An Accidental Discovery may Significantly Improve Rehabilitation Outcomes for Neurological, Psychiatric and Autoimmune Conditions.

First Case Study:

Helping a Stroke Survivor Recover 100% Mobility (from 5%) in 8 Weeks.
In 2001, I was hired to help a 77-year old female recover from a Left Hemisphere Ischemic Stroke. She had 5% mobility on her right side, and aphasia. She was doing Physical Therapy, and wanted Tui Na to help improve her recovery time and outcome. I added three Jin Shin Flows into our session that seemed indicated. But I didn't expect what happened next.
When I was about 75% complete, her arm began wheeling through the air, and her leg bucked off the table repeatedly -INVOLUNTARILY- with 100% range of motion until I released the points.

I almost jumped out of my seat!
(How I felt)
(How she looked)

But, she was smiling like the Mona Lisa and, when I asked if she was okay, she happily exclaimed, "Oh yeah!"

At the end of the session, we found her voluntary range of motion had increased 5%.
Her mobility increased with each weekly session until...

...she recovered 100% mobility in 8 weeks.

I'd seen profound outcomes practicing Jin Shin since 1994, but...
...no teacher, book or practitioner mentioned it could yield results like this!

Investigation

I immediately sought a Western Medical explanation because I knew that would be critical to bringing this therapy into conventional stroke rehabilitation to improve recovery time and outcomes. After our first session, I shared what happened with a Physical Therapist I knew who had worked with dozens of stroke patients for over 30 years. She asked to witness the next session to see what she couldn't imagine was possible.
When the same thing happened again, the PT looked startled as she paced around the table, looking under it from all angles. After the session, she looked bewildered and said she thought my client was hooked up to electrodes and we were pranking her!
She brought a doctor colleague to the 3rd session to see if he could explain this. Seeing the same as we did before, he tried to play it cool, but it was obvious he was uncomfortably baffled. Their reactions vividly illustrated how all their education, training and experience, working with countless stroke patients for decades, gave them no frame of reference to understand what they witnessed -and how critically limited Western Medicine can be.
Her Neurologist was equally astounded and had no explantion to offer either.
  • A Scientist at heart, I wanted to see results using the same protocol with other stroke patients across variables including:

  • Age at Stroke, Stroke Type, Symptom(s) Severity, Time Since Stroke, Other Medical Conditions, Diet, Exercise, Lifestyle, Background, etc.

  • Given the profound implications of my initial results (see Global Human & Economic Costs below), I was shocked to find no support from Stroke centers, Neurology offices, etc. in reaching other Stroke Survivors.
  • Then, life derailed me until February 2022; and I immediately returned to pursuing my investigation. In 21 years, I found only two Jin Shin studies. This highlights how Jin Shin has remained overlooked by research worldwide.

  • Only one of those studies, by Dr. Theresa Hernandez, were for stroke recovery. While it showed improved heart rate in subjects, it didn't affect mobility.

  • To date, I have yet to find anyone who can explain this phenomenon other than TCM practitioners, who regularly see similiar results in their practice... but not quite like mine.

Despite 5,000 years of history, Chinese Medicine remains controversial because...

"...studies have not fully explained how acupuncture works within the framework of Western medicine."

John Hopkins Medicine

Supporting Evidence

"Acupuncture ...is widely used to improve motor, sensation, speech, and other neurological functions in patients with stroke."

American Heart Association (2008)
"Combining acupressure with a task-related training program is safe and effective in improving the lower limb motor function of an individual 5 years post stroke."
International Journal of Therapy and Rehabilitation - Vol. 21, No. 4 (2014)
"Acupuncture is found effective for the treatment of paralysis caused by a stroke."
Healthcare Medicine Institute (2017)
"Acupuncture therapy seems effective for motor function, pain relief and activities of daily living in stroke patients with mild SHS, when it is used in combination with rehabilitation."
Frontiers in Neurology (2019)
"Acupuncture treatment of insomnia is efficacious, not because of its placebo effect."
Annals of Palliative Medicine (2020)
"National Institutes of Health (NIH) studies have shown that acupuncture IS* an effective treatment alone or in combination with conventional therapies to treat the following:
  • • Nausea caused by surgical anesthesia and cancer chemotherapy
  • • Dental pain after surgery
  • • Addiction
  • • Headaches
  • • Menstrual cramps
  • • Tennis elbow
  • • Fibromyalgia
  • • Myofascial pain
  • • Osteoarthritis
  • • Low back pain
  • • Carpal tunnel syndrome
  • • Asthma

...It may also help with stroke rehabilitation."

