When you are sick or injured, you just want the pain to stop. Pivotal Point Oriental Medicine can do that.  There are 56 ailments for which Traditional Chinese Medicine is approved worldwide, and pain relief is probably the number one reason people seek treatment.

Interconnection
Traditional Chinese Medicine is much more than a “quick fix” for discomfort—it’s a way of life that embraces the interconnectedness of all things as its philosophy. 
It’s about the energy that connects us with others, our environment, and the universe.  Our internal systems function in relationship to our external environment much like a mobile:  change in one part affects the harmony of the whole.

What usually upsets the balance is not primarily an injury or a microbe, but the stress we feel when something in our environment—or something in ourselves—upsets us.  A wise man once said that “behind all disease lie our fears, anxieties, greed, likes and dislikes.”  In our rapidly changing world, this resistance—otherwise known as stress—is the number one cause of dis-ease in many Western cultures.

Health is Happiness and Happiness is Health
Homeostasis—balance—is the body’s paradise, and our complex, many-faceted systems are always seeking this state of happy, harmonious simplicity. 

When we place too many forces on the body unnecessarily—through drugs, sleep deprivation, excessive or not enough exercise, too much food and drink, or inconsistent schedules—we break homeostasis with stress.

Stress disrupts the flow of our qi (pronounced “chee’), or life- force.  Pain can be seen as stuck energy:  it has been over-stimulated, blocked or stagnated by stress, causing “dis-ease” in our body, mind and spirit. 

Western medicine tends to treat by manipulating symptoms, rather than addressing the root cause of illness.  The danger of this is that while we may get a temporary release from pain, the underlying cause may only be driven deeper, lying in wait to recur in a less tractable form.  This is why Pivotal Point Oriental Medicine is often more successful than Western medicine in addressing chronic illnesses. 

Uniqueness
Pivotal Point Oriental Medicine also treats the individual, not her disease.  We are each unique in our experiences and perceptions, our genetic makeup, and how we move through the world.  Thus, a “headache” is treated differently in a quiet pale, tired person who is studying too much than for a large, loud, red-faced person who is often irritable.  Pain may be stuck energy, but how and where it’s stuck is quite individual.

Pivotal Point Medicine will teach you how to listen to your body, alert to signals and symptoms that something is out of whack, just as we as a species are learning to be alert to the signs that things may be out of balance in our environment—of which we are an inseparable part.

Your Body and Food
Our sustaining life force is comprised of what we take in from the environment— our air, our water, and our food.    Nutritional therapy—choosing the best foods for health-- is an important pillar of TCM.  Food is the best drug,  and Mother Nature is the best pharmacist on the planet:  that’s why she made wholesome food taste so good.    And I believe that keeping our environment free of toxins keeps our internal environments in balance, as does learning to live in sync with the seasons.

Traditional Chinese Medicine is based on the truth that the world is in us, just as we are in the world.