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The go live button and we'll see what happens. So Dr. Koda, now is a good time to tell a joke if.
You have one. You know, I don't have that many, but I was in the military, so I have a little military joke. Okay. All right. So, you know, the enemy captured three members of different ranks and they were all going to be facing a firing squad.
There was a general and then there was a high-ranking NCO and then there was a young private, right? And so they asked the general first, you know, if he had any last requests. So the general said, you know, I'd like to give a really long and flowery speech to my people.
And they said, okay. And so then the NCO, which is, you know, a high-ranking enlisted person said, I'd like to help the general do whatever he needs to do and, you know, fetch him whatever he needs to get, you know, if he needs water, if he needs slides, whatever, you know.
And then the private gets asked last and he said, just shoot me before the general speaks.
That was good.
So anyway.
Okay. Thanks for that.
Hopefully it won't be that kind of moment tonight, so.
Okay. Well, I'm Terri Camerizal and I'm here with Creation Fellowship Santee. We're a group of friends bound by our common agreement that the creation account, as told in Genesis, is a true depiction of how God created the universe and all life from nothing in just six days a few thousand years ago.
We've been meeting most Thursday nights here on Zoom since June of 2020. We've been blessed with presentations by pastors, teachers, doctors, cartoonists, scientists, apologists, and all around smarty pants people who love the Lord and have a message to share.
You can find most of our past videos by searching Creation Fellowship Santee, that's S-A-N-T-E-E, on YouTube. Follow us on our Creation Fellowship Santee Facebook page and sign up for our email list by emailing creationfellowshipsantee at gmail .com so you don't miss any upcoming speakers.
Most of our topics are creation themed naturally, but from time to time we are blessed with some off topics, such as what we have tonight. Although tonight's is actually not so much an off topic but an application of our belief that God designed our bodies with irreducible complexity.
Believing that to be true, how should we approach our own care? Health care is quite a popular topic these days and some of our members were wanting to hear ideas for pain and health care that line up with God's word.
So I invited my own former physician, Dr. Eric Cota. Dr. Cota has a bachelor of science degree from the U .S. Air Force Academy, a master's of public health from Johns Hopkins, a doctor of medicine degree from the Uniformed Services University, and a family medicine residency from UC Davis.
He has been a practicing family physician for 23 years and a medical acupuncturist for eight years. He has published articles in eight different peer-reviewed international medical journals to include the Annals of Family Medicine, Journal of Urology, and Journal of Family Practice and Medical Acupuncture.
He has been on the teaching faculty of two medical schools and one family medicine residency program. So with that great resume, Dr. Cota, we are happy to have you with us tonight.
Well, thank you, Terri. So I guess the first thing I have to do is figure out if I'm sharing my screen correctly. So let me see if I can do that. Can everybody see that okay? Or maybe not quite yet. Hold on.
Yeah, not quite yet.
You know, all right. So maybe there. Hold on. Is that going to work? Let's see if that shares. Okay.
Yeah.
Is that sharing? Is that good?
Yes, that's perfect. Right there. Perfect.
I need to go backwards. Okay. There we go.
Okay.
There we go. So I think we're working now. All right. So yeah. So yeah, that resume, thank you for doing that, Terri. Really, that doesn't make me any smarter than anybody. It hopefully at least says that I probably am not too crazy.
I at least should know what I'm talking about to some degree. So with that, I'll tell you a little bit about acupuncture. And actually, so I know quite a lot about acupuncture. I'm not necessarily an expert in herbals or the other types of alternative medicines.
But I think acupuncture is a really neat area. So yeah, the thing about me is, you know, it just, you know, it was becoming a Christian, it was easy for me to see that, you know, the teachings of Christ were truth.
And that was easy. The hard part was, especially with my background and going to public schools and, you know, doing all this sort of scientific medical sort of learning, wrapping my brain around, you know, creation versus evolution, right?
Because everything I was always taught was evolution. And that was, that made sense, you know, on the surface, and it took a while to wrap my brain around things. And actually, you know, the acupuncture area has really solidified that to me.
And I think I may be one of the few acupuncture people that think that way. But hopefully, this will give you just more ideas about acupuncture, but also give you more ammunition as far as witnessing to God, just another way of looking at how creation makes sense as opposed to evolution.
So, all right, so I'm gonna go through here. So just my, my journey as an acupuncturist. So I, as you heard from the introduction, I was, I have been and I still am a family physician. I still practice as a family physician.
About 20-ish so years ago, as a tourist, I took a trip to China. And, you know, being medical, I took the opportunity to make a stop at a Chinese medicine place. And just out of curiosity, just to see what this was all about.
They checked my pulse, and they looked at my tongue. And they said, your liver is kind of warm. And you should take these supplements that looked kind of funny. And they said, yeah, this will make you all better.
If we had time, we should do acupuncture. And I said to myself, this is really ridiculous. There is no way this could be true. This is just makes no sense at all. I thought it was the craziest thing ever to believe in Chinese medicine or acupuncture or anything like that.
So I certainly did not come from an origination that, that this is the way to go. And I was, you know, in any way biased towards acupuncture from the start. So I just wanted to give you that as a background.
And, you know, just to show you that, you know, this is where I'm coming from. So acupuncture just as a quick history lesson. I show this one cartoon just because I love this cartoon. I imagine acupuncture to have started this way.
Basically, you know, you have these two early hunters with this woolly mammoth upside down dead with this itsy bitsy little arrow, you know, and they said, we should write that spot down. Well, I kind of imagine acupuncture to have started that way.
You know, somebody got poked with something and they said, well, my back doesn't hurt anymore. And they said, well, we should write that spot down, you know, because I'm guessing that it wasn't just some stroke of genius that someone just decided, well, we should poke needles in people and that'll make them all better.
You know, so that's, that's how I always think of acupuncture starting. Obviously, most of us have heard that acupuncture started in China, at least a couple thousand years ago. But what's not known is that it was used in lots of the world through the years.
Medieval Persia, there's evidence that it was used for sciatica, which is an offshoot of back pain affecting the nerves. There's, I haven't actually found the source data for this, but I'm told by other acupuncturists that some Egyptian mummies even have had evidence of, you know, when they scan the mummies after they find them, you know, they find certain ailments like, for instance, arthritic spine changes.
And they found that there's burn marks in certain spots that we would think of today as being acupuncture points. And so, you know, in a roundabout way, the thought is, is that maybe they had figured things out too, that certain spots actually are good for healing certain things.
Later on in France, of all places, it made its way there. And they actually, there was a famous doctor from France who came up with a whole new way of looking at acupuncture that came up with what's called auricular acupuncture, which is ear acupuncture.
And that actually completely originated in France and then took hold a little bit in China as some word got back that way. So that was probably one of the first places where new acupuncture methods went backwards back to China.
Sir William Osler is probably a name that you've never heard of before, but is a probably the most famous Western physician of the 18th century or the 1800s, at least 19th century in 1892. Basically, back then, he was the author of the textbook of medicine that everyone in the Western world took as gospel, basically, for medicine.
