Michael Max

CBD, cannabidiol, has been making the rounds lately in the natural medicine world. Almost overnight it seems this botanical has popped onto the scene and there are lot of claims as to it health benefits. As Chinese medicine practitioners we are already familiar with some of the benefits of hemp seed, and as practitioners in the modern world we might like to incorporate something as useful as CB...

Research can be a problematic area for practitioners of East Asian medicine. While many acupuncturists are keen to share research with patients that paints acupuncture in a positive light, especially for marketing purposes, there are not many of us that are generating that research. And there is the issue of double-blind studies, which are the gold standard in conventional medical research, but di...

Many of us were exposed to gua sha in our schooling, but it was more like a footnote than anything else. Over in Asia gua sha is a well-used aspect of the folk medicine. Hardly a grandma or auntie that doesn’t know how to raise a rash with a soup spoon. But most docs over there don’t use it. So it is understandable how in teaching “medicine” here in the west we’d get the minimal exposure we do....

There are many ways to attend to our patients in clinic. We can work through mental models that we’ve acquired from our schooling, study, and clinical experience. We can also use our innate human ability to touch, palpate and sense. In this episode we discuss the importance of down-regulating our nervous system. Along with the use of palpation and sensing references to anchor our ideas about wh...

Plenty of people seek out acupuncture in particular as they have heard a few needles in the ear will break their cigarette habit, or cause their appetite and cravings to completely transform. We’ve all heard stories of someone’s cousin who got needled once and never smoked again or they lost a lot of weight. But how many of these people have you seen get these results in your clinic? Often pati...

Using acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine are helpful modalities in the treatment of veterans who have served our country and suffer from injuries and the aftermath of trauma. But, treating veterans is not as simple as treating what we see in the clinical setting. There are aspects of military life that are invisible to the average civilian. And while acupuncture increasingly is being used...

We learn in acupuncture school that the body, mind and spirit are woven together into the tapestry of one’s life. We learn that each of the yin organs has a spirit aspect, and that we can’t touch the body without touching the mind and vise versa. And yet there are blockages that are lodged more in the psycho-emotive realm and can at times prevent healing on the physical level. In this show we e...

Dr. Wang Ju-Yi was ever curious about why some treatments worked and others did not. He deeply studied the classical literature along with his own clinical experience, and somewhere along the way started putting his hands on patients to simply see what the channels had to say. For those practitioners who find palpation to be a key part of their practice, the work of Dr. Wang opens a whole new w...