灸
Moxibustion
Smoldering mugwort, held above or applied indirectly to specific points. Warming, tonifying, especially useful for cold and deficiency patterns. The smell is, frankly, distinctive.
In session
What it actually is
A 2,400-year-oldsystem of pattern diagnosis.
In Western terms: a practitioner reads a constellation of signs — pulse, tongue, history, the way you describe sleep — and selects points on the body's meridians to provoke a specific physiological response.
The needles are filiform, single-use, sterile, and roughly the diameter of a strand of hair. Most people feel a brief, dull ache at insertion (we call it de qi) and then nothing. Sessions last sixty minutes; you spend most of them resting on a heated table in dim light.
Modern research has implicated effects on the autonomic nervous system, on local microcirculation, on neurotransmitters like serotonin and beta-endorphins, and on inflammatory markers. We will not oversell this. The classical framework, the one that actually predicts what we will do in the room, is the one our practitioners trained in.
2,400Years of recorded clinical practice
361Classical points across 14 channels
~1.8MU.S. visits per year (NIH NCCIH)