Today, that would be considered Harrison's internal medicine, which, you know, in those days, it was Osler's Principles and Practices of Medicine. Well, I have a copy of, you know, a reproduction of that book.
And for instance, one place in that book, it specifically says that for back pain, the best thing that we've figured out is to do acupuncture on that. And it says that right in there. And sometime between 1892 and the 1900s, everybody in the Western world, whether it be America or Europe, pretty much throughout acupuncture, and went with pharmaceuticals.
So why that is, you know, we have lots of theories on that. But that's just an interesting tidbit. And in the USA, it's really not taken hold too much. It probably took hold first when President Nixon went to China, and he was the first president to actually go to China.
And he had a physician, as do all presidents, they have their own private physician that is in the White House. His physician, while on the trip to China, was taken over by the Chinese medical folks, and shown surgeries.
And he came back and marveled at the fact that they were able to do extensive surgery simply with acupuncture as the anesthesia. And so he brought that back. Subsequently, there's been training for physicians in acupuncture in the United States since probably the 70s.
Although, you know, in the 70s, it didn't take hold a whole lot. It was a very, very small thing. It's still a pretty small thing, but it's gotten a little bit bigger, at least. But yeah, so it's fairly new.
I mean, the 70s, you know, okay, we're close to 50 years now, but it's still fairly new in the United States, and it's starting to take hold. And where I'm at right now, I'm very fortunate to have a lot of folks that I work with who are on the cutting edge of what new innovations basically in acupuncture.
The next bullet I have on there is kind of an interesting thing. I've heard some people, I haven't heard a lot of people say this, but they wonder if certain things are pagan in nature. Is acupuncture pagan in nature?
It came from China after all, and other things like yoga and other things, people have thought that. And that's reasonable. I don't have anything to refute that other than the verse from Titus that I put there on the slide that kind of says it all to me, that makes sense to me that to the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure.
So, you know, it really, you know, if you worship it, the altar of acupuncture, then maybe it's pagan. But if you use it in a biblical concept, and you think of it in a biblical sort of way, it probably isn't.
But I'm sure there are lots of opinions either way on that. So, but that's the way I think of it. All right. So acupuncture is really complicated. And actually, this starts to get into, you know, as I have thought of this over the years, I've come to realize that this really doesn't seem like an accident.
It really doesn't. The diagram up on the upper right hand corner of this slide is not by any means for anyone's memorization. But it just shows you that a lot of smart people have been trying for a lot of years to figure out why acupuncture works.
And, you know, there's been a lot of, a lot of hints and a lot of findings and, but there isn't a smoking gun of exactly why this works. So, you know, just to give you an idea, there's some that would say that there's, you know, you put the needles in and there's a local muscle and tissue reaction, and maybe certain forms of acupuncture work largely in that way.
And I think they do. But okay, that makes sense for certain things. There's some evidence that anti-inflammatory mediators in the body rush towards the acupuncture needle areas and cause benefit in that way.
Okay. That explains certain effects. That doesn't explain all the effects, but that's useful. The brain stimulation part. Now, the little picture in the bottom right hand corner is actually some real data from what we call a functional MRI.
That was done out of my current clinic. Some folks in my current clinic did this and it showed that basically what they did was they had lab simulated pain, which was painful, but not damaging permanently or anything like that, but, you know, a painful stimulation and they took pictures and the pictures on the left, it shows, okay, here's what that pain stimulation did to brain function.
Okay. And then they put some acupuncture needles in, in areas where they thought would help the pain that was artificially generated in the lab conditions. And on the picture on the right, you can see that brain activity radically changed.
And it also changed in the areas where they were originally stimulated. So there, you know, that indirectly shows some evidence that perhaps the brain plays a role that, you know, certain areas of the brain are made active by acupuncture treatments and make changes and make the body or the brain or both perceive things in a different way because of the acupuncture.
Neuropeptides basically are some things that have been shown to change with acupuncture. So certain acupuncture methods seem to induce the brain to change chemicals and the amount of chemicals that are produced.
Most notably opioid chemicals or opioid receptor regulation seems to, in some cases, you know, that lab folks have found changes in either those or hormones or things like that. And that seems to be a potential mechanism.
And then, you know, these are all these things seem to work in a vacuum in certain cases, but they don't really explain everything very well, especially, I don't know if, I think a lot of you probably seen in some Chinese store somewhere, the models or the pictures of the acupuncture meridians, which are basically these lines all over the body.
And so in Chinese acupuncture, there are meridians that go all over the body that don't make any sense to a Western medical physician because nothing that we did, nobody that we've ever dissected in our training or medical school looks anything like these meridians.
And so what, and that's actually a large reason why Western physicians don't believe in it because it makes no sense at all, right? So what could possibly be happening here? Well, there's some theories that we don't know, you know, they're just theories.
We're just trying to make sense of it all. What is everywhere? Well, there are tissue planes, you know, there's planes between muscles that go all over the body. Maybe that's the communication method.
Maybe body fluids are stimulated in such a way that go all throughout through the body. And so maybe that is. A couple of years ago, one of the major journals, I think it was Science, came out with a revelation that something that we've seen on human tissue slides for, you know, for decades, if not centuries, was deemed to be, wow, this might be a hole in the organ, and which was basically the connective tissue.
And I remember in medical school, looking at this connective tissue and going, okay, it's just stuff there. It's like, you know, it's just wavy stuff like, like the calluses on your hand, but it's all over the place.
You know, it is on all tissue slides, but it is everywhere. And it goes in straight lines. It's almost like roads, you know, in a way. And so it makes you wonder, is there something there that we don't understand that, that is in this connective tissue that could be communicating throughout the body and causing some of the effect of acupuncture.
So again, no proof. We're just trying to figure things out. And finally, peripheral nerve stimulation, which is the best way that most medical doctors can wrap their brains around this is that, well, it must be stimulating nerves, nerves are all over the body, but significant nerves go in very specific places.
And some acupuncture needles don't go all that close to significant nerves. So sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And so it's hard to say that that is the answer. And maybe there's lots of answers.
And, you know, when you think of all of this put together and think, look at this slide, you realize that it's really complicated. It is so complicated that the smartest researchers and the smartest physicians and people all over the world have not really figured out exactly how acupuncture works, no matter how many bodies we've dissected or how many research studies have been done.
And it's, to me, it's sort of like DNA in the sense that, okay, it is so complicated that it couldn't be an accident, right? It's just like this just didn't happen, right? If it just, if it was more of an accident, it would be a little bit more simple and understandable than this crazy thing that we can't figure out.
All right. So just getting to some examples, just to give you an idea, and I'll divulge right now that there's a lot more to it than just pain control. And so I'll show you and tell you just a little bit about it.
And I will tell you also that I have a story for everything. I've got so many stories. Every day I have a story about acupuncture. It's crazy. I still practice primary care every day. I still practice acupuncture every day.
