Too Much of a Good Thing: When Over-Treatment Happens to Your Patients

Over-treatment is not a widely recognized concept in the field of traditional East Asian medicine, but it is useful to consider as it may provide an explanation for what may be occurring when patients fair poorly after a session of acupuncture, or rather than improving during a course of treatment start to experience a deterioration in their wellbeing.

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Applications of Shape of Qi Listening: Part 2

The Engaging Vitality (EV) training offers an opportunity for acupuncturists to bridge the gap between what can very often feel like abstract and often inoperative theory in our East Asian medical tradition and the primacy and immediacy of our clinical reality as it unfolds in our own everyday, ordinary workaday life in the clinic. What can help to bridge this divide is the diligent and dare I say very joyful practice and cultivation of our palpation skills.

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5 Essential Reasons to Take the Upcoming Fundamental Course Series in 2020

The Engaging Vitality (EV) training helps practitioners of East Asian medicine learn how to enhance their ability to directly perceive and make clinically effective use of qi in their practice. Now that registration has opened for the upcoming Fundamental Course Series, here are five essential reasons to take this upcoming training opportunity in 2020.

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3 Unexpected Ways EV Can Enhance Your Practice

With steady engagement with the EV material and consistent practice and utilization of the palpation techniques, in time anybody can come to discover how the EV material can enhance their practice of acupuncture and herbal medicine, expand their capacity to flexibly approach patient’s problems from a multitude of viewpoints, and deepen their appreciation for the practice of East Asian medicine….

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Thanks for the EV Module 3 Course in Portland, OR

Hi EV team,
I wanted to send a thank you to all of you - Rayén, Kailey, Marguerite and Dan for this weekend, as well as the whole course. 
The class and toolbox is exactly what I had been looking for! As much as I love Chinese Medicine, I was frustrated by the gap between the theory and the practice, and the absence of a shared palpatory experience and relationship to qi. I've been using what I've learned in the course on all my patients in clinic, and it has been taking some of the "guess work" out of whether or not a treatment is working. 

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Kailey Brennan on why study EV Part 2

In school to study acupuncture and East Asian medicine, we start with the fundamentals. We study East Asian medicine’s understanding of the body. We learn about the pathways of the meridians, the concept of the Qi dynamic, the theory of Yin and Yang, the Daoist understanding of humans and their relationship to nature, as well as some of the cultural, historical, political, philosophical and spiritual ideas that influence and undergird this medicine. 

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Why study EV? by Kailey Brennan

Engaging Vitality is a acupuncture and palpation workshop developed and taught by Dan Bensky, Chip Chace, and Marguerite Dinkins. In addition to being longstanding practitioners of Traditional East Asian Medicine, the instructors have extensive training and expertise in osteopathic palpation methods, including visceral manipulation and craniosacral therapy. Engaging Vitality is the product of their many years of deep engagement, study, and practice of these various traditions. 

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Why study EV by Kailey Brennan

I landed in my first Engaging Vitality Module I seminar a month after getting licensed as an acupuncturist. My primary reason for signing up was that I saw it as a chance to develop my palpation skills. I did not come to this profession with a background in any kind of bodywork. Beyond point location and surface anatomy, palpation was not heavily emphasized in my TCM schooling.

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