John Hopkins Medicine
* "is" indicates numerous studies have reliably proven efficacy, while "may" signifies less scientific confidence.

Discussion

Having no neat correlations with Western Medicine presents a special challenge in researching TCM to yield confidence for Western doctors to medically recommend it.
"Science is not simple, and neither is the natural world; therein lies the challenge of science communication. What we do is both hard and, often, hard to explain. Our efforts to understand and characterize the natural world are just that: efforts."
- Naomi Oreskes (2021)
Naomi Oreskes is a professor of the history of science at Harvard University. She is author of Why Trust Science? and co-author of Discerning Experts

Four reasons why my method yielded such extraordinary results may be:

1) Therapeutic Human Touch.

2) The specific Flow I used.
3) Tui Na integration.
4) My chi.
"...the efficacy of acupuncture relies on who administers it; likewise, the efficacy of Qigong depends on who teaches it. If you don’t meet a good acupuncturist or high-level Qigong master, it takes longer to unblock the meridians and allow the flow of vital energy through these invisible pathways."
- Qigong Grand Master Xi-Hua Xu
As mentioned in my Bio, I practiced Kajukenpo from age 7 - 10. While Kajukenpo is not associated with Qigong, they both cultivate and use Chi -for defense and homeostasis respectively. Similarly, Tui Na and Martial Arts have always had a symbiotic relationship. At age 10, I began casually practicing Shiatsu (a 1,000-year old Japanese adaptation of Tui Na). My formal training in Tui Na, Shiatsu, Thai Massage and Western modalities of Therapeutic Bodywork began at 21, along with Tai Chi, Qigong and Jin Shin. By the time I began working with my stroke client in 2001, I had developed my Jin Shin and Bodywork practice for 6 years; and cultivated my relationship with Chi for 19 years. Practicing these disciplines has been as much an "Art" of Mind & Spirit as knowledge and method.
While the mechanisms behind my phenomenal results are not fully understood in the framework of Western Medicine, a robust body of studies prove the efficacy of Tui Na, Massage, and Acupuncture in numerous aspects that are well-understood in neuromuscular, psychological, immunological and endocrinological terms. Future studies will require critical attention to Chi, Intention, Attention, which acupoints are used, and the sequence points are activated.

Global Human & Economic Costs

The human and economic costs of stroke are profound:


* Only 10% of stroke survivors fully recover.
* 25% have minor impairments.
* 40% have moderate impairments that are manageable with special care.
* 15% - 30% are permanently disabled.
* over 30 million people worldwide suffer the indignities and trauma of stroke. * More than 6 million people die each year from stroke. * 159,150 Americans died from stroke in 2020. * There are 795,000 NEW stroke patients EVERY year in the U.S. alone, and rising 2% every year. * About 34% of total global healthcare expenditures are spent on stroke. * The average lifetime healthcare costs across all stroke types is $236,165. This costs Americans over $187B per year in stroke rehab, and over $7 TRILLION globally!

Improving stroke recovery time by even 1% would

save the U.S. over $1.8B and $70.8B annually worldwide!

Other Neurological Diseases

The 9 most common neurological diseases costing America alone over $936 billion per year are:

Alzheimer's Disease, other dementias, Stroke, Parkinson's Disease, Migraine, Epilepsy, Multiple Sclerosis, Traumatic Brain Injury, Spinal Cord Injury and Low Back Pain.
~913,925 U.S. adults have Multiple Sclerosis, with ~10,400 new cases diagnosed annually.
~60,000 new Parkinson's Disease (PD) cases each year + over 10 million people living with PD worldwide. At least 50 million people worldwide have Epilepsy. ~ 47.5 million have Dementia, with 7.7 million new cases diagnosed each year. ~500,000 new cases of Alzheimer's Disease are diagnosed in the U.S. each year.

Diabetes

Diabetes added $1.3 trillion to the global economic burden in 2015 and is expected to add $2.1 trillion by 2030.