Probably about one-third to almost half of my visits in my primary care clinic every day are acupuncture visits, and that's by the patient's choice. And I'll just tell you exactly what I mean by that.
What's incredible about that is I never push acupuncture. I am a regular doctor. I still, I basically subscribe to the thought that I don't want to withhold any option to a patient. And so what I will do when I see a patient, I will say, hey, we have these options.
I can give you these medicines. I can send you to this specialist, this physical therapist, this chiropractor, this whatever. I can whatever, maybe give you a shot, maybe give you a cortisone injection.
I can do acupuncture. What do you want to do? And amazingly enough, and actually this has changed over the years as I've seen, a lot of people want acupuncture. And over the years, less and less people want the drugs, and more and more people want the acupuncture.
And I really, I think, and I wonder if I'm trying to skew that in the way I present it, but I really have no incentive to push acupuncture in my day-to-day practice because I work on a salary. I get the same amount of money no matter whether I do acupuncture or I do something else.
And I'll tell you, if I just write a prescription for medicines, that takes me a couple seconds. If I do acupuncture, that's taken me 15 to 20 minutes and I'm rushing through it. And so the incentive would be for me to not do acupuncture, but I do it because it makes my practice much more satisfying.
The patients are overwhelmingly more satisfied and do overwhelmingly better. And I've seen it every day. Every day I have new stories about that. And I'll probably tell you some of those stories as we go along.
So getting to this slide, allergy. You wouldn't think of acupuncture for allergy, but it is terrific. I'll tell you two stories about allergies on this, just to give you an idea. We have cherry blossoms here in Washington, DC, and there's the Smithsonian museums.
And so it was cherry blossom season a few years ago. My daughter, we were wandering around doing the museums and she was saying, I can't stop sneezing. My nose is itching. And we're in the museums in the middle of the Capitol Mall and I don't have acupuncture needles.
So I have her sit down. I jab my needle into the allergy point in her ear. And about 10 minutes later, she says, I'm good. Okay, let's go. And so that, even to me, this is what I do for a living. I was shocked by that.
Another one that was just a few months ago. So I will tell you that the local medical school, the medical students love doing acupuncture rotations. It's not a required rotation, but they have a few elective months and they love doing acupuncture rotations.
So we had a couple of medical students and we taught them a few things about some acupuncture and, you know, we teach them a couple of methods and what they do in their spare time, they practice on each other.
Right. Just so they get it. Well, this one time, a couple of months ago, they, these two students were both on the rotation and they, they said, Hey, Dr. Koda, come, come take a look. How did, how did we do on putting these points in?
And, you know, they were trying to do pain points basically. And I said, well, you know, these look pretty good, but this one over here, you know, that one's really more by the allergy point. And the one student says to the other student, you see, I told you my sinus is cleared up as soon as you put that one in.
And so, you know, just to give you an idea of, you know, really how incredible it is. I mean, with something as simple as allergies, dermatology. All right. I do this kind of to give you an idea of how widespread this benefit can be.
I've had some patients who've been to the dermatologist for years and they have chronic conditions. You know, one that you would have heard of would be psoriasis. And, you know, I, you know, thinking back to the China trip days, it's like, I did not have any preconceived ideas of acupuncture helping skin conditions at all.
So I'm going, okay, that, you know, wow, that that's really pretty bad. You know, your psoriasis is really bad, but let's let's treat your, your anxiety and everything. And so I was treating that. And, you know, over the course of several sessions, you know, she comes back to me.
I mean, it was probably a couple months later and she goes, you got to look at this. My psoriasis is all drying up. And, you know, it was, it was one of the worst cases of psoriasis I've ever seen. It was all over her body.
And she's, you know, then she, you know, a couple months later, she showed me, I just got a couple spots left, you know, here and there, you know, and it was like, wow, that was really amazing. And I've seen that with other dermatologic conditions that have completely failed pretty much all the modern dermatologic treatments by the dermatologist.
So crazy stuff like this. I mean, you know, almost miraculous. I, you know, everybody knows about, you know, several of Jesus's miracles, you know, healing the lepers and things like that. But, you know, it's, I mean, it's, it's not on that level, but it's, I mean, in medical terms, it's nothing anywhere close to anything I've seen before.
Right. So, you know, it's, at least on the human level, it's pretty miraculous. So gastrointestinal. Okay. What in the world is acupuncture going to do for intestinal problems? Right. So I use irritable bowel as a, as one, because I treat that one pretty darn often, actually.
And I, you know, I love being a physician doing acupuncture in primary care, especially because I get to see a wide variety of cases. And so, you know, being a family physician, I see everything. Right.
And so I get to try out acupuncture on everything. I pretty much throw it out as, you know, if someone wants it, Hey, I give it a go. But I found that irritable bowel. Wow. I, you know, I just put four simple needles in and most people respond and most people respond to the same treatment.
So that tells me that there's pretty consistent connection somewhere, somehow, and they don't make any sense. Like I, like I said before, with, with Western medicine, Western medical teaching, any anatomical teaching that we know about, but you know, people love it.
I mean, I, most people for, for instance, for this condition, I treat once a month, once every six weeks and they're good. And then they come back, Oh, it's starting to be hacked up again. And, you know, I treat them again and then they're good.
And then they, you know, just come back, you know, every once in a while. And, and it's great. I mean, I've, I had one lady about six months ago. She's, she was older, she was in her seventies or eighties.
And she said, she wishes she would have done this 10 years ago because the last 10 years of her life were pretty much nonexistent because her bowels were so messed up that she couldn't do anything. You know, she could, she could hardly leave her home, but this allowed her to do that.
So, so yeah, so irritable bowel as well. All right. On to the next thing. This is a very interesting one. So these pictures were just a few weeks ago. All right. And so I'll, I'll get to the pictures and I'll explain those because, you know, they're just a bunch of graphs, but anyway, I'll, I'll get to that.
So ear, nose and throat stuff. Okay. What in the world could acupuncture do for that? Well, you know what? Nausea and vomiting, there is nothing any better than acupuncture. I mean, you know, Zofran's pretty good.
Phenergan's pretty good, but wow. You got to keep dosing those, right? You got to, you know, they're good and then they wear off and they're good and they wear off and then they have side effects, right?
And so the side effects sometimes can be really bad. I mean, the really bad side effects aren't that common, but you know, they do happen there, you know, people get weird, you know, postures and, you know, their body contorts in weird ways and on rare occasions, but I usually with maybe two, maybe four needles and in inside of five minutes.
I mean, I, I can get rid of people's nausea and vomiting whether it's from, I've treated people with nausea and vomiting from cancer, from pregnancy, from just being sick with the, you know, the food poisoning and whatever, but it's I mean, it works and it's low risk.
It's not got side effects and it's, it works like a charm. Vertigo. Wow. You know, some people, well, and actually Terry, I know you've been fighting vertigo. You know, there's two or three different treatments that usually one of them works very well on a patient and it, it, it helps a large proportion of patients.
