“If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.”
J Krishnamurti
Yesterday I taught an all-day shonishin seminar for the Oregon State Association as a fundraiser. I was helped by Daniel Silver and Todd Wymer. For those unfamiliar with this term—Shonishin—it is a Japanese style of pediatric treatment that does not often use inserted needles. Instead techniques of stroking, tapping, scratching, and vibrating points are used. Various interesting tools are employed to do this work.
How can it be that such minute levels of stimulation as we find in shonishin are often enough to bring about the kinds of change infants and children need? It is difficult, if not impossible, to explain, given our current understanding of the human body. The amount of contact pressure is often only 5 grams or so, and yet this is enough to bring surprising change to many conditions commonly encountered.
We had three patients come to receive treatment, ranging in age from 2 to 8. All three really enjoyed the work; that much was clear. It is possible to talk kids into needles, and it is possible to needle them painlessly and to have this be very helpful (indeed this gentle needling is part of shonishin training as well), but I have never encountered a child who LOVED being needled. Some rare 6-year olds think it is sort of cool to see a needle in their arm, but none of them think that it feels great—not the way the stroking techniques of shonishin do.
I worked for a famous math educator for a year at the University of Oregon as her grader. She was fascinated by questions, and she infected me with the same curiosity. When I first saw shonishin performed, my assumption was that it would not be enough stimulation to provoke positive change. When it became clear that that was not true, that shonishin treatments actually produce impressive clinical outcomes, then certain questions presented themselves, questions that I could not ignore.
In one old article in the North American Journal of Oriental Medicine Dr. Yoshio Manaka, MD wrote that with every patient we have to ask how much stimulation is needed to get the desired outcome. He maintained that this question never gets easier, even after we have practiced many years. The patient who looks like an NFL linebacker might best be served with a very gentle treatment style, and the thin 70-year old woman might experience the best results from a much heavier-handed approach. It is a tough question.
It was 2000 when I first saw shonishin performed. I started to wonder about how this gentle stuff would work on adults. I started to think about Manaka’s question. Could it be, I wondered, that many of our treatments offer much more stimulation than is really needed to get the job done? I started to think about this, and it still occupies my thought.
Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes can enclose the same cubic space as a standard box home with 30% fewer materials used. That is a lot, a big difference. A dome needs no internal supporting walls like our square buildings do. The larger the dome, the more stable it is. This is just one example of how our basic assumptions can be challenged. Of course in our culture a house is supposed to be square. Really? Does it have to be, or is it the case that we are simply used to houses looking like this? How many animals build square nests like our houses? How locked in are we to a certain kind of thinking? Of course acupuncture treatments need to include XYZ amount of stimulation. Really? How would we know the true answer to such a big, big question? All we can say is that have an opinion about this question based on quite limited experience. No one knows the truth of how much stimulation would be ideal.
My point here is to promote the practice of asking tough questions, ones that get to the heart of our most cherished and basic assumptions. Of course this is no way to make friends, and I feel obligated to let you know that up front. That professor I worked for was not popular with her students, despite the fact that she was a lovely human being. Her questions were tough, thought-provoking ones, and the students did not welcome such tough work.
In general people do not like their long-held assumptions to be challenged or questioned. If you become a questioner of this sort in Chinese medicine, you can count on a certain amount of push-back. People defend their ideas and assumptions like their lives depend on it. But you will benefit in many ways from questioning in this way, as will the lives of your patients.
Best wishes all around
Bob Quinn