I first started working with ear acupuncture after unsuccessfully treating a shoulder problem using body acupuncture. A friend of mine had been using auriculotherapy for a long time and recommended that I try it. Although I had studied auriculotherapy at school, I didn’t give it much chop. In fact I was outright disrespectful of it. After all, I was a classically trained acupuncturist, following a tradition that was over 2000 years old, what would I want with a school of thought invented by a Frenchman in the late 1950s? It was too young, it was too… unsophisticated! Besides, it didn’t follow any of the normal Chinese medicine notions. In fact, it claimed a completely different modus operandi altogether. It was all too much for me so I ignored the method completely for a very long time.
Well, they say that necessity is the mother of invention. In my case it was the mother of innovation. When I was unable to fix the afore mentioned shoulder problem, I was compelled to look elsewhere for inspiration. My friend had guided me to the map of the ear that we had used in school when being taught auriculotherapy. Turned out this was the Chinese version on the map. You see, when the ‘father of modern auriculotherapy’, Paul Nogier, presented his findings on his research back in 1957, the Chinese flipped out at the thought that a foreigner might have discovered something about their medicine that they didn’t already know. What followed was extensive, exhaustive and quite comprehensive auriculotherapy research in China. In the end, the Chinese were able to verify Nogier’s findings and quickly produced their own auriculotherapy map, complete with some Chinese sounding point names, and claimed auriculotherapy for Chinese medicine (see map above).
Chinese Ear Acupuncture Map
http://www.clady.cn/2012/yangshengzhidao_0514/21119_2.shtml
Anyway, you can imagine my surprise when I inserted the first needle into the ear of my shoulder patient and I got immediate change in range of motion and a significant reduction in pain. I was shocked! Actually I was shocked to the core to be honest. ‘What the bloody hell had just happened?’ I thought to myself. It took quite an effort not to look rocked in front of my patient I might say. I just couldn’t believe it. I’d done a 3 hour lecture on ear acupuncture in school, conducted by someone who didn’t really consider it any good, and I had been given a map by friend who told me to stick the pin in the ear where the map said I should. It was so disconcertingly simple, yet immediately beneficial.
What followed was a sudden and rapid adoption of the auriculotherapy model into my clinical practice. Everything went well for a while. If I had difficulty shifting a (musculoskeletal) problem with my usual processes, I would look at my map and insert a couple of needles in the recommended places and change would usually magically occur within moments. After a couple of years I began to notice something strange. I could get great results with most people but with some I had almost no impact on their conditions what-so-ever using auriculotherapy. Being busy with study, work and life (I was still single at the time), I decided to ignore this anomaly and settled on the idea that a 70% success rate with ear acupuncture was good enough for me. And I was happy with this view for some years. But then, another case got my attention and I was again stuck for results and looking for answers. What I discovered in my search was that the lesson I had in school was only an introduction to auricultherpy. There was more. As it turned out there was a lot more. In fact, there was a mind boggling lot more about auriculotherapy that I didn’t know.
What I’d like to share here is the idea of three phases in auriculotherapy. When I understood this concept it was like a huge tectonic jolt shock my clinical practice and, after I had picked the pieces up, I noticed my success rate start to climb again. I had worked out why my auriculotherapy was a little hit and miss. Turns out that the original map that Nogier produced, the one that was the basis of the Chinese map I had been using in clinic, was, in fact, meant to be applied in acute conditions. This map was known as the phase 1 map in the European tradition. There were other maps. There was one for chronic conditions, known as phase the 3 map and one for degenerative conditions, known as the phase 2 map. Each was meant to be used in different circumstances. For example, if someone came to clinic suffering from an acute condition, let’s say a shoulder problem, then the best map to use would be the one designed to treat acute conditions, i.e., the phase 1 map. However, if the shoulder problem had been around for 3 or more months, then the acute map would be of little clinical value. Instead the best map to use would be the chronic map, the phase 3 map. Likewise, if the condition was really bad and was resulting in a breakdown of tissue in the local area and had become degenerative in nature, then the map to use was the degenerative one, or the phase 2 map.
When I discovered the various phases of Nogier’s auriculotherapy, my results using ear acupuncture shot up considerably. These days I use ear points every day and on most people, usually as an adjunt to body acupuncture but also as a stand-alone practice. The most commonly used map in my clinic is phase 1 but sometimes I need phase 2 and, very rarely, phase 3. Check out the maps below. They have been borrowed from Terry Olsen’s text, Auriculotherapy Manual: Chinese and Western Systems of Ear Acupuncture, 3rd edition, 2008, 73. They actually show 4 phases. FYI, the 4th phase, is basically the reflection of phase 1 on the back of the ear. I hope you enjoy.
The 4 Phases
For more information on Auriculotherapy, esp the European tradition, please see Jim Chalmers, Auriculotherapy Ear Acupuncture: the practitioner’s guide. Please note that Jim is Australia’s best gateway presenter for those interested in exploring the nuanced and complex branch of auriculotherapy known as auriculo-medicine.