I won't say it helps everybody, but certainly at least two thirds, if not more patients, probably more like 70, 80 of patients. Have their vertigo completely controlled. I've even had people with, you know, Meniere's disease is something that you'd know about if you've known someone that had it and that doesn't go away.
It's an ongoing recurrent thing. And you know, I have people with Meniere's disease that come and see me once every month to every quarter and they go, well, I think I need a treatment again. And then they go on their way and, you know, and, and that's it.
And it's a lot of times their treatment only takes five or 10 minutes. And it's, it's pretty incredible. So now I'm getting to this graph thing in these pictures. Tinnitus, tinnitus is ringing in the ears.
And you know, one of my colleagues, really crazy, but actually world famous sort of guy. He he's, he's, he's getting up there in age, but he's still going strong. He's 79 years old now, but he comes up with the craziest things.
And, you know, I, from experience, I know if he comes up with it, I want to give it a try to see how it, how it works. Well, you know, maybe about nine months ago, a year ago or so, he came up with this thing.
He said, Hey, I want to show you something. And what did he do? He put some acupuncture needles in, in various places in, in the head, in tropical, typical Chinese meridian points. And he said, here, I, I, I got this thing.
So he pulls out his iPhone and that's what that, that picture is at the bottom there, that black rectangle there. And he says, I just use this app. I'm looking at him and, you know, 10 years ago, I would have thought he, he, he really lost it, but now, now I, you know, I, I think everything's worth a try.
He pulls out his iPhone and he says here, I, I just have them do this app and tune the sound to the same frequency as their, their, the ringing in their ears. And then I touched that to the needles and I go, okay, this is really out there.
But you know, he was in there with a patient and I saw it. And amazingly enough, the person's ring went away and that's crazy. I mean, I've since treated patients and it is crazy. It probably seems to work on certainly more than half of the patients.
I mean, some patients don't respond, but I mean, you know, tinnitus, if, if you have an idea about it, it, there is no real cure for it. The best thing we can do is we can give people hearing aids. They can wear noise canceling headsets, but you can't really fix it at all.
So the, the standard of medical care is about 0 improvement, right? I mean, or response rate. And we're, we're talking about 50 response rate, maybe even more than that. But I mean, since then I've treated a guy who was a pilot in Vietnam, had significant ring in his ears.
I've treated a 20 year musician who had, you know, obviously bad noise exposure over the years and had a lot of ring in their ears and they got better. And, you know, the, the Vietnam vet, I take care of him all the time for, you know, because I'm his doctor.
I mean, he's come to me at least six months after the treatment. He says, you know, I still get ring in my ears just a little bit, but I hardly notice it. I mean, before, you know, I couldn't think of anything else, you know, it was like, it was pretty much his whole life.
And now it's like, okay, if I concentrate in a quiet room, I can hear it, but it's, you know, it's not ruling my life anymore. And that's, you know, just a couple of treatments months previously. So now I get to these graphs.
So these graphs are an interesting thing. So what are these? These are audiogram graphs. So audiogram is, is basically the graphs that are made. If you remember, usually most people at some point, at least when you were in grade school or something, when you did a hearing test, they do beeps that are high pitched to low pitched and various pitches.
And they figure out, you know, what frequency can you start hearing at? So the, the dark line at the 20 on the horizontal 20 is about where the limit of normal hearing is right. And, and the frequency threshold is logarithmic, meaning that this isn't just a simple graph.
30 isn't, or 40 isn't twice as bad as 20. It's like 10 or a hundred times worse than 20, right? So it's pretty, pretty different. So this is actually, these graphs aren't generated from those beep tests, but more sophisticated tests by an audiologist.
So this is actually a real case. And what had happened in this case is we had treated this patient with, for ringing in the ears. And we didn't know they were going to the audiologist. They just said, Hey, can you help me ring in my ears?
But the audiologist ran to the clinic, and this is probably three weeks ago, ran as fast as she could to the acupuncture clinic and said, well, what did you do to this patient? And we said, we treated the ringing in the ears.
I think she said, basically the graph in the top middle there was basically the same almost identical tracing that the person had had for about five straight audiograms that the audiologist did. And it wasn't going anywhere.
And she noticed that between the last time and the time that she ran up to see us, you know, within minutes of doing an audiogram, the only thing that had really happened was they had gotten some acupuncture treatment with us.
And so what happened was, and what made her run to us as fast as she could was the test on that day was the one in the bottom right. And so the blue line is the left ear. So the left ear had major hearing loss.
So if you look, I mean, we're looking at 70, 60 decibel thresholds at low frequencies and low frequencies are, you know, usually people hear low frequencies, you know, that means that something pathologic is happening in the ear, not just noise exposure, but to give you an idea that about 70 decibels is the sound of a vacuum cleaner.
All right. And so she tested this person and after like five times of five different occasions, getting a graph like the one in the middle there, she gets a graph like this one after acupuncture treatment.
And yeah, we're looking at 25 decibels, 45 decibels, 25 decibels, you know, 25 decibels is a whisper. All right. So, you know, at the best, at a couple of those frequencies, it was the difference between hearing a whisper and a vacuum cleaner.
And so she says, this doesn't ever happen. What what's going on here. And so we're in the process of trying to write up a research proposal to figure out if this is reproducible. I mean, we know that we've been able to help a lot of people ringing their ears, but if we can help a lot of people with hearing loss, that would be really quite quite groundbreaking.
So yeah. And I mean, yeah, she's an experienced audiologist. It's she says, this never happens. I don't see this. So just to give you an idea of some of the possibilities here. And again, this was just a few weeks ago.
So I had to put that in amongst the slides because it's a visual visuals are good. All right. Psychology, psychiatry. I love treating psychology, psychiatric conditions. Most family practitioners run away as fast as they can screaming when someone has some sort of mental health sort of condition because it's very frustrating and it's tedious and it's not the funnest thing in the world to treat.
But since I've started doing acupuncture, I love it. I am confident that in a very large percentage of folks, I can make them a lot better, whether it be anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and even ADHD.
Some of this is just some research data that just graphically shows that in studies of people that do acupuncture and don't do acupuncture, how bad or how much different things are, whether it be depression, anxiety.
And I believe these graphs completely because I see it in practice. When I was in practice in California and when I was Terry's doctor, we actually had in our clinic embedded mental health services. And so it was just the other side of the building, which was maybe 50 yards away, right?
I don't know how long it was. It was just on the other side of our building, which wasn't that big a building. But quite quickly, the psychologists would pretty much as part of their normal process, they changed it from, okay, we do counseling to, we do counseling and hey, can you see this person and give them acupuncture needles?
Because it was so helpful. We've used this in the war zones for people with post-traumatic stress. Anxiety, depression, which is so common in those areas and people do so well. We even in my current clinic, we have basically group appointments for stress and pretty much we know what points work in most people.
