Published in the North American Journal of Medicine Vol. 22 No. 64, July 2015
Before I get to the topic of the use of teishin (and other shonishin tools) in the treatment of chronic Lyme disease, I wanted to make some brief comments about a movement that seems to have been sweeping my local area. Of the 500+ acupuncturists in the greater Portland, Oregon area, I estimate that at least 100 have a teishin. Many have other shonishin tools as well that they use on adult patients. This is extraordinary when one thinks about it, given that TCM dominates US acupuncture, and TCM as an acupuncture style believes De Qi must be acquired for acupuncture to be effective. How could such a gentle tool become so popular? Why Portland, why now, why teishin?
I believe five reasons can account for this.
1. Brenda Loew has come to Portland five times in the last seven years to teach shonishin, sometimes hosted by Portland Traditional Japanese Medicine seminars and sometimes by the student Shonishin Club at NUNM. Each time people have been turned away due to the limits of the venue. At the time of this writing she will return again in one week. As people see that this gentle approach works for children, they are naturally curious to try it on sensitive adult patients. Attendance at her seminars has been high, ranging from 28-40 participants, so she has introduced probably close to 150 local practitioners to gentle work.
2. Dr. Bear (Iwashina Anryu Sensei) has come to Portland three times in recent years. Iwashina Sensei uses no needles, only teishin, and participants can see that his treatments are magically effective on adults with no inser- tions at all. (I asked Dr. Bear some years ago how long it took him to start to get good clinical results when he abandoned needles for teishin, and he replied immediately that in less than a month he was getting better results than ever!)
3. At NUNM for five years now a very active Shonishin Club has held regular meetings. This has served to keep the ball rolling from when Brenda Loew has come to teach. As a result a good number of practitioners in Portland now regularly treat infants and toddlers.
4. NUNM has a year-long class in Japanese therapies (taught by the author and Daniel Silver), and in this course students learn to use teishin and enshin on adults. Students graduate and take these skills out into their new practices. NUNM also has a required six-week shonishin class taught by the author and Daniel Silver.
5. Stephen Birch’s book and DVD provide needed supportive information, as what he teaches and what Brenda Loew teaches are in alignment. His book in the NUNM library is probably one of the most checked out books, and many students have purchased a copy of their own.
Very recently Stephen Brown came to Portland to teach Shudo-style Meridian Therapy and in the course of this seminar he introduced how he and Dr. Shudo employ the teishin. The ball keeps rolling! More and more people are discovering that gentle therapies are effective.
With that introduction established, I would like to touch on a topic that Junji Mizutani and Mayu Onishi wrote about a few years ago: Chronic Lyme disease (often with co-infections). Lyme in its chronic phase brings debilitating psychological, rheumatological, neurological, and dermatological symptoms; it attacks multiple systems of the body at the same time resulting in a rapid loss of quality of life. In their NAJOM article Junji and Mayu discussed the use of various traditional moxa strategies designed to strengthen chronic Lyme patients, so they can begin to reestablish some measure of quality to their lives. An important note before I proceed: one needs to differentiate between the acute phase of Lyme, when a patient should be urged to undergo the standard antibiotic regimen, because there is every hope it will be sufficient to bring about a total cure, and the chronic phase of the disease in which the antibiotic therapies are quite often unsuccessful. It is this chronic phase I want to explore with regard to the teishin. I would like to do this by discussing one case of many in which I NEVER once inserted a needle in the patient, and this applies to many treatments over time. I have come to think that since chronic Lyme attacks the nervous system so strongly that any stimulating therapy is inappropriate for them. The teishin, enshin, and Yoneyama zanshin are the tools I use for these patients. I do combine them with gentle moxa (not too much though) and Sotai movements. The triad of these three therapies has been unusually helpful in treating many chronic Lyme patients.
The patient, JM, first came to me as a 23-year-old who had been in a wheelchair for three years. Her chronic Lyme had progressed over a period of many years starting at the age of nine or so. She had never been able to conclude her high school education due to the ravages of the disease. Her anxiety was at an extreme level. A few months be- fore she came to me she participated in an African shamanic ritual designed to promote “ancestral healing.” After that she was able to slowly walk a little bit again. When she came to me she could walk one block, then she had to rest sitting on the curb before walking home. As I inspected her body I found extraordinary tightness in the upper back and neck regions. She reported great discomfort there. (This is fairly universal in chronic Lyme.)
I treated her over a period of three years using Chinese herbs (she could tolerate only a very low dose), moxa, Sotai, and shonishin techniques. Sometimes she would come to my clinic and sometimes she would come to see me at the NUNM University Clinic. Eventually over time I could train some of the interns working under me to treat her as I had been doing. At the time of this writing she no longer requires treatment; her life is pretty close to that of a normal young woman with a child, and she is contemplating career and educational opportunities. She is able to hike six miles regularly, and her emotional state is fairly well regulated. She undoubtedly still has viable spirochetes in her body, but her own system’s integrity has been rebuilt to the degree that it can contend with them and keep them in check.
What did a treatment look like with this group of therapies? Initially I would attempt to get her to relax more fully by using a Sotai movement or two, usually in the ankle-lower leg region. Next I would do sesshokoshin in her abdomen with a teishin in the fashion of shakujyu therapy. Next I would determine the sho by inspecting pulse, ab- domen, channels, and forearm. She was typically a Liver sho. The sho would be treated then with a teishin instead of a needle. (I use the teishin in tonification as I was taught in Toyohari training.) The next step was usually to do a little moxa on basic points like LI-11, CV-6, 12, TB-4 (left), ST-36. Typically this was just three half-rice cones. I taught her husband how to do this at home and they did so regularly. I would then do Sotai movements in the hip-ASIS area. Next I would use teishin and enshin in the scalenes and SCM of the neck. I use the teishin there in the fashion of the dispersive sanshin I learned from Dr. Bear. The enshin was simply stroked very lightly downward through the whole neck region. After doing this work with the tools I would do 2-3 different Sotai movements in the neck. This combined teishin-enshin-Sotai work became over time my version of the Toyohari naso work. She would then turn over. On the back I would usually tonify the back shu points correlated to her sho – usually this meant BL-18, 23, then I would move on to dispersive sanshin over the whole back with a real focus on the mid and upper back. Sometimes I would do some moxa here as well if time allowed. I concluded with some Sotai movements in this prone position in the shoulders. Finally the patient would be turned over again for a final assessment of pulse and abdomen.
Although I treated this patient many times, this general treatment flow was maintained in most cases, and this represents as well how I treat other chronic Lyme patients. Slowly over time she improved to where she could be outside playing with her son, and then going for slightly longer walks, to eventually taking hikes in the forest. Her emotional state improved as well with the anxiety lifting. I am still in touch with this patient but she no longer needs to come in for treatment. She has a very normal life and has had for over a year now. This case has given me real pause to think about how best to treat the many chronic Lyme patients I have encountered here in Oregon. I am convinced that minimal stimulation is the way to go with these patients. Their nervous systems simply cannot handle strongly stimulating therapies. Here the power of the gentle has proven itself to me over and over again.
Bob Quinn teaches full time in the School of Classical Chinese Medicine in Portland, Oregon and with Ryan Milley runs Portland Traditional Japa- nese Medicine Seminars, a company that hosts trainings in Meridian Therapy, moxa, and Sotai.