Today we will be demonstrating for you the acute point protocols for GI and GEO. Absolutely. For gastrointestinal we have a couple of different protocols, one for constipation, one for diarrhea, and one for nausea and dyspepsia. These are great protocols that are really personal and a variety of points where again, like so many of these you can use them all, or if you're in a situation where you can only choose a few of them, you can really pick the one that resonate most for you. Let's start with the constipation points. This protocol has points that are on the arm, the foot, and the abdomen. It's fairly straightforward. Let's start with the ones on the arm and the hand. Megan, actually could you take your watch off. Sure. We'll take your arm. This protocol has large intestine 11, which is up here at the elbow, triple warmer 6, which is on the forearm, and large intestine 4, which is on the hand. Large intestine 4 we've used a lot already. This is the point that's located between the first and second mediators per metacarpal at the high point of the muscle here on the hand. Again, you can just come in find that point and pinch. Triple warmer 3 is on the forearm and let's just have you rotate your arm a little bit like that. Great. What we're going to do is take this space here between the wrist and the elbow. What you'll do is where the wrist is here, you are going to come up four fingers widths from the wrist. Here's the risk-free, you're going to use your hand like this and come to this part, a little hard to see on the video, sorry, right in here. Again, where you're going to focus on applying pressure is between the two bones between the ulna and the radius. You're going to feel that there's this interosseous space in here, and you really want to focus in on where you feel the largest indentation in between the bones at that level up from the wrist, so that is triple warmer 6. Large intestine 11 is located up here on the elbow. What you'll do is you will find the biceps tendon here. One way to do this is if you actually have the patient just go ahead and bring your elbow down. Perfect. When someone flexes their arm at approximately 90 degrees, you can also do it at 45, you actually feel where this biceps tendon is here in the elbow. You're going to come to the lateral side of it, and just bring your thumb over into this indentation that is toward the outside of the body. You're also going to find the edge of where you feel these bones of the elbow. You're going to find this nice bony spot right there and go for the midpoint in-between. Sometimes it can be a little bit tricky to find all this anatomy, so quite honestly what I tell people to do is basically find the elbow crease and it's almost at the very end of where you see the crease of the elbow. It's a hack where you see when I crease right here, it's the end right there. That's basically where LA 11 is. I want you to understand that we're finding it based on anatomical markers, but that's a quick way to do it. To apply pressure to this point, it works really well to just hold under the patient's elbow and press. Obviously, you're not always going to have the patient with their arm up like this. If you go ahead and put your arm down by your side, it's still pretty easy for you to get to even while the patient has their arm comfortably resting. After you find the point, if it's more comfortable for the patient to actually extend their arm and be able to lay flat, you can absolutely do that. It's often just helpful to have the elbow bend in order to help locating the point. One of the things that's so great about all these point arm on the is that they're all really related to the movement of chi and fluid in the body. If we're dealing with constipation, oftentimes constipation can be very dry, so one of the great things about this point in particular is it helps to move those fluids, in lipoma Chinese medicine perspective, it's actually thought to help hydrate the bowels a little bit to move things through. Then of course, these other points are in the large intestine channel and relate energetically to what's going on in the colon. Another point that we are going to do is actually kidney 6. We're going to take our foot and use this to find it. Kidney 6 is on the medial aspect of the foot. What you're going to do is find the medial malleolus, which is the ankle bone. If we're looking at the foot, we're going to go for the high point of the ankle bone. If you take your finger and just gently slide below that high point, there's a little bit of an indentation at the very bottom. Now, there's a lot of structures in here. There's some ligaments, there's bone, there's a lot going on. You're really looking for what will feel like a little bit of an indentation right below the bone that forms that malleolus. Find that indentation and just press in there, and that is kidney 6. It is a great pair with triple warmer 6, and there's actually great arguments for even just using kidneys 6 and triple warmer 6 to treat constipation. That's a really nice point pair. The final point that we're going to look at as part of the constipation protocol is spleen 15. Spleen 15 is on the abdomen. So Megan if you could stand up, perfect. Spleen 15 is actually at the level of the umbilicus. I can just going to lift up to show the teen top underneath, and where's your umbilicus? Right here. Right there. Perfect. I'm just going to touch your abdomen. Here's the umbilicus, and I'm just going to go through the process based on anatomical markers, but we're also going to find a way to cheat on it. What we can do is move your fingers gently over and find this very lateral edge of the rectors abdominis. This is the abdominal muscle. It runs vertically up and down the abdomen. We're going to come to the very edge of it, and the edge at the level of the umbilicus is where spleen 15 is on both sides. You can actually see the indentation of her umbilicus, the agile of her muscle is here. There we go. One way to hack it, which is pretty easy, is that vertically, it's at the nipple line. If you have a general idea of the vertical line of where a patient's nipple line would be, it's approximately at that same level. Sometimes it's easier to almost eye that compared to actually palpating the rectus abdominis, depending on how much adipose tissue a patient might have or how comfortable you are actually palpating on someone's abdomen, it can be easy to eyeball that. Another way to do it is the patient's hand width plus another finger. That's about the right measurement. I would say though the best way to do it is umbilicus agile the rectus abdominis. There you go. Again on both sides. Typically a patient will be lying down or sitting, so one really easy way to be able to stimulate this is just to use one or two fingers on the abdomen or actually have the patient do it themselves and press on it themselves with their own hands, which is a nice way to do that. Those are the five points in the primary protocol for constipation. If someone is having abdominal cramping with the constipation, if they're having a lot of discomfort, another point you can add in is liver 3, which we've learned in some of the previous videos. This is the point that is between the second and the first toe, you come to the webbing slide up between the metatarsals into almost where you fill them join, it's just distal just before those bones join in, the largest indentation here. That's a nice point that you can add in if someone's having cramping. The last thing I'll add in is that you can also just gently massage down the whole front of the tibia along the tibialis anterior muscle. That's a really easy thing to be able to do particularly if you're working with someone in an inpatient context or you're taking care of someone in your home while they're lying down, you can just gently massage down their shins, down toward their foot from the knee. That's a nice way to stimulate another part of the body that relates very much to constipation.