And so we just have as many people as want to show up at this time and we just go around the room and go boom, boom, and they all get the same treatment and most of them do great. And they come in every few weeks or so to get their stress lowered.
I've had folks that say that, my family can't stand me because of my moodiness or my anger, but when I get this, they don't mind me anymore. And so yeah, that type of person, that specific person that I'm thinking of comes and sees me once a month and okay, get my monthly treatment and I'm good.
And so yeah, I love treating any of these conditions and even ADHD. ADHD, crazy as it is, kids don't like needles a whole lot, but I've had kids go, okay, I'm game. And they try it out and they still don't like the needles very much, but they go, I feel better.
I'm back again. I want to keep getting treatments. And so when it's worth it to a kid to get needles poked in them, that means something. So yeah, so mental health things, acupuncture, terrific. I'll have mental health conditions.
All right. So pain, I know we advertise this as pain and pain is probably the first thing that the mainstream medical community has accepted acupuncture for. Fortunately, it's actually taken hold a bit in mainstream medicine.
So compared to 10 years ago, now it went from being, this is really kind of out there crazy. We don't know if it's really helpful to most medical recommendations nowadays actually say for a variety of pain conditions that acupuncture is a reasonable part of medical care for pain.
And so one that just came out, was very timely before this talk. The JAMA Oncology, which is the journal of the American Medical Association came out with a study that, and this was just last month, that acupuncture treatment patients did 16 to 19 better than standard care patients for cancer pain.
And so that was a very large study in a very large reputable mainstream journal. And so that's absolutely true. BFA is a form of acupuncture. If you look at that picture of the person on the left there, it's a way of using very tiny little needles.
They're those little bitty gold things that you see in that person's ear. And it's a very elegant, simple sort of that we can teach anybody. In the military, we've taught nurses, we've taught medical technicians, combat medics, who are not physicians obviously, to do this even in the field and it works.
Just to give you an idea of how well it works, and sometimes some of the combat medics are very crazy. Some of them were taught some of this and they go out and they're in the war zones and they're treating guys and they're the first thing on the battlefield that people have access to care.
And so that's why we called it BFA, which is battlefield acupuncture. Some of them were taught this, and this is such an incredible method that was developed by one of my colleagues. They're crazy and sometimes they get a little bored when there's not any action.
And some of them were taught. And then later on, some of my colleagues went back and said, how's it going? Some months later, and they said, oh, this is terrific. Watch this. And they would basically blow up, put tourniquets on each other and make it hurt a lot.
And then they'd put the needles in and they'd go, look, it doesn't hurt. And so we said, well, that's great. But we don't recommend you putting tourniquets on just for the heck of it. Anyway, it is really quite incredible.
The pictures that I have here of the x-rays, the chest x-rays, that was actually a public publication from our clinic from a few years back. And to give you an idea, the one on the left is the before.
So this person had horrendous pain in between the ribs from basically, I mean, it's something really simple, just pulling a rib muscle. But that pain can be quite horrible. It was so bad that they couldn't take a breath.
They can hardly breathe in because any sort of chest expansion was just torturous pain. And as noted by the first x-ray on the left, which if you look at the right side, which is the left lung, because you're looking at the person on an x-ray, you see the bottom there basically is pretty flat.
And you have that sort of line that goes along the far right side there of that picture. That indicates basically the collapse of the lower part of the lung because they weren't taking deep breaths for a long enough period of time that it just didn't, air wasn't going in that part of the lung.
So three needles later, actually, by the time they took this picture, they'd already gotten three needles, but, and they were pain-free already by the time this picture was taken, but changes hadn't happened yet.
They came back about six hours later. Simply, it was only six hours later because they went back to work and had to finish their shift. And they came back after the shift and said, I think my lung's fine now.
I haven't had pain ever since those needles went in. And so we said, okay, we took another x-ray and it's, it's hard to see unless you count ribs. Counting ribs gives you an idea. If you count from that, that collarbone, the clavicle up there on the, on the right side of the picture, which is the left lung, there isn't a whole rib and a half difference.
So when we're talking a large portion of lung just got aerated with no intervention other than three needles in it in one ear. And that was it. There was no, you know, needle put in the lung. There was no chest tube put in.
There was no medicine given. And for anyone who had any questions, the radiologist read it as, you know, a lobe of the lung was collapsed on the first one and now it's not collapsed anymore. And the radiologist was not told what intervention was done.
They just read the pictures as they saw it, you know, and so they, they confirmed that, hey, this, whatever happened, it's all better now. And so the only, the main reason why we do this and we published that is because it's sometimes hard to get people to believe things unless it's visual, right?
And so you know, we can, we can say all day long that, oh, their pain went down. They're not hurting as much anymore, but okay. That's kind of subjective. It's, you know, it's, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
But a picture goes a long way to, to showing people and convincing people. So, so yeah, so that was an interesting one. Oops, wrong way. All right. Dry, dry mouth. You know, that's, you wouldn't think that's such a big problem, but people with really, really dry mouth that don't produce saliva lose their teeth eventually.
People with dry eyes, the best medical treatment is eyedrops. And I've had patients that go through a whole bottle of eyedrops every single day. All right. And that's the best that the eye doctor can give to them for those sorts of things.
So the reason why this is significant is that this, these pictures are simply just showing where we put the needles for this, this, but the real interesting thing here, as much as anything has to do with the fact that Johns Hopkins hospital, you know, patients would go there from our clinic and, you know, they'd see the specialist or their cancer doc or their, their ear, nose and throat doctor.
And after a while, Johns Hopkins, one of the top medical institutions in the country would, after they heard back from some of the patients, they started sending patients back to us and they'd say, you know, we can't fix your dry mouth or your dry eyes, but they can down there, go see those acupuncture guys down there and they can fix it.
And so, you know, just that story tells the story, you know, that, okay, Johns Hopkins admits that they can't do it, but the acupuncturist down there, whatever they're doing can, can do that. A very small variation on this, this treatment seems to also help taste, which is kind of interesting and current because we haven't actually tried this out.
We're looking for patients to try this out on because taste is a big problem with post COVID nowadays. And we're wondering if, you know, certainly we've been able to help a lot of people with taste problems before, if it's going to be helpful in COVID patients.
So, so yeah, so even COVID and post COVID problems you know, it's very possible that acupuncture may help that. Speaking of COVID, so I got COVID, I got COVID pretty definitely more definitely than most people a few months back.
So what, what happened was, is there was a person that was symptomatic. They tested positive and I was exposed to them several days earlier. And then about five days later, I got, I started getting extremely achy, very productive, bloody sputum and night sweats and everything.
And so then I got tested and I was positive. So pretty darn definite that I had it. And so I had to quarantine like everybody else. And I'm sitting there and I'm a doctor, I'm sitting there on quarantine and you know, a day, day of quarantine, I'm pretty much going crazy.
