acupuncture: does tui na raise the game?

[davie]

Dear all,
Like many of you in the family I am lucky enough to study TCM and acupuncture, but I am just a baby in the TCM world and could do with some advice from big brothers and sisters!

It is well known that chi kung and force training help with this art in a big way, indeed many would say some type of energy work is essential to become the real deal.

I was thinking that learning tui na (traditional chinese massage) would also be a great skill and would help big time with confidence, sensitivity and point location as well as being a great skill in its own right.

What is you're view on this?

Many thanks

Davie

[ricagnew]

Hi Davie

We study a little tui na in the third year of our acupuncture course, though I don't think it is very comprehensive. I don't have a vast experience of tui na but I'll give you my thoughts anyway.

I would like to study tui na in depth once I've finished the course because I think it will be a useful additional technique but I don't necessarily think that learning tui na would help build confidence, sensitivity or point location skills. Confidence is something that develops from knowledge and practice and the key to building sensitivity (of touch) and good point location skills is having good palpation skills. You don't have to learn tui na to develop good palpation skills, though they are also fundamental to tui na.

In terms of skills and techniques, good palpation is a skill, while point location and tui na are techniques. If you can palpate with sensitivity and confidence, you can apply this to point location, tui na, pulse taking and palpating the channels.

Obviously, since tui na requires good palpation skills, you may be taught more about how to palpate effectively in a tui na class, but if you are lucky you will learn this through point location and pulse taking anyway.

All that being said, I'd like to learn tui na as an additional skill, particularly for treating channel problems and those who won't let me go anywhere near them with needles!

I would agree with you that chi kung will be vital to provide the best acupuncture possible. Unfortunately the chi kung we've learnt at college has been a little disappointing for most of the class - a testament to the value of the arts that Sifu so freely teaches us.

Hope the course is going well.

Best regards

Richard

[davie]

hey thanks for that one richard.

And I agree with you that as well as helping with acupuncture the great benifit of tui na is no needles!

Also I have found that the college does not go into tui na as deep as I would like, so I am going to study it on its own too.

And yea we sure are lucky with our chi kung. I thought the chi kung we were shown at college was good, but for me I just do my shaolin wahnam chi kung cos thats my thing. What really suprised me is the amount of teachers at the college who were not interested in chi kung at all. And saying that I am impressed by them as people, and they sure seem to know thier stuff in every other way..

Good luck with all this too,

cheers