Tomorrow we’re heading out to Scotland to drop off Miriam for her second year at University and then to teach two classes in stunning European cities: sinew channels in Edinburgh, and luo channels in Venice. My usual quest before leaving— to have everything spotless, bills paid, laundry done, some social time, and to answer as much correspondence as possible—all ground to a halt with the following email
Dear Ann, I hope you don’t mind me asking you a question this way. I can’t ask this publicly so I can’t ask in your Facebook group. My problem is that at my school we are not allowed to treat high blood pressure, and we have to send them to the ER. One person was even expelled from of our school for treating it even though they were successful. The very sad truth is that our school is run by people who have no qualifications in acupuncture and don’t believe that it works! The reason I am in acupuncture school is help people heal without drugs but last semester I did have to send a person to the ER to obey the rules, and the look of his face still haunts me. He was already on a battery of hypertensive drugs, he couldn’t stand the dizziness and was coming to the school clinic to try to get off the exact drugs they would have prescribed in the hospital. He didn’t go to the hospital and he got no treatment from me. To me this is a shocking situation. The side effect of dizziness in the most common one of those drugs alone is present in 19% of patients who take it. Taking drugs is the opposite of what a patient coming to me as an acupuncturist wants. When I hear you talk about Chinese medicine, it seems that you have full confidence in it, and treating this is a matter of course. Would you turn a patient away with blood pressure over 140 over 90? We have to turn them away if they measure even 141 over 90, or 140 over 91. I know you are busy, thank you for reading this email.
(Name withheld, email used with permission).
How is this possible, I asked myself. So I checked in, and yes this is true. Not only are the students forced in every single patient encounter to measure blood pressure using the western method—they are also weighing patients, and neither of these has anything to do with Chinese medicine, for good reason: these measurements are not Chinese medicine parameters. Instead, we look for what is truly going on through pulses at the wrist. Effects on blood pressure, for example, are felt there as a subset of yang (rising, heating, moving force). The pulses speak pristine, comprehendible, Chinese medicine language, which is the language of diagnosis and treatment. Diagnosis and treatment must be of the same thought world. Are we trying to produce A grade acupuncturists here, or C minus grade western doctors? This is disrespecting western medicine. And if this is the public’s experience, we will lose the immensely precious practice of acupuncture, one of the greatest jewels of human culture.
This is rectifiable. All that needs to happen is a return to principle: A Chinese medicine practitioner does not treat conditions. We do not treat labels, western diagnoses, or symptoms—we only treat the individual. Therefore, we do not treat high blood pressure, and nor, for that matter do we treat back pain, Crohn’s, migraines, asthma, you name it. We treat the whole individual systemically and the labels—which are all symptoms—fall away. The high blood pressure falls away because the whole person is not existing in a condition in which high blood pressure can arise.
The Chinese medical diagnoses for individuals who experience high blood pressure could be any of dozens of things: yang rising, yang escaping, diaphragmatic blockage, heat in the blood, heat in the constitution, heat in the stomach, blood stagnation, failure of heart and kidneys to communicate, disturbance of the spirit, fullness of the pericardium luo channel, imbalance of wei qi in any divergent or sinew channel, and so many others. Each of these diagnoses leads to a unique and distinct treatment that is just right for the individual person sitting with the practitioner. It is tailor made. In other words, high blood pressure is a symptom of a much deeper and very individual picture and cannot be the main factor determining treatment. It is not the underlying illness.
For example, a person comes in and is complaining about headache, light-headedness, nosebleeds, shortness of breath, vision changes, and fatigue. There are countless different pulse permutations that the practitioner may find given these symptoms. For an example, let’s say the patient has no dispersal of lung qi, a superficial and rapid spleen pulse, a kidney yang pulse that presents at the moderate level and is tight, a heart pulse that is tight at the moderate level and rapid at the deep level, a liver pulse that is thin and a kidney yin pulse that is floating to the superficial level.The conversation with your patient may go something like this:
——–
When did all this start?
“I started noticing those things in May of last year.”
What was happening in April last year?
“Hmmmm, well, nothing really. Not that I can remember.”
No shocks, disappointments, no memorable interactions?
“Well kind of, yes. Some friends, actually, my business partner and his family came for dinner the day after we filed taxes and between courses their daughter and her friend and my son went up to the roof of our building. She and her friend got high, but my son doesn’t touch it. The daughter told my son that I am dead weight and that her father was taking over our company. I didn’t believe it, but about two weeks later, that’s exactly what happened. He simply stole it through a loophole left in place with my trust. Then before the end of the year he destroyed what he stole through sheer ignorance.”
Can you trace these symptoms to before that.
“No. No, I can’t. Are you saying it’s all stress?”
There are a few more questions to ask, given your pulses. Your stomach pulse is rapid and pushing out, which means it’s asking for help cooling off. I wonder, are you drinking liquor or coffee, are you taking drugs of any kind, eating garlic, hot spices, onion, chocolate?
