Office Hours with Angelique and Toby, episode 17. Released January 8, 2026. 40 minutes.
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About this episode
Acupuncturist Philip Suger, who trained at Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine and practices in Connecticut, joins Toby Daly and Angelique Britt to talk about learning and practicing Saam acupuncture. He shares advice for newer practitioners, starting with the basic supplementing prescriptions and building trust in the system, and the three compare notes on needle size, stimulation, and preparing sensitive patients for stronger points.
Philip also describes the research behind his English translation of foundational Saam texts, forthcoming at the time of recording, and the open question of where Saam's counterbalance pairing came from. The conversation closes on diagnosis: why a symptom does not dictate a single treatment, the place of intuition as a working hypothesis, and a stubborn elbow-pain case that finally responded once Philip reconsidered the presentation.
Topics
Philip's training and background
Advice for new Saam practitioners: basics first, trust the system
Needle size, stimulation, and sensitive patients
Translating foundational Saam texts into English
The origins of the counterbalance concept
Saam as a living tradition: few points rather than a shotgun approach
Diagnosis over symptom-to-point formulas
Intuition in clinical practice
A difficult elbow-pain case
Key terms
Saam acupuncture (舍岩): a Korean Buddhist monastic acupuncture tradition that treats imbalance on one channel system at a time, using combinations of the five transport points.
A note for listeners: this is a conversation between licensed practitioners, offered for education, not as medical advice. Patient details have been kept general to protect privacy.
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically from the published audio and lightly edited for readability. It may contain errors in names and terms.
Welcome to Office Hours. Whether you're new to the acupuncture profession or have been at it for decades, this is the place where we discuss all things