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Ancient Remedies for Modern Lives

A Handy Tool to Promote Wellness and Handle Pain

Part 1

by Kamron Jafari

Do you know yourself like the back of your hand knows you? Despite what you may think, our hands hold a wealth of fortune in them. While they may not tell you where you’re going to meet your true love, they can certainly get rid of that “heart-ache” from your last breakup.

Confused?

Welcome to Hand Acupuncture! A widespread treatment method that was formally founded in Korea in the 1970s by Dr. Yoo Tae-Woo, Hand Acupuncture (Sooji Chim) is a style wherein the hand is used as the basis to bring harmony, balance, and wellness to the entire body.By using massageor acupuncture on specific areas of the hand, one is able to treat pain and influence the health of the internal organs.

The trigger that inspired the birth of this new microsystem was like that of all great discoveries – uninvited and completely accidental. On a certain night in 1971, Dr. Yoo found himself awoken by a dreadful headache in the back of his head: a pain so severe that he was unable to fall asleep. A strange intuition drew Dr. Yoo’s attention to the back of his middle finger. The thought dawned on him that perhaps this pain could be alleviated by needling a point on his finger. He began to poke at the back of his middle finger with a ballpoint pen until he found a painful area, whereupon he needled the point. Almost instantaneously, the occipital headache disappeared!

kha6Dr. Yoo had stumbled upon the tip of a monumentaliceberg still largely submerged beneath the surface. Having conjectured that the distal phalanx of the middle finger corresponded to the head of the body, Dr. Yoo continued to dig further and experiment what other parallels existed between the hand and the human body. Eventually he succeeded in developing an entire microcosm of the body that existed entirely on the hand. For every part of the body, there was a corresponding point on the hand. For every acupuncture meridian that flowed in the body, there was a corresponding but smaller meridian strewn across the hands.  Ultimately, he established the hand’s potential intreating and harmonizing the human body in its entirety.

The Hand as a Microcosm of the Body

With our historical background in place, it’s time to finally visualize and understand the hand as a reflection of ourselves. The hand microsystem that I have chosen to introduce here is the Dasari Hand Acupuncture (D.H.A.) system which was founded by Dr. Jae Hoon Kim,an esteemed faculty member and head of the Korean Acupuncture Concentration at Emperor’s College of Traditional Oriental Medicine.

In Dasari Hand Acupuncture, the middle finger acts as the center post of the upper body. Looking at your middle finger relative to the surrounding fingers, we see how it stands highest. In this way, D.H.A. links the distal phalanx of the middle finger with the highest natural position of the body: the head. The distal phalanx is further differentiated into the face and back of the head: represented by the palmar and dorsal aspects of the distal phalanx respectively. Further bit down, the middle phalanx encompasses the neck/cervical spine, while the proximal phalanx contains the chest/thoracic spine.

Moving towards the extremities, the index and ring fingers represent the upper limbs, while the thumb and pinky represent the lower limbs. Differentiating the extremities into its specific parts, however, poses a series of impending questions.  If we look at the above photo, we see how the elbow and knee joints are on the same side of the hand (the dorsal aspect), whereas in a supine human body, one is on the back and the other on the front respectively. This leads us to ask why the D.H.A. microsystem is constructed as such, and whether the knee and elbow joints should be placed on the dorsal or palmar aspects of the hand.kha3

D.H.A. requires us to envision the body in a supine position with all of the extremities stretched upwards. As such, we can see how the index and ring correspond to the upper extremities and the pinky and thumb to the lower extremities. When looking at the body from this perspective, we can also clearly see why the knee and elbow joints are placed on the dorsal aspect of the hand.

The palm of the hand encompasses the epigastrium, abdomen, lower abdomen, and genital areas, whereas the back of the hand contains the lumbar vertebrae, sacrum, and hip joints.

In understanding what side of the body connects with what fingers, it is best to place both hands in front of you, palms facing outwards. The pinky and ring ringers of the left hand and the thumb and index of the right hand mirror the left side of the body; the thumb and index of the left hand and pinky and ring fingers of the right hand mirror the right side of the body. It is important to keep this in mind when treating pain on only one side of the body!

In Part 2 we’ll look at Treatment Protocols

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks to Dr Jae Hoon Kim, who has graciously given permission to use the diagrams on Dasari Hand Acupuncture from his textbooks.

 

REFERENCES

Yoo, Tae-Woo. Koryo Hand Acupuncture Vol 1. Eumyang Mekjin Publishing Company: Seoul, 1983.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kamron Jafari is a student of acupuncture and oriental medicine at Emperor’s College in Santa Monica, California. Jafari graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in the Humanities from Soka University of America in Aliso Viejo, California. After completing his undergraduate studies, Jafari made his way to Thonburi, Thailand where he explored life through the eyes of an English Kindergarten teacher. He now pursues his dream of leading a contributive life and creating value in our world through Traditional Chinese Medicine.