“That’s pretty much all I eat! It’s my whole diet.”
I’m finding that what we call kidney yin, which roughly translates as hormones but means a lot more, is floating, and therefore asking for help with replenishing your deepest resources. We’ll have to talk diet, but I’m also wondering how your sleep is.
“At first I would wake up often just wondering how this could happen…. We’d been friends for over 20 years. I thought we were close. But then I realized that he’s been a jerk this whole time—all the clues were there and I chose not to see them because we were always in it together, fully.”
That would explain the tightness in your heart pulse, looking for help with freeing the constraint. And the tight pulse on your rear right wrist which is a sign that the pericardium received a major shock and is looking for help releasing its reactive protection over the heart. Your heart pulse is also asking for help slowing down.
“Do you think I have high blood pressure?”
You have a rising yang qi, that means that your mind is likely saying, “This should never have happened to me. I’m a decent person. I didn’t deserve this. This came right out of left field, and I’m bewildered.” Have you been angry?
“Yes, very angry, but I don’t let it get the better of me.”
All your symptoms fit together like pieces in a puzzle. Each of them is a response to the boiling reactions to what happened that night.
“Isn’t that understandable?”
Perfectly understandable, of course. It’s deeply human. But it’s also required for a human to express. Any reaction that is not expressed but instead suppressed is held in the body and that creates inflammation, resulting in the decimation of your resources. Everything your body is doing is for the purpose of sustaining health in the face of that damage.
“So we could die of stress?”
Well, hypothetically, but your body has many layers of safeguards. The problem is that the symptoms of these safeguards are themselves chronic degenerative diseases of varying types depending on each person’s strengths and weaknesses. That’s a long story for another time.
“Okay…”
Okay. In Chinese medicine, before we do a treatment, we look deeply, then make a diagnosis, which can take its own time. The diagnosis is quite unlike a western doctor’s diagnosis. What we do is notice what the body is trying to do, how your body is responding or reacting to the challenges you are experiencing. In your case, both your pericardium channel and heart channel are seeking to be freer. Your liver channel needs help storing blood in the liver so that it can bring qi from the liver up to the heart to nourish and relax it. It’s then also able to bring that blood downward and break it into essence to bolster your yin (that includes hormones and other dense resources) so that you can reach a deep state of sleep. We need to heed the stomach’s plea to cool off and we’ll do that by letting a tiny amount of blood from a point on your leg. Your lungs are asking for help dispersing their qi, an action that connects you with the world. Today, because the origin is of emotional nature and emotions are contained in the blood, I’d like to do all of that with small needles we call lancets. The overall treatment principle today is to “release the luos to relieve blood stagnation due to emotional stress,” also known as “disturbance to the peace of the spirit”. When the luos are released, there will be a major shift and you’ll feel different.
“How so?”
You’ll feel freer. Increased freedom can manifest in so many ways. It’s very important that you go easy on that list of foods I asked you about. They are equal contributors! Can you do that?
“I get it, yes, I will. Garlic, really?”
Yes, really.
“For how long to I need to take those things out?”
As long as you want to feel progressively freer.
“Okaaaaaay. Got it.”
——–
With a treatment like this, the underlying cause is actually being treated and the symptoms—the high blood pressure and the corollary symptoms—can then fall away.
So dear writer, if you manage to convince your school that a change is necessary for the sake of every individual and for the sake of the practice of acupuncture itself, and you don’t have training in the complement channels (the sinew, luo, divergent and eight extra channels) and you have a patient in front of you complaining of high blood pressure and when you take the pulse you feel that they are rapid and high in the wrist, bleed luo points. Start wth ST-40, then take the pulse again. Bleed a few more and the pulse will calm down. You will significantly lower the pressure and that will give you time to look further, to make a diagnosis. High blood pressure is a symptom emerging from stress and inflammation. You are witnessing the body trying its best to offload excess heat. What is causing that heat? Are they eating the big inflamers: garlic, hot spices, coffee, chocolate, alcohol, onion, sugar, GMOs and processed food? Letting the situation run untreated can be deadly for sure. And giving them a drug to lower it can make the numbers better on paper but can prevent the expression of the heat, causing it to be diverted internally toward the organs, creating deep diseases.
If it’s not inflamers in the diet causing the hypertension, then its likely stress. Worry, a mental habit where the mind clings to negative imagined images, creates tremendous tension and emotion. The build up of unexpressed emotion creates friction in the blood—blood being the container of the emotions—and the resulting heat must be expressed upward and outward. This too, is hypertension. You would bleed luo points with the intention of releasing the pent up emotions. Choose the luo point according to the emotion most prominent. See my book, Advanced Acupuncture for much more detail that you could begin using right away.
What an extraordinary gift we have for all mankind in this medicine—the actual freeing of pathology so that the body has no need to react—no need to create high blood pressure. It’s power must be celebrated and fully utilized, and those heading our institutions must lead that charge.
Ann Cecil-Sterman
New York City
September 2nd, 2025