My home grown bean sprout harvest. I get one every four days. Delicious in salads, heavenly stir fried!

This is a treatment I use for one patient that's been very successful. I treat this patient weekly with acupuncture and cold laser for chronic knee and ankle issues and they are healing well. She also has a lot of bulging varicose veins. Three weeks ago I started treating them with cold laser and the result is quite amazing. The bulging has gone way down and the leg is looking much better. Cold laser is known to help with pain, inflammation and promotes blood flow which can explain the results. I will continue this treatment with her to see how much it can improve. I will also try it with other patients to see if the treatment actually works or this is just an isolated case.

Things happen and sometimes you only realize much later how much they have influenced you and shaped you. My experience with Dr. Niemtzow is one of them. I met Dr. Niemtzow in 2008 and was fortunate enough to be able to follow him around and learn from him for a week. This is a list of what I learnt:

• Piezoelectrlc stimulation
• The use of ASP needles
• Cold laser
• Battlefield acupuncture protocol and
• His insight that energy medicine would be the medicine of the future

But most importantly:

• The importance of patient mobilization during treatment and that
• Improvement in symptoms should be achieved within the treatment session

All these techniques and principles continue to guide me in my everyday practice.

Dr. Niemtzow continues to transmit his lode of knowledge and experience. Take advantage of it:
http://www.n5ev.com/courses.html

Lok-Kwan offers laser acupuncture as an alternative to needle sensitive patients as well as children. A 2008 systemic review of RCTs evaluating laser acupuncture as a primary intervention concluded that "Evidence was found to support the use of laser acupuncture in the treatment of myofascial pain, postoperative nausea and vomiting and for the relief of chronic tension headache. Laser acupuncture would appear to represent an effective form of acupuncture for the management of these conditions and could be considered as a viable alternative to more traditional forms of acupuncture point stimulation." (quoted from the abstract)

I recently equipped the office with an Apollo laser system. Cold laser may help with many conditions other than acute and chronic pain:

Light therapy is now available in the form of laser acupuncture. Lok-Kwan uses the Apollo cold laser to treat pain and other conditions. Safe, fast and painless, proven for treatment of acute and chronic pain and evidence is accumulating for many other conditions. Make an appointment to experience it yourself.

This is without doubt the top TCM news story of 2015. That a TCM doctor is the key person for the discovery of a pharmaceutical drug is quite astounding. Please view Tu Youyou's lecture on Nobelprize.org. It's a fascinating drug discovery story. 

The drug is artemisinin, a derivative from the plant qinghao, artemisia annua, also known as sweet mugwort. Interesting thing is that Dr. Tu did it by combing Chinese medical literature for herbs and formulas for malaria and testing them. She obtained extractions from qinghao in different ways but they did not work. Finally she was tipped off by a closer reading of one line in Ge Hong's 341 AD text "Emergency Formulas to Keep Up One's Sleeve" (shown in above photo from Dr. Tu's Nobel lecture presentation) that says Qinghao should be soaked in water and the juice squeezed out of it for treating malaria: vs. boiling it which is the common decoction method. She then started to explore cool extraction methods that finally led to success. Ge Hong was a most renowned Daoist scholar and philosopher. Actually he had one foot on Daoism and the other squarely on Confucianism but that is another story. Without a doubt, Ge Hong himself experimented with different extraction methods to find the most effective one for preparing qinghao for malaria.