How healthy can we become? Should we measure and compare the results with standard values? Should we test how good someone can function in relation to his health, education, social function? Should we ask if someone is feeling sick? Or happy?
Which health are we dealing with when we treat patients? Can we sincerely promise our patients that they will stay healthy when they commit to a healthy lifestyle by eating healthy food, do their exercises and chill mindful every now and then?...
How normal is the fact that health care is divided into regular and alternative/complementary? How logical that the quality of our care is compared with the care costs per capita?
Why is there no answer to the question how much health we produce in our society? Or how much happiness on an individual or societal level? Or how many obstacles we encounter in our everyday lives through which we inevitably develop physical or psychological problems anyway?
Why is there no answer to the question how much it is worth to us to live in a world where being boundlessly healthy is the most normal thing? How healthy would we all be able to become? How healthy would the world be then?
International Lectures doesn’t only offer postgraduate courses, but sometimes also calls attention to something that seems so obvious in our lives or work. According to us, health isn’t the situation that arises after “making someone better” or when you could say there is “absence of illness”. Health is the universal awareness that we can feel ourselves boundlessly at home in this world and the world around us can give that feeling back to us every moment. Because we are one.
Course outline 2016-2017
This week Tuvia Scott is our guest for the fourth time with his beautiful 3-day Abdominal Acupuncture, a treatment method - also called “Miracle therapy” - that is becoming more and more popular in China and in the West due to its efficacy of chronic, long-term conditions. The course is rated by our students as very good, very effective and extremely valuable!
Tuvia will also teach Five Element Acupuncture, a method that harmonizes personal energy and personal life path. The Five Element theory is used to understand as purely as possible what is unbalanced and what personal obstacles can be understood as responsible for that.
Peggy Bosch graduated on a doctorate last November at the Radboud University of Nijmegen on the subject “Acupuncture in the treatment of depression, schizophrenia and sleep disorders.” This year she will teach two impressive courses that will bring us great understanding of what goes on in the head of psychiatric patients. Only when we understand that, we can learn what help the patient really needs. During Effectiveness of acupuncture in psychiatry Peggy will delve deeper into the backgrounds of psychiatric disorders and explain why acupuncture treatments, whether or not in combination with psychotherapy/psychopharmaca, can be the difference of day and night for a patient. The course Psychology for TCM practitioners - the psychiatric patient is aimed at learning how to recognize psychiatric emergencies and learning how to handle psychiatric patients, so that the therapist can focus with confidence on the TCM treatment. This course is accredited by the NVA as a Western medical training!
During the 2-day course Tonifying the Immune System Dr Yair Maimon will discuss the interaction between the Shen (inner order) and the Qi (immune response), explaining that acupuncture is perfectly able to create a deep healing effect in patients. It also happens to be the terrain of a fairly new western science, psycho-neuro-immunology. But in the TCM world it has been one of the basic ideas of immunology for hundreds of years: supporting the Zheng Qi (antipathogenic factor) to expel the Xie Qi (pathogenic factor).
In his 2-day course Food as personal medicine, Yan Schroën will share many insights with you about the value of food that is known for centuries in the Chinese tradition and that is being discovered in the western world only fairly recently. How do western advises and choices compare to the Chinese approach of food as personal medicine? How healthy are the officially approved western recommendations about healthy food, smoothies, sports drinks, colouring agents, preservatives, etc? How can we use food as first aid medication, in disorders of the digestive tract, or if we have to deliver top performances (sports, meeting deadlines, exams)?
Axel Does will teach you in his 2-day Tuina and the 5 Elements in a magnificent way numerous Tuina manipulations that you can use to feel what basic energies are off-balance in a patient according to the Five Element theory. Since every person has, due to his constitution, a certain affinity to one or more of these element-based energies, an imbalance tells something about the harmony of someone’s energy at that moment of his life. Every imbalance can subsequently be treated with a specific Tuina treatment. Axel will learn you what Tuina Liangong and Ziwoanmo (Exercises and Self-treatment in Tuina Therapy) for patients and therapists you can use clinically.
Multi-day courses
Several TCM techniques or insights ask for a multi-day course. Only then it will be possible to dive deeper into the matter so you can really make a certain part of acupuncture or TCM more your own.
Last year we have been doing many students from home and abroad a great favour by organizing the 9-day Shen Acupuncture course from Dr Yair Maimon. This year we’ll organize the 6-day Meridian Wave Program, the 6-day Bu Ming and the 12-day Chinese pulse diagnosis.
The past few years, Amos Ziv has been teaching about the Meridian Wave Channel therapy many times. This time he will be doing his complete 6-day Meridian Wave Program so you can learn in theory and practice how, by mastering the channel theory, you will be able to treat pain in the majority of common musculoskeletal conditions as well as a lot of internal disorders involving pain and discomfort. He will also teach you how to make solid treatment protocols and learn you how to make highly effective point combinations. Through this knowledge of the classic TCM channel theory you will greatly enhance your acupuncture capabilities and understanding of Chinese Medicine.
Yan Schroën will learn you a TCM treatment method that is known as Bu Ming, which means “nourishing destiny”. This method is all the more essential in a society that is becoming more and more complex and individualistic. Often people don’t know any more what they really “want”, “opiniate” a lot about everything and eventually only act out of need to get confirmation from the world around them and not from who they are. With Bu Ming a therapist can teach a client how to take responsibility again for his/her reality.
Sybill Huessen, assisted by Christoph Götte, will teach on a high and modern level Chinese Pulse Diagnosis so all the students will be able to know exactly which pulse qualities they are feeling with their patients and how they should interpretate the various pulse pictures. Besides classical TCM-pulse diagnosis you will also learn the pulse qualities according to the Shen-Hammer system’s model which has proven to be very useful especially in psycho-emotional disorders of patients in the modern society. The course is given to a maximum of 16 participants, enabling them maximum practice while getting constant professional feedback, so they will get the best individual results out of this course.
Unconditional healthy life
Why isn’t health a natural matter of course?
Maybe because we find scientific knowledge more important than letting each other and ourselves live unconditionally. Because from childhood we haven’t learned otherwise than to fight every day to make the best of it in our own limited allotted living space. Because we do not know anymore how to see the world as a place that is big enough for a boundless healthy life for all of us.
You, the practitioner, are in a position that you can give precisely that to your patients with every treatment: the feeling that health is a truly sustainable energy.