Like I gotta do something. What do I gotta do? And I recalled, you know, just the month prior to that, there was a, a finding, a very short communication in the medical acupuncture journal out of France.
And you see the reference there, Wolf, which was a person from France, noticed that in COVID patients, they had these funny ear changes pretty consistently. And what they did over in France, and France is a place where ear acupuncture got its start.
They put needles in that area that was swollen. So the picture on the left shows the swelling and the picture on the right shows no swelling, right? And so the difference that was seen in COVID patients.
So I'm sitting at home going, I just read that thing. What am I going to do for two weeks? I'm on quarantine. I looked in the mirror and I go, wow, my ears swollen in that spot too. So I had some needles at home.
Yeah. What, what the heck? I'll put a needle there. I put the needle there. And so what happened was really quite, quite, quite crazy because I generally think, okay, I'm too smart for this acupuncture stuff to work on me.
I really literally, I never expected to work on me, but anyway, I did it. And I literally had insomnia that night because I would say 75, 80 of my hours. And so I put this needle in and really it was crazy.
I mean, things just don't get better that fast. COVID doesn't get better that fast. The flu or the colds don't get better that fast. So I just couldn't sleep because it was like, wow, this is just insane.
I think this works. So even for COVID, you know, there's yeah, there's stuff that appears to be very beneficial. Um, so yeah, so it, uh, it confirmed to me that, you know, these people in France that had this finding weren't crazy, that, uh, there's something to this.
Dr. Kota, can I quick ask about that? Yeah. Um, does that ever go away? Say if you had, you know, if you, that person,.
The swelling in the ear there, you know, mine, mine went away. Um, it, it, uh, probably took a couple of weeks for my swelling to go away, but, um, yeah, so I treated it, but it, it, it went away thereafter, but yeah.
That is so weird. I never even heard of that as a symptom. Yeah. Well, no, no, no. It's very obscure in the medical acupuncture journal that doesn't get a lot of press, but, um, yeah. And that was the, where it was published.
You know, the other interesting thing too, is being, uh, in a clinic where we actually test people for COVID all the time. I mean, I have ready access to COVID tests. So I went back to work right after my quarantine was over.
Um, actually it was only 10 days, right. And I went back to work and I tested negative. Um, and people are not generally negative that quickly. They're usually, you know, several weeks, a month, two months before they go negative, you know, and so mine was clearly positive and it was clearly negative.
And so where did you put the needle for that swelling in your ear? Oh, um, right in the middle of my swelling, which was kind of on the upper side of where that circle is, you know, so yeah. All right.
Thank you. Sorry to interrupt you. I was just, otherwise I'd forget. I mean, even to me, it was shocking, you know, so it was shocking. Um, so neurology, um, so headaches as a family physician, I can guarantee you that family physicians would gladly have someone else take their migraine patients any day of the week.
It's really a headache and it's frustrating and it's not very satisfying. And as a family physician, I reflected that throughout my career. It was like, oh, there's a migraine, a horrible migraine. Oh, this is frustrating.
You know, your definition of success when they come in, because they usually come in after their Imitrex or whatever didn't work and their Motrin didn't work and their Excedrin and all that stuff. And, you know, they're in a dark room, they're curled up in a ball with dark glasses and you open the door and they say it's too much light, you know, you know, the bad migraines, I'm sure some of you have had them, but, um, quite honestly, I love horrible migraines because quite honestly, I expect 90 of the time I'm going to get rid of it.
I literally, yesterday I had a patient, that very patient, dark glasses, couldn't open her eyes, curled up in a ball on the exam table. And 15 minutes later, my headache's gone. I'm going to work. I'll see you later.
And I said, okay, I don't think it will come back. And, you know, and I, one other thing to say on migraines, this is one of the things that convinced me about acupuncture. I did acupuncture just because, hey, I just wanted another tool, right?
But I, I started treating migraines and the typical thing is, you know, your experience as a primary care doctor is you just give them, you just drug them up as much as you can. And you're happy that, okay, the, the, the, it's led up enough to where I can go home and go to sleep.
Right. So my standard is, you know, throughout my career was given a bunch of medicines. Okay. It took the edge off. They can go to sleep. Here's your note to, to go home from work for the day. And the first time this ever happened to me, it just shocked me.
And I, it would just, it blew me away. You know, it was like, it was the same sort of story, 15, 20 minutes later, persons start off looking like the person I described. And I said, okay, I'm going to give you a note so you can go home and go to sleep.
And the lady goes, nah, I can go to work. I'm like, really? You can go to work? Yeah, I'm fine. I can go to work. And I go, okay. All right. And it kept happening over and over again. And after a while it's like, you good?
Yeah, I'm good. Okay. I stopped offering people to go home from work because they didn't need to. And so it was really crazy. I mean, that just blew me away because I, you know, it's something that I'd never seen before in my career.
And I, I always see it now. I mean, it's like all the time. So it's, it's crazy. This picture is just an illustration of another sort of acupuncture. I had an ALS patient, Lou Gehrig's disease. Horrible.
Just the long and short of it, these are the points, some points I use. It's, it's really, it was really crazy. This guy showed up to the clinic in a wheelchair. He was pretty well off before, but you know, ALS had sapped all his finances and he was in a wheelchair.
And he said, and all the neurologists can do is they can monitor my progressive decline. And now I'm on Medicare. He was pretty hopeless. And he said, man, I just hope I live long enough to see my daughter's wedding, you know, later this year.
Well, he he did treatments with me every couple of weeks for about six months and he walked his daughter down the aisle and he did the father daughter dance. So, and he brought her in and showed me the videos.
So I know it happened. So it's, it's pretty crazy, pretty amazing. This other thing called Calamari is something that's on acupuncture theory. It's not available that many places, maybe 50 to a hundred places in the country, but we have in our clinic.
It's honestly the best thing for, it's not needle, but it's, you know, using some acupuncture theory. It's honestly the best thing for nerve pains. It's, it's really incredible actually in my clinic. You know, I had, this is a few years back.
I'd told the neurologist, hey, you should see this thing that we're doing with neuropathy patients. And he said, yeah, yeah, that sounds really interesting. And I said, come on over and take a look at it over at the acupuncture clinic.
He said, yeah, that sounds great. He never came over, but you know, six to 12 months later, he came over. He says, okay, I have all these patients. They say something over here is really helping. What is it?
Oh yeah. It's that thing I was telling you about, you know, and yeah, it's, yeah. People don't get, doctors don't get convinced until the patients start telling them crazy things about how they're getting better.
So, so it's something. All right. Now we're really getting really crazy. All right. The eye, what can acupuncture possibly do for the So this crazy 79 year old genius of an acupuncturist who I would get to work with has come up with something.
And so macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa, basically significant blinding conditions. He's come up with a treatment that has helped people. And he's demonstrated a few cases in Vietnam only because it was easier to do it without a lot of restrictions in America.
