Colon Hydrotherapy

[dcan]

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What does martial arts have to do with acupuncture? Sounds like you've been watching to many kung fu movies. Sorry couldn't resist that correlation gave me the chuckles.

Edit: After responding I realized I didn't quite directly address your question. So here goes. Acupuncture is based on piercing and "manipulating" the chi meridians in your body in an effort to restore the chi balance. Chi meridians is a core concept of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Chi is also a fundamental concept in internal martial arts, and "old-school" martial arts use of "pressure points" explained it as the manipulation of chi points. So TCM is the basis for both acupuncture and older internal martial arts (as opposed to "external" or "hard style" martial arts like taekwondo). Therefore, traditional Oriental martial arts is very related to acupuncture. Acupuncture uses the TCM chi meridians concept to heal, while martial arts uses it to know how to hurt.

Nothing I've said above implies the "reality" of chi meridians, just that that is the fundamental concept underlying TCM.

We now return you to our originally scheduled message...

Wait... First, I'm not saying acupuncture isn't effective. I'm saying it probably has the same roots as acupressure (Shiatsu) which is really just what modern physical therapy calls trigger point therapy or myofascial release. I do self-myofascial release almost every night with a foam roller -- and so does almost every athlete and weight lifter nowadays. It's crude but effective in breaking apart knots in your fascia and your muscles. If you don't know, your fascia is the "spongy" material between your skin and muscle that basically ensures your body all hangs together properly. You can see it when you eat chicken sometimes, it's the whiter stringier parts. Fascia covers your entire body in one mesh, and it gets knots in it from overuse. These knots affect sometimes distant areas of your body because the fascia pulls, for example a knot in the fascia in your upper back pulls in all directions and pulls the fascia (and muscle, and nerves) in your skull which causes a headache, so the practicioner works on "releasing" the knots in your back to alleviate the headache. Etc. You also get "knots" in your muscle, small areas that bunch up and inhibit movement elsewhere, called "referred pain." These muscle knots have actually been photographed now, so they are a real scientific phenomenon.

Coincidentally, trigger points are broken up by one of two methods: direct pressure (which sounds a lot like Japanese acupressure) or by injection, inserting a needle coated with local anesthetic into the trigger point to force it to release. That sounds a lot like acupuncture, without the mysticism.

Second, martial arts is all about understanding the dynamics of the human body. In order to understand how to harm someone you have to learn how the body actually works. By learning how the body works you become better at understanding how the body heals, at least in part because you have to learn how to fix your own problems from training so hard. And if you spend enough time studying martial arts you start to get seven shades of weird and you start looking at all kinds of weird things. On the scale of weird things a dedicated martial artist gets into, acupuncture is very, very, very "normal".

And no I have not had acupuncture myself, but I've done Shiatsu and had it done to me, and it's pretty mind-blowing what happens to your body, both the one doing the acupressure and the one receiving it.

Here's some further reading:

Fascia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Trigger point - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Trigger Point Injection for Muscle Pain

Trigger Point Therapy Workbook; Your Self-Treatment Guide for Pain Relief (get it on Amazon for $13)

Amazon.com: Thera Cane Massager: Health & Personal Care (used for trigger point manipulation, 430 reviews, 4.5 stars average)