age sought my help for her severe, debilitating headaches. The presentation of those headaches was outside of any definable pattern that a decent clinician would recognize, given that the location, the size of the area, the onset, the duration and intensity and the character of the pain all just simply didn't fit a definable pattern found in the literature or in my own knowledge base.
After a few treatments, she happened to mention that her fiancé experienced similar, though less intense headaches. I immediately knew that the source of the headaches had to be environmental, because she told me that she was working from home and didn't often go out, but her fiancé worked outside the home. I told her that she was being poisoned by something within her home or in her neighborhood. I urged her to get the air in her home tested for toxins.
Before the results came back, the two of them moved from the bedroom on the upper floor to the living room on the floor below. The headaches eased. Test results on the air in their home revealed partially combusted toxic hydrocarbons due to a cracked flue in the oil-burning furnace. The situation was resolved with the flue's repair. That's the last I saw of her. This was not a strictly Chinese medical diagnosis, but it was the correct diagnosis, One of the finest successes of my entire career,.
Q: Your example reflects your comment about our need to have an insatiable desire to find the etiology of the ailments our patients present. Linda Li, DC, who also worked with Chinese medicine, made a similar discovery when she traced a patient's headaches to toxic fumes from an old fridge And here in Austin, another DC traced the source of severe gastrointestinal problems in a young woman to her upbringing on a houseboat where her hippy parents would take water directly from the lake!
Beyond diagnosis, Jack, you also offered unusual courses such as dealing with "Uncontrollable Anger" and "2 Ways the Body Makes itself Known."
A: As to the why of the unusual topics in The Whole Circle's repertoire, if I've been blessed with a gift of understanding, it's in finding connections between and among disparate disciplines and ideas. So, the unusual links don't seem so unusual to me. And my students have appreciated this greatly as it prompted them to ask more questions beyond the complaint of that day.
Q: In one of your courses you referenced using the "ID" (Internal Dragons) protocol once on a young woman who came to you with recurring nightmares of being enveloped in blackness. This happened after being cursed ("may you live in darkness forever") by the head of a cult when she opted to leave after giving birth to their son. As the "ID" protocol refers to your own J.R. Worsley training in the U.K., could you explain the ID protocol you used to combat an internal pathogen?
A: To unleash the "Internal Dragons," we would used seven needles on the following points: ST 25, ST 32, ST 41, and a master point below Ren 15. It just took one session and the nightmares vanished. But this is not something people should mess round with. The instructions to use this protocol properly are very detailed.
Q: Are there any specific references you could share for acupuncturists unfamiliar with J.R. Worsley's teaching?
A: His insistence on seeing each person in body, mind and spirit animated all of his teaching. It was that background that lead me to understand Yin / Yang, the Substances and Zang/Fu theory as having spiritual roots. The Early-Heaven arrangements of the Tai Ji and Wu Xing visually display that exact reality. It was this understanding that has allowed me to practice and teach in the way I have for 50 years.
Q: What is your next challenge? Will you continue giving live Zoom courses? Or do you intend to craft a new book?
A: I think my Zoom days are now concluded. I have a thought-out and partially written book on the nature of the human mind, whose working title is Abaracadabra, which comes from Hebrew, meaning "I create as I speak." The nature of the internal narratives which we all have, and with which some actually battle on a daily basis, shapes what we experience and how we experience it. In many ways, it can be the root of all misery.
What I hope for is that book being able to bring healing to people. It will be very different from my first book, "A Universe Made for Two," which shows the workings of Yin and Yang in the first two days of the creation story in the book of Genesis in the Bible.
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
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One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
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