And at the university of Pittsburgh, he did a demonstration for the ophthalmologist there, but just to give you an idea in Vietnam, he did a treatment, two needles. I mean, that's it, two needles. And you know, the, he treated a person a couple of times and the ophthalmologist in Vietnam said, this is incredible.
And you know, he's not my doctor. He doesn't know. He said, well, what, what happened? And he said, well, this patient read stories to his granddaughter last night. I said, okay, that's, that's great.
What was his vision for? Well, he couldn't see the before, you know, and almost the identical story from when he did the, the demonstration over at the university of Pittsburgh, you know, he, he, he did a demonstration for their ophthalmology department and he got a patient, he did a treatment and, and the person could see, you know, like the biggie menu, you know, and they were very excited.
And he was like, okay, what was he like before? And they said, well, he couldn't see the chart before. Now if he can see the E all we got to do is give him glasses now. So, you know, before, if you can't see the chart, then glasses, aren't going to do him any good.
So, you know, I've joked with them. He's and I, I, I am slightly joking, but I'm slightly not joking because one of the points is right below the eyeball. It's, you know, on the lower orbit and it's not in the eyeball, but it's on the lower orbit.
And I say, you know, that'd be really interesting if, if Jesus touched these exact spots and, you know, being the creator of the universe and all, you know, he just knew what to do. And we just kind of stumbled along, you know, some of the same things that he was doing and, you know, maybe it's just how it was designed.
Right. I don't know if that's true or not, but, you know, it's sort of joking and sort of not joking. I'm wondering, you know, like, wow, you know, you know, is that, is that the secret of everything?
And, you know, obviously a carpenter from the middle of nowhere in Nazareth and 2000 years ago, shouldn't know these things unless he's the creator of the universe. Right. So, but you don't really put needles in a person's eye though.
Right. No, they're below the eye. They're below the eye. So there's, yeah. So they're really close to the eye. And, you know, most of the accounts of Jesus is he's touching the eyeball or touching eyes.
And so really, you know, it sounds really close to where these needles are going right below the eyeball. Right.
Oh, no, I agree. I believe, I believe the designer universe.
Huh. That sounds a little similar, you know, it's like, well, you know, was it just designed this way? And, you know, it, you know, it, yeah, I don't know because it's, it's interesting. So we're working on it.
It's, it's very hard to convince the review board for doing clinical studies to sign off on it, but we're very close to getting them to sign off on us doing a study to try to show this, because honestly, this is the type of thing that even if I've told them, even if it works on 10 of the people, that's a heck of a lot better than 0%.
Right. So yeah, you know, even that, that success rate would be great and it could be higher than that. I don't know. We'll still see, but we're hopeful that we get the study approved for us to start in the next, you know, six months or so.
All right. So I'm almost to the end here, but you know, getting back to the whole, you know, theme of this group, you know, the creation theme. Okay. This is a map of the ear, you know, from the French and the Chinese kind of put together.
Okay. I racked my brain. I try to think, okay, what is, what could possibly be the selective advantage to someone getting poked or burned or, you know, something done to parts of the body that have nothing to do with these body parts and helping like, okay, I'm going to put, I'm going to poke their ear and their back's going to feel better.
And often instantaneously, honestly, I mean, within minutes, how, how is that, how did natural selection make that happen? It doesn't make any sense at all. Right. And it, and not, not only that it's so complicated, it's, I mean, it's like DNA.
If it's, if it, if it's really wired that way, it's, it's so complicated that, you know, you couldn't have put a computer together. It's that complicated. Right. So, I mean, it's just so out there. For instance, I mean, yesterday in my clinic, I, I saw a guy who's 73 years old.
He I put what four needles in his ear and he said, wow, that, you know, and he was there for pain. Yeah. This just took 10 years off of my, my pain. You know, I haven't, you know, had this pain this low in 10 years.
So, you know, and, and this was just minutes later. So again I cannot think of a selective advantage to this also stepwise development. Right. So, okay. What were the steps incrementally that led to this happening?
It doesn't make any sense. Right. I, I, I mean, someone tell me if that would make any sense at all. It just doesn't make any sense. And, you know, between that and the complexity and you know, it's like the, the the common argument that, okay, this big book didn't just fall from the sky randomly and just happened to come like this.
Right. Someone had to have intelligently put this together. Right. And so yeah, that's, I mean, it basically acupuncture as a whole has really solidified my belief that, okay, this isn't at all an accident.
So, so yeah, so that's, that's everything. The just to give you an idea of what, what I find in my practice. So my low bar goal is I, with acupuncture is I significantly help two thirds to three patients.
And that's, that's very conservative. All right. I, I, I bet I help more than that, but okay. At least that much. And I say a miracle, at least monthly, I mean, you know, not miracle, not like a Jesus miracle and not walking on water, but, you know, like, you know, in, in, in medicine, a guy telling you after three months, three minutes of treatment, that he feels like 10 years have been taken off his pain history.
I mean, that's pretty miraculous, right? I mean, you know, someone's hearing, going from a whisper to a vacuum cleaner or a vacuum cleaner to a whisper with one treatment. It's pretty darn miraculous.
I mean, at least from the medical standpoint, right. Or, you know, someone just going to work half an hour after being curled up in a ball, you know, you know, with a horrible migraine. I mean, that's pretty miraculous.
So, I mean, I, you know, it's, it keeps me going. I am so, I'm, I don't have any desire to ever quit doing medicine or acupuncture because, you know, this keeps me going. So, so yeah. So that's, that's my presentation.
Okay. Dr. Cota, that was really great. Thank you for sharing that with us. And, and then how you put it into some context for us, for our group there at the end, that was really, really interesting. And we have a lot of questions for you.
So I'm going to try to kind of categorize them here for you. So let's start off with actually one thing first, not a question, but just a little comment is that Dr. Halverson from Temecula says, hi, he's watching on Facebook.
So very good. Okay. Okay. And then so one basic question is, do you think that, that the fact that people don't, even doctors don't really understand how it works is one of the reasons that a lot of regular doctors don't even want to go there is just the lack of understanding.
Yes. And, you know, even in acupuncturist doesn't, you know, they can't tell you that they totally understand how it works. Right. And so, I mean, that, that's a big simmering block in all facets of life.
If you, if people can understand it, they immediately say it's not possible. Right. And so, I mean, that's, I mean, goes all the way back to the creation idea. If you don't understand it, it can't be true.
Right. And so, and you, even the same thing for, for patients, I mean, you know, you tell them that you're going to stick some needles in their, you know, their body and that might help them see better.
You know, it's just so far outside the box for them that a lot of them don't show up because they go, this is impossible. They don't even try it.
Right. So, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can speak from experience that I, I was pretty desperate with my vertigo when, when you introduced me to acupuncture and you were like, do you want to try it? I'm like, I'll take anything.
So I mean, you know, eventually people get to that point where, you know, why not try it when nothing else is working anyway. So. Right. So that's, that's,.
