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Book Review of Insights of a Senior Acupuncturist

Insights of a Senior Acupuncturist
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This is from the back of the book: "Miriam Lee has been practicing acupuncture for over 40 years. She came to the United States from Singapore where she lived for 17 years after leaving mainland China in 1949. In China she was a nurse and midwife before becoming an acupuncturist, and lived through the Japanese occupation and World War II.
When she arrived in California, acupuncture was illegal, so Miriam worked on a factory assembly line and gave treatments quietly out of her home, later sharing space with an open-minded M.D. In April of 1974, Miriam was arrested for practicing medicine without a license. With the overwhelming support of her patients, she was acquited and made part of an acupuncture research project at San Francisco University, where she practiced until 1976 when acupuncture was legalized in California."
MY REVIEW: I picked up this book while I was going to acupuncture school. I am really impressed by the fact that Miriam helped her clients by using only 5 commonplace acupuncture points: St 36, Sp 6, LI 4, LI 11, and Lu 7.
Why did she only use these 5 points? As Miriam explains in this book, she was working on an assembly line at Hewlett Packard and attending church. While working in the factory she said she waited to see how she "would be called upon to give what" she had learned. A son of a member of her church had a tumor removed from an area of his spine and could not walk. She went to him each day and treated him until he was able to walk again and get a job.
The boy's mother sent another woman to her, after one treatment she was free of pain. Then she sent a friend who had such bad low back pain that she could only work for one hour a day. After 3 days of treatment, she woman went home and cleaned for 17 hours and her back pain was gone.
Soon the word spread. For 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, she saw between 75 to 80 patients a day, 14 to 17 patients an hour. In her own words: "I had 4 beds for those who had to lie down. People in wheelchairs were treated in the bathroom. Those who could sit I treated in the waiting room or on the foot of the treatment tables. I worked alone, putting in and taking out the needles, and recording all the treatments. The pressure was tremendous. I had to come up with a safe, effective treatment that I could apply quickly and easily to people with ordinary sicknesses so that I could focus on those with really difficult conditions." - this is how she came to use what her students called 'Miriam Lee's Great Ten Needle Treatment'.
If this story doesn't inspire you, I don't know what would.
In section one, Miriam explains how she came to use those 5 acupuncture points. Section two has the clinical applications of these points. And there is an index in the back so that you can look up common symptoms and diseases, such as diverticulitis, epilepsy, hypertension, overeating, etc.