Patient 1: Treatment 1 (Fire - Inner Fire?)

Treatment 30 Sept 2010

Patient: Female, aged 42 (to be called Patient 1)

Element: Fire (Outer Fire) (initial diagnosis only – to be confirmed or changed as treatment progresses)

Number of prior treatments: None. This was the first treatment by me after she was passed on to me by another practitioner, who had been treating her for 15 treatments with no success.

Main complaint: Panic attacks, depression, painful shoulder and hips, bad sleep.
A history of under-achievement, usually apparently self-induced: failing exams by not working in last year, even though she sailed through the first two years at university, giving up on being a tennis player just as she was about to make the county team as a teenager. The really deep-lying problems lay, as they always do, in early childhood, because her mother had alcohol-problems and her father disappeared. She has never married and is in an on-off relationship with a married man.

Treatment given:
The physical examination was done during the initial Traditional Diagnosis (TD) the week before: BP (normal), Centre Pulse (in the centre), Akabane tests (any that were out were corrected).
1 Checked for Possession: Not found
2 Aggressive Energy (AE) drain: AE found on HP (P) and H. Drain took 1 hour.
3 Checked for Husband-Wife (H/W) imbalance (which I had thought might be there, because of the great imbalance between left and right pulses and her desperation): Not found
4 Source points of Fire (Outer Fire): TH 4, HP (P) 7 (tonification without moxibustion)

At the end of treatment:
She looked calmer, and less agitated after treatment. But only time and more treatment will tell if she is Fire, and, if so, which side of Fire, Inner (SI and H) or Outer, TH and HP).

Things to look out for next time:
1 Re-check for the possible presence of H/W imbalance, which can appear once the AE drain has helped the patient’s mask to drop.
2 Check for the appearance of any Entry/Exit blocks (to be checked at each treatment, as they can appear at any point, a good sign that good energy is trying to push its way through the meridian system, and causing a slight overload at some point).

Suggestions for next treatment:
1 CV (RM) 8 (no needling, but 3 moxa cones on salt) – a balancing,
reinforcing point for the spirit on CV.
2 Source or tonification points (i.e., from Wood (mother) - Fire (child),
TH 3, HP 9 with 3 moxa cones, or transfer from another element to Fire, depending on pulse picture found.