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Janaury 5, 2010 by Brian Jackson, L.Ac.
The art of Tuina has been practiced within China for over 5,000 years in various forms and has been taught as a formal discipline within China's medical colleges for over 2,000 years. Tuina continues to be used today to treat a variety of disorders and diseases in both children and adults throughout China. From China's modern urban hospitals all the way to the most distant rural areas of China one can find a Tuina practitioner due to the fact that it is effective, practical, requires no special tools, and can treat such a wide array of disorders.
Tuina utilizes various manual manipulations over select parts of the body stimulating various acupoints to regulate the physiological and pathological conditions within the body to produce its curative effects. The eight basic treatment methods were summarized by Wu Lian in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) as: kneading (mo), grabbing (jie), pressing (an), flicking (duan), lifting (ti), pushing (tui), pulling (na), and rubbing (mo).
In addition, the use of different herbal extracts, compresses, liniment, salves, cupping, and scrapping can be used in conjunction with acupuncture or separately to help achieve the best clinical results. Tuina can be used to: correct the position of joints, restore blood flow and proper circulation throughout the body, raise the temperature of soft tissue, reduce the pain response, and regulate the endocrine system.
Tuina's far reaching curative effects can be used to treat not only muscular skeletal disorders but also neurological and internal medicine disorders with relative efficiency, costing far less then pharmaceutical therapies or surgical procedures. One of the greatest benefits of Tuina is that the procedure is noninvasive and has relatively no side effects, which makes it a safe alternative to pharmaceutical therapies and ideal for pediatric patients.
Tuina differs from other forms of massage in that it utilizes traditional Chinese medical theory to view the human organism as a whole and is sensitive to the correlations between one's health and one's environment; taking into account the fact that emotions, changes in the season, and ones daily routine have a real effect on a person's health and that all these factors must be considered in the treatment of disease. At the same time it is also more specific in its treatment then other body work modalities and attempts to treat the root cause of the disease and prevent the development of new diseases.
Tuina practitioners have received rigorous training in Qi Gong (Yi Jing Jing, Shao Lin Nei Gong), which makes them more aware of the movement of Qi and Blood in the body and allows them to better manipulate these substances and restore their balance when disease occurs. According to Chinese medicine the unhindered and continuous flow of these substances throughout the body is fundamental to ones continued good health and avoiding disease. In keeping with this theory, Tuina practitioners use a number of different methods to re-balance these forces within the body and this forms the basis of their work within the clinic.
If you or a loved one is suffering from a chronic health problem and would like relief without the use of surgery or pharmaceuticals why not try Tuina, a safe, simple, and cost-effective remedy with no side effects.
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