Heating and Cooling with Saam

#427

September 23, 2025

Saam Acupuncture

Heating and Cooling with Saam
Roseline Lambert

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Ever notice how our bodies have their own climate? The heat of fire and cold of water aren’t just metaphors, they are elemental forces that don’t just live in the weather—they’re playing out in our patients’ bodies every day.

In this conversation with Roseline Lambert, we explore her work blending Saam acupuncture with Japanese palpation methods, and how she’s been experimenting with heating and cooling as clinical strategies. What began as curiosity has become a set of questions for her hands, and a more finely tuned sense for how temperature sketches the contours of channel health and pathology.

Listen into this discussion as we talk about how observation and palpation guide treatment, how listening closely to patient language reveals diagnosis, and why heating and cooling formulas might unlock clinical puzzles where standard approaches fall short.

Roseline brings the improvisation of a musician and the hands of a cartographer to her practice. Her story is a reminder that our medicine grows not just from what we’re taught, but from how we follow the questions that arise in clinic.

In this episode, we discuss:

Discovering Saam acupuncture through Michael Max’s podcast while still in school
Being drawn to Saam’s observational framework as an alternative to complex TCM patterning
Using personality traits, physical presentation, and simple signs as diagnostic anchors
Shifting focus from pulse and tongue diagnosis to visual and tactile observation
Introduction to palpation through Japanese acupuncture during mentorship
Realizing palpation could bridge theory with lived sensations in patients
First experiments combining Saam with Japanese palpation in clinical practice
Discovering “cooling and warming” formulas through a Facebook group discussion
Creating personal charts to map and remember dozens of new formulas
Using palpation of fire and water points to confirm clinical choices
Case study of electrical leg pain and abdominal rash resolved with cooling treatment
Patients as collaborators, providing language, feedback, and active participation
The creative “mad scientist” joy of testing and refining formulas
Exploring how cooling/warming principles might extend to other elemental relationships

Let the body talk to you. Put your ego aside, and listen with your heart, your hands, your soul… and then use your brain.

Roseline Lambert, R.Ac

Originally from Quebec City, I now live in Toronto, and I am part of a multi-disciplinary clinic with a focus on mental health. I graduated in 2019 and started practicing right in the midst of the pandemic. I came across Saam acupuncture during my first year of practice, and was completely amazed by it. I started learning this Korean 4-needle technique with Toby Daly, and got inspired later by Thomas Sorenson and his five elements abdominal palpation. I also trained in Japanese acupuncture, first with one of my mentors, Ariella Meinhard, and now with Kiiko Matsumoto. I primarily use palpation as my diagnosis method for both approaches.

Outside of my life as an acupuncturist, I continue my career as a baroque singer. I feel that those two careers feed and complement each other. When I need to move my Qi, I go salsa dancing or for a ride with my bike Marcello.