That's the reason why a lot of people end up showing up. I mean, a lot of people think it's totally ridiculous that they're doing acupuncture, but they're there because, okay, I got nothing else. I've done everything else here.
I'll try it because nothing else, I've got no hope otherwise.
Yep. Right. Can you address how acupuncture and acupressure are similar and different?
So they're all basically the same. They use the same basic points. Acupuncture, I considered basically just a stronger input on the same points. So, you know, a needle being a stronger input than, than pressure.
Pressure is nice though, because anyone can do it. You, you have fingers, most people have fingers, at least you can put pressure on points and make it happen. So so that's usually the difference. Another thing is foot acupuncture.
I generally don't do that because so people typically will do massage on the feet or, you know, acupressure type, type methods on their feet, because you can imagine people really don't like needles being poked in the bottom of their feet very much.
So so yeah, so it's very good. But in general, I find that the benefit isn't as strong and isn't as long lasting, but there can be very good benefit. But, you know, at the same time, if it's not as strong or not as long lasting, you can do it on your own as opposed to having to make your way into the clinic, you know, and so you have, have the resources available.
Everybody has the resources available. So that that's,.
You know, the trade off there. That makes sense. And, and yeah, because some, some of the acupuncture needles are long and, and you just leave them in for a session, right? But, but I don't know if I, maybe I missed you pointing this out, but like, for example, I went to see my new acupuncturist today and I have several needles in my ear right now.
And so that was what you would do with me and that we would leave them in for like five, three to five days. So yeah, I can't imagine walking around on those. Right. If they were in the feet there. Yeah.
And the longer needles,.
It's just not practical to leave them in, you know, for extended periods of time. So yeah, if you can imagine it just isn't, it just doesn't work with life. So yeah. Okay. So,.
So then we have several questions about very specific things like, for example, can acupuncture.
Help minimize wrinkles in aging skin? You know, so I haven't really tried that much or at all, but as you can see by the wide variety of treatments and I honestly, I went into acupuncture just thinking, okay, maybe I can help somebody's pain out.
But over time I found that, wow, it helps for this. It's helping for that. It's helping for that. So wrinkles, I would make sort of a broader statement in that I'm, I'm getting more and more convinced that acupuncture can help just about anything.
It's just a matter of us finding the right points to make it happen. And so, you know, we're not smart enough to have figured out everything yet, but but yeah, I, I, I don't doubt that there's probably a good treatment that can help that, but, you know,.
I, I certainly haven't figured that out yet. And, and so then also can it help with hormone changes?
Yes. So I haven't done a lot of hormone stuff. The main hormone sort of things I've done is for libido. You know, so usually that goes with lower testosterone or, you know, estrogen or testosterone. So I've treated that.
I've treated people with infertility problems. Certainly probably more than anything. Menopausal sort of hormone changes seem to be helped a lot with acupuncture. So,.
And how about peripheral neuropathy related to bone spurs on the spine?
Bone spurs on the spine? Spine stuff all the time. Yes. Now there's a variety of how much an individual will respond. I think it's pretty common for people to respond well. Sometimes the duration of response varies.
So maybe they need to, one person needs to be treated more often and the next person doesn't need to be treated that often. So, so yeah, generally people do very well. It's just a matter of how long the benefit is with treatments.
Yeah. And how about fatigue? Fatigue? Yes. So treat that all the time, as well as kind of hand in hand with that insomnia. Wonderful for insomnia. You know, people, you know, kind of weird, you know, you put needles in places and they're going to sleep better.
Yeah, they do. You know, it's really quite, quite amazing. So yeah. So for fatigue, even some fatigue it's from other causes like low blood counts and things like that. Yeah. I've seen cases where their blood counts have come up from the acupuncture amazingly enough.
Yeah. So then when, when it is used for pain, can, is it effective if you just do it once in a while or, or even just like one time, can you get benefit from it or does it need to be an ongoing.
Thing that, that somebody would do? So I would say one time you can get benefit. I typically and maybe this is a little bit conservative because sometimes the results is better than this, but what I typically will tell people is if your pain is something that just happened pretty recently, it's a lot more likely that, you know, we can treat once or twice and it'll be gone for good.
If it's been there for five or 10 years, it's more likely that we'll need to do periodic treatments, you know, and everything in between, you know, so so yeah, the permanence of the condition usually correlates with the duration of benefit or how often, you know, or how, you know, how long the duration of the.
Treatment sessions need to be. Yeah. That makes sense. Do you, do you know how, like how common is it right now for insurance companies to cover acupuncture, especially specifically somebody in.
The audience is asking if you know about TRICARE? So yeah, so I know a lot about TRICARE because I work with TRICARE. So TRICARE is very interesting. If you get acupuncture in a, in a military facility, no problem.
It's covered. It's good. And I happen to work in a military facility. But if you seek care outside the military facility, they don't cover it and it's out of pocket. And that goes for most things. There's chiropractors in most, most military facilities.
TRICARE is fine. No, no charge. If you seek care outside the military facility, it's on, it's on you.
It's yeah, they don't cover it at all. Okay. That's good to know. And then if somebody's looking for an acupuncturist, how would you encourage them to get started finding one?
So there's a lot of acupuncturists around and there's two types of acupuncturists and there's not necessarily one's better than the other, but licensed acupuncturists are more vocational. You know, they go to acupuncture school.
They don't go to medical school first. They can be very good. It's kind of like chiropractors versus osteopaths. So they're a little bit cheaper and they're a little bit more common to find. So usually you can find them all over the place.
And the majority of the methods they use are similar methods. They just don't approach it from as complete a medical point of view from the Western standpoint. To find a physician acupuncturist, there is a good resource.
If you go to, if you look up medical acupuncture, there's a medical acupuncture site. And then on that site there's a site for, there's a button for patients and they can sit and you can use the dropdown menu to say, find an acupuncturist, which is a physician acupuncturist anywhere in the country.
So that's a good way to find people.
In your area. Okay, great. I think that's about all for specifically for acupuncture, but I think there's one question that's weighing on a lot of people's mind. And so somebody did ask, and if you're willing to answer, you did mention that you had COVID, that you were able to use acupuncture to cure yourself.
But the question is, are you planning to get a vaccine?
Hmm. You know, I'm in no rush to get a vaccine. So scientifically, you know, any other disease, every disease, pretty much once you have it, you have antibodies to it. And so that traditionally has been considered the gold standard, right?
So, you know, if you've had the measles, if you had the chicken pox, if you had whatever, you don't need the vaccine because you have antibodies to it, right? And so, and those antibodies are natural.
And so, yeah, I don't, I'm not too terribly worried about it, because I know a hundred percent, I've had it and I've had it symptomatically. So I'm pretty happy with that. You know, any other condition, we would just check my antibodies and they'd say, okay, you're good.
You're good. You know, and so I'm not in a huge rush. I mean, you know.
Terry, in the live stream, I'm going to stop recording and I'm going to ask Dr. Koda a.
Question. Okay.