From the Archive
Clinical experiences with PC4
It’s been a bit busy here at CM HQ, but I wanted to post something this week. We’ve been turning toward the summertime and the fire phase, so I had a look through the archives and I found something that kind of fit that. I had originally written it for an in-house textbook for POCA Tech; the text was titled The Punkling’s Guide to Japanese Meridian Therapy (version 0.9). The chapter on individual points didn’t make it into the text, so this is technically new material even though I wrote it eight or nine years ago. I have left the piece pretty much as I had written it, with some light editing.
PC4 (xī mén): Another go-to point for me. It is the Xi-cleft point, thus it is related to Blood pathologies, which for the Pericardium means Blood heat or Blood stasis. I have found it to be useful in Blood stasis menstrual problems particularly. It is part of my Blood Stasis protocol, which I will describe further in the Strategies section.
Clinical experiences with PC4
PC4 can also be effective in treating arrhythmias, something I learned quite by accident early in my career. I was in my second year of practice, if I recall correctly. I was working at a rheumatologists’ office, and one evening one of the arthritis patients came in for treatment. I found an arrhythmia in her pulse, and, being the good Meridian Therapy student I was, I decided I needed to correct her pulse before going on to treat the symptoms. I diagnosed the Spleen Sho but wasn’t quite sure of what points to treat, so I decided to use the pulse feedback to choose the points. I monitored the pulse with one hand and touched the various Spleen channel points, and I settled on SP6. I did contact needling on that point, and rechecked the pulse. The arrhythmia was still there. I went on to the Pericardium channel, and PC4 seemed to normalize the rhythm, so I did contact needling on that point. I rechecked the pulse, and the arrhythmia was gone. I mentioned it in passing to the patient, and went on with treating whatever pains she presented with. At the end of the treatment, the pulse was nice and even, so she went on her way.
A few days later, one of the MDs in the office stopped me at the front desk and asked what I had done to this patient. It turns out that she had been on several different medications to treat the arrhythmia, with no success. When she was examined by this MD, the arrhythmia had disappeared, and when asked what happened, she told the MD about the acupuncture. The MD was impressed, and I just sort of shrugged it off. Since then, I have had a few more cases in which PC4 was able to normalize the pulse rhythm, so I will usually use the point if the patient presents with an irregular pulse.
PC4 came in handy on another occasion in the same office. A patient arrived at the end of a shift, after the rheumatologist had left for the day. She was having an autoimmune flare which was causing inflammation of the pericardium, with acute chest pain. I told her she needed to go to the Emergency Department, but she refused. I called the doctor, and he talked to her. She would not go to the hospital, she said had had this type of flare before and she was confident that the acupuncture would get her through it. I got back on the phone with the doctor who told me to go ahead and treat her. PC4 was, as the xi-cleft point, one of the first points I went to. By the end of the session, she said she felt the pain had eased and she left. I saw her a short time afterward and she told me she had fared well through the flare-up.
Point location
I locate this point differently than the standard. Ellis et al (2004) have the point located 5 cun proximal to the wrist crease on a line between PC7 and PC3. I use a location which I picked up from some of the Japanese practitioners, which is in the area of the “3-cun band” on the forearm. It is a band that is 3 cun distal to the elbow joint (or crease, on the Yin side of the forearm), along which I also locate LU6, TB9 and LI10. In practice, I find that there is a fairly wide variation in the location of the point, so I need to palpate and/or use pulse feedback to locate it exactly. For LU6 and the Yang channel points, the palpation is usually to find a tight, rubbery spot along the muscle. For PC4, the palpatory finding can be a little more subtle. Some of the Japanese practitioners will pinch the skin along the meridian and use either the most painful point or the point where the skin is tightest (Shudo 2003 makes reference to this technique). Sometimes I just look for a gritty feeling under the skin, or look for the point which gives the biggest pulse change.
Note: this newsletter is for information purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Please seek the opinion of a health care professional for any specific medical issues you may have.
References
Ellis, A., Wiseman, N., Boss, K., & Cleaver, J. (2004). Fundamentals of Chinese acupuncture (Revised ed). Paradigm Publications.
Hayden, R. (2016). The Punkling’s Guide to Japanese Meridian Therapy (version 0.9). Privately published.
Shudo, D. (2003). Finding effective acupuncture points (S. Brown, Trans.). Eastland Press.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing