What’s TCM?
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a rounded approach to your health. It is an umbrella for multiple modalities, and uses Acupuncture, Herbal Medicine, Cupping, Moxa, Gua Sha, Eastern Nutrition & Qi Gong to best help address what your body needs. Sometimes a session will include Acupuncture alone, and other times it may include a combination of those modalities, depending on what will serve you best. This is always discussed with you.
Acupuncture
Acupuncture is probably our best known tool & we use it, quite simply, to modulate. The history of Acupuncture is rich and substance filled. There are different styles of Acupuncture, but all are based on a refined and complex system that understands how pathways regulate. This is part of why it’s used to help such a variety of things; it’s a full body medicine.
The art of Acupuncture involves taking your symptom patterns & diagnosing how your system’s internal regulators have responded or compensated to the demands of daily living, illness, injury, environment, stress, food, and mood. We identify which systems are over-compensating, under-functioning, or not moving, and then uses pins to regulate by influencing specific areas. Whether it be vessels, organs, networks, muscles, or nervous system, each point is carefully selected for its specific function or influence over a region.
When considering what we can treat, the list is long, however each practitioner will tend to have their own focus areas. Here are mine.
Acupuncture in its truest form is a preventative medicine. Modern day living tends to be a little more reactionary when it comes to seeking treatment, whereby people come once they have an issue, rather than coming to prevent an issue. Great health is preventative, and if you have the privilege to be able to access regular maintenance, your body will love you for it.
cupping
Cupping therapy is used to lift & separate fascia & muscle, allowing for improved local blood flow, helping with range of motions issues, reducing pain and inflammation, easing contracted muscles, & can free up tension and congestion. It may also be used in digestive or respiratory cases.
Cupping feels like what I imagine a strong octopus hug would be like. The strength of the cups are easily adjustable, reasonably strong and pleasant. The cupping marks can vary in colour, and are often (but not always) deeper in colour where there is pain and stagnation.
It generally better suits those that use their bodies often, whether with regular training or tradie work in recovery. It can also benefit people with a history of injury (such as over old surgical scars) in getting mobility and pain back on track.
Chinese Herbal Medicine
Healing the body from the inside out, we use high quality, cruelty-free TGA-approved herbs, which may come as granules, pills, or liquid herbs depending on preferences and availability. With tablets/pills, you may be on a dose that feels like a lot, compared to a regular supplement. That’s because the formulas are made with herbal extracts and not synthetically derived, so the dose needs to be higher for you to get the therapeutic benefit.
Formulas have a synergistic effect in managing your health, and are commonly used in a range of conditions, including but not limited to women’s health, gut health, energy levels, sleep issues, immunity.
gua sha & jade rolling
Gua Sha is a scraping technique that historically has been used for any problem featuring surface or internal blood stasis and pain.
Modern day has seen its use diversified & even paired with jade-rolling to extend to the world of beauty & skin care routines.
Why is Gua Sha so great? To start, it increases surface microperfusion (surface circulation of blood), & it upregulates gene expression for the enzyme heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1). Its immune & anti-inflammatory effects have wide application.
A treatment including Gua Sha on the body may leave you with some red marks (petechiae). This is because blood cells have been forced out of the capillary bed, and is part of the microperfusion mentioned earlier.
Fear not, the marks won’t last forever. As blood is reabsorbed, the breakdown of hemoglobin upregulates the anti-inflammatory & cytoprotective components. Yay!
moxa
Moxibustion is the therapeutic practise of burning moxa, which is a tinder made from the dried leaves of Artemesia vulgaris (commonly known as mugwort) on or near the skin. Thermal stimulation to specific areas of the body in order to restore function can be traced back over 2000 years. In practise, we generally use it to strengthen the immune system, warm the body, & promote circulation. Moxa has numerous benefits, and research into its properties covers changes in blood chemistry through to assisting with turning a breech-positioned baby.
eastern Medicine nutrition
Food as everyday medicine incorporates observing your body and its pattern, in order to learn what it needs.
The therapeutic properties of foods utilises the base properties of flavour & nature of ingredients (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, spicy/pungent, hot, cold & neutral) with energetics & seasonal eating to create a balancing effect for any system changes.