~1.6 million Americans have Diabetes, including ~200,000 youth under 20 years old, with 64,000 people diagnosed with Diabetes each year in the U.S. alone.

A Universal CAUSE

More than 50% of ALL deaths have been attributed to inflammation-related diseases.

These include:

Autoimmune Disorders, Cancer, Diabetes Mellitus, Chronic Kidney Disease, Ischemic Heart Disease, Neurodegenerative conditions, Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) and Stroke.
Poor diet is the primary cause of Chronic Systemic Inflammation (CSI).
Resolving poor diet is infamously confounded by the biofeedback loop between the body, brain and behavior.
A common example of this is over-eating to cope with stress. And, people tend to eat "comfort food" when stressed, which tend to be pro-inflammatory. The inflammatory response to foods, and over-eating, respectively induce stress that compels this destructive coping behavior and creates a vicious, addictive cycle. Alternatively, people are raised eating inflammatory foods by parents and communities who are simply unaware of the devastation such diets produce over the years. Excess intake of sugar, refined grains, dairy, fried foods, alcohol and caffeine are some of the more well-known inflammatory and mood-destabilizing foods that people get hooked on early in life. And because their degenerative effects on people's health are often discounted as "just getting old" these habits remain unchecked when they could be curtailed to prevent advanced aging and degenerative diseases. Many of these foods develop biological dependency (addiction) while their habitual use -through learned coping associated with alleviating stress- creates psychological dependency. Foods associated with family, friends, community and positive memories further strengthen psychological dependency. These dependencies often coincide, making it extremely difficult to break habits that destabilize the body's homeostatic functions, which promotes disease, dysfunction and premature death. Psychological stress can also cause systemic inflammation in the body and be far more more difficult to resolve than simply changing eating habits. As an essential part of an integrative health lifestyle, this Method can help attenuate these processes to enable the body & mind to self-regulate, reduce systemic inflammation, and naturally promote healthy behaviors that prevent and facilitate recovery from the cause of more than 50% of all preventable deaths and disease and the multi-TRILLION-dollar global economic burden of degenerative health conditions.

A Universal METHOD with WIDE Applications

"The Meridian is that which decides over life and death.
Through it the hundred diseases may be treated."
- The Yellow Emperor

Jiayijing, Vol. 2, Ch. 1a
In TCM Theory, balancing Yin & Yang in the body's Meridians establishes the most fundamental foundation to support healing and homeostasis. Thus, it may improve recovery, as an integral part of Best Practices, from many other conditions despite their distinct Western Medical pathologies, such as:
Traumatic Brain Injury, Spinal Cord Injury*... ADHD, Alzheimer's, Dementia, Epilepsy, MS, Parkinson's, Auto-Immune Disorders...
Anxiety, Bipolar Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Depression, PTSD, and Schizophrenia. TCM methods have proven to remarkably improve most of these conditions, especially when combined with Good Nutrition, Regular Exercise, Massage Therapy, Physical Therapy, and Psychotherapy.
* "Being a relatively simple, inexpensive, and safe treatment, acupuncture has been widely used to help the recovery of motor and sensory function after SCI. Acupuncture not only results in functional improvements but also aids neural restoration. ...given the evidence for the efficacy of acupuncture, we recommend that physicians should support the use of acupuncture therapy for SCI complications."

Study Proposal

My proposed study will investigate how well various Neurological, Psychiatric and Autoimmune conditions may be improved by a Standardized Jin Shin Protocol to make it easy and affordable to deploy at home and professional healthcare settings.
The following factors will be considered in the study design:
* Cause, Duration and Severity of Condition(s)
* Comorbidities * Lifestyle
* Adverse Life Experiences * Sex, Race & Ethnicity
* Career & Income
Data will be compared between a minimum of 32 subjects, with at least 2 subjects presenting similar conditions and demographic factors, and 2 with significantly different conditions and demographic factors, in each of the following experimental plans:
1) Experimental Jin Shin
2) Sham Jin Shin
3) Experimental Jin Shin + Tui Na
4) Sham Jin Shin + Tui Na
5) Experimental Acupuncture
6) Sham Acupuncture
7) Experimental Acupuncture + Tui Na
8) Sham Acupuncture + Tui Na
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