A Pelican in Wyoming
“Why are you putting a needle in my ankle when my pain is in my shoulder?” -Patient
In a cross-country road trip in college, I once spotted a lone pelican calmly floating in a lake in Wyoming and as my Floridian roadtrip partner and I drove, I said ‘you’re not going to believe this but I just saw a pelican in that lake’.
Oftentimes in acupuncture patients comment on how strange it is that needles are being placed in often seemingly unrelated areas of the body as it relates to their main concern for seeking treatment. The above experience and the migratory patterns of birds is a lovely analogy for showing just as seeing a seabird in Wyoming can seem out of context, when viewed as a whole, any part of the Earth is related to another, just as the body is inextricably connected as a whole.
When we first developed as embryos, for example, it is easy to see how at that point in our development, our feet are really not that far from our heads. Further, evidence shows that during our embryological development, certain organs and spaces in the body actually share the same tissue that eventually begins to span larger areas in the body when we develop into adults. This tissue that surrounds all of our organs and muscles is called fascia and there is evidence to show how this fascia is interconnected throughout the body and shares relationships with other systems of the body. Another system that spans our entire body is our circulatory system and our nervous system and in this context, it is easy to understand how for example, when we are feeling a sensation in the foot, this sensation is being processed in our brain. Also, science has recently discovered a new organ, called the interstitium that is essentially a network of fluid filled passageways that surround our organs and systems and spans the entire body and contains many different components related to the functioning of not only our circulatory system, but our endocrine and immune systems as well among others. Also noteworthy, Chinese medicine has known of the interstitium for thousands of years.
Acupuncturists place needles in acupuncture points that are located in areas of high concentrations of nerves and blood vessels (not into the nerves and vessels themselves) while understanding the interstitium, neural pathways, and fascial chains that are connected to the bodies organs and functions relating to all of the systems of the body. Just as a pelican can be seen in Wyoming, an acupuncture point in your ankle can be related to and affect the functionality of the adrenals and kidneys, for example.
As Chinese medicine is rooted in nature and recognizes the human body to be inextricably a part of nature, nature can be a perfect example of the functionality or imbalance and disharmony that we can experience. Take for example a beaver dam. Although in the big picture, beavers are responsible for contributing to the health of their ecosystem, from the perspective of a dammed river, the beaver can be quite powerful in affecting that rivers flow. In various ways our bodies, just like the Earth contain rivers and once downstream a dam is created through imbalance and signaled by the existence of pain for example, the rivers in our body begin to stagnate and the greater ocean of our bodies can be affected negatively. The placement of an acupuncture needle can be viewed as the removal of an obstruction in a river downstream, and therefore the river, or as mentioned before as an example, a fascial chain starts to move and become unobstructed. Flow returns and pain disappears as a result. Sometimes a blockage occuring in the shoulder can be undammed in the ankle, just as a pelican once seen swimming in the ocean, can be found sunning peacefully in a high altitude lake in Wyoming. The body, just like the planet, is interconnected.
