Shingles

[Antoine Mulpas]

Hello everyone,

I’ll have a patient coming for shingles at the end of the week. I never treated this before. I wonder if you have insights for this condition, any tips for the diagnosis. I’ll check the pulse to see which mediumship is deficient of course during the treatment and eventually treat according to it. I look into the red book, and it is mentioned only for the LI Divergent channel. But I guess it can appear even at an early confluence ?
Thank you for your answers!
Cheer,
Antoine

[Armin]

hi Antoine,

I have treated a few cases in the past but not using the complement channels, just with the primary channels! As far as the complement channels are concerned, I suspect it would depend on what stage of the condition they are coming in to see you.

If it’s early stage (acute, first couple of weeks), and blisters are still fresh red and popping, I would imagine a sinew approach would be indicated, especially if you find a sinew pulse as well. I would treat the sinew channel trajectory as well as where you find the sinew pulse. Likely, the blisters will be on Taiyang and Shaoyang (UB & GB). I would avoid the actual blister patches if in the acute phase and focus on reducing the rest of the affected channel trajectories. If it’s in the chronic phase, you could definitely address the affected areas as well.

If it’s a chronic case, like months of this condition and still in pain, most likely Shaoyang will be involved. I recall Ann saying in couple of her lectures that for chronic skin conditions, treat the Shaoyang. In this case you would treat both GB & SJ as you are addressing a chronic condition, as opposed to just GB for more of an acute condition.

When it comes to the pulses, given that this is not a movement related pain condition (muscleoskeletal), the pulse position would be the same as the sinew channel, so if you find a sinew pulse at the right cun, you would treat the LI or LU sinew channels as opposed to the Taiyang (represented by right cun). Hope this isn’t getting too confusing 🙂

Also, for chronic cases, you can do the divergents. I would pick one either based on pulse or based on the overall picture of your client. If they are really deficient (qi & yang deficiency), probably LI divergent, if less so, then Gb divergent (blood deficiency) could also be used, but these are chronic cases and the DSD approach.

One trick that has really worked for me in the past was to use a moxa stick and warm around the edges of a blister patch during an acute blistering phase and over the actual patch when no longer acute. You would do this until the skin gets slightly pink.

Hope this helps and hope others will give their insights as well.

[Rm]

Hi,

I wanted to follow up on this previous Shingles discussion to see if anyone had any additional advice.

I too have a 60 y.o. patient suffering from postherpatic neuralgia on the left leg and foot. The scars from the original blisters (back in July) and the pain is on the GB and BL lines (starting just posterior to GB34 and around BL55/56 on the lower leg and goes down the lateral/posterior leg to ankle where it wraps around the top of the foot (blister scar at ST42) to the medial side (around LR4 and bottom of the foot around KI1 and KI prime.

His pulses were generally depleted although a bit of floating and tight on GB and BL so I did sinew on the 2 yang sinews first GB and then BL. As his KI yang felt depleted, I moxa’d Gv4 and 14 (LU seemed to disperse, LR wasn’t tight and I think ST felt like it had mediumship). After needling the confluent pt and releasing points along the meridians, I also moxa’d them as they mostly felt depleted. It was interesting to note that he could not feel the moxa for sometime and it took a lot of effort to get the heat sensation along both meridians.

Unfortunately, he reported not getting any relief from the pain that he describes as sharp and worse with things touching, rubbing. He is on metformin for diabetes and while the pulses were deficient, he didn’t come across as overly sickly or weak.

I am surprised and a bit deflated that he didn’t benefit at all given the amount of work we did during the treatment and am hoping someone might have some additional advice. Did I miss something? Should I stick with divergent treatment? I did note a potential GB divergent pulse post treatment but am also wondering if the post neuralgia could be luo level (damp heat being held by blood creating ss).

If anyone has any suggestions, I’d be most grateful! I see him again next week. Many thanks, Rene

[Armin]

hi Rene,

A few of the basic things that come to mind as potential reasons that things didn’t work out favourably:

1) Was he hydrated before the start of the sinew treatment?
2) The fact that he’s a diabetic and on medication would tell me that he’s most likely deficient in mediumship. So, frankly I would have simply done the sinew treatment prep work regardless, that is tonifying the St fluids, lV blood and kd yang. It would have hurt and most likely would have helped.
3) To me, this would be more of a case of deficiency, so I would make sure that the needle at Jing well would be pointing upwards and the sinew treatment would be up the channel and the flaccid points would be done medially making sure to close the point with your finger right after and the tight points laterally to reduce.

Let’s assume you did all these and no result, then for sure mediumship is not there and yes to divergent approach.
I’m not sure about the Luo to be honest, but ya if you see lots of visible luo’s, I’m sure it would help.

Sorry for the late reply. For some reason, I didn’t even get your question to my email!!! And I guess others haven’t either. A glitch in the system 🙂

Let us know how it goes.

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