Engaging Vitality- The Practice of Attention, Sensing and Perception • Dan Bensky

#243

March 15, 2022

Acupuncture, Listening, Methods, Palpation

Engaging Vitality- The Practice of Attention, Sensing and Perception
Dan Bensky

Our Sponsors

When traveling do you turn on the GPS and follow the instructions, look at a map to orient yourself, or do you have a sense of the terrain and the capacity to navigate by landmarks, waterways and a sense of where north lies?

In your clinical work, are you orienting to a theory or idea, or toward something in the patient that is telling you in the moment what is needed? Are you working off a map, or attending to signals from the patient’s body and being?

In this conversation with Dan Bensky we investigate some listening tools that have their origin in Osteopathy, but also can be used to help us find acupuncture points and interact with them in a potent way. Furthermore, these methods can guide us in tracking the patient’s response to our interventions in real time.

Listen into this discussion on engaging our patients vitality through the use of palpation, sensing, and attention that will aid you in listening to the subtle messages from the patient’s body and qi.

In this episode, we discuss:

Experiences in Taiwan and Macau
What motivate Dan into doing medical school
One of the problems with conservatism in traditional culture
Engaging Vitality is a process of teaching tools, what you do with them is up to you
You have to be OK with being wrong
Points are organic and unique to the patient, the point is where you get the best response
The theory is always useful, in theory
Leaning on appreciation
Thoughts on staying present with sensing
Some of the time you’re using the techniques to help you practice, and other times you’re using your practice to learn the techniques
It’s very easy to unintentionally overtreat patients
With traditional medicine you only get better by experience, and to get experience you have to pay attention
How appreciation in your work is helpful
If you only can talk about Chinese medicine in our professional jargon, then you probably don’t really understand their condition
There is no such thing as a non-compliant patient
Figuring out what approach is right for your patient
When you trust your hands, you’re in for a wild ride

Acupuncture is not sticking needles in people; it is using needles to get a positive response from the organism

Dan Bensky EV

I’ve been interested in things East Asian since I was a boy and stumbled into Traditional East Asian Medicine [TEAM] by chance in the early 1970’s. At the time it was not only very hard to find a place to study, it was even hard to know what or how to study.

This sense of wonder has stayed with me for the past 45 years.

My experiences, in Taiwan, Japan, China and the US have shown me that the greatest thing about this medicine is that it has so many tools that aid in being open to paying attention to and helping our patients on a multitude of levels.
Similarly, engagement with the medicine demands that we dive into the traditions without being stuck in them so that we can connect to and be a part of them. I have been helped along this path when, again by chance, I became interested in osteopathic medicine in the late 1970’s and had the good fortune to go to Michigan State University where I was able to work with some amazing teachers. It became quickly obvious to me that TEAM and osteopathy were complementary on many, many levels and I’ve been working on integrating them and attempting to understand how each illuminates the other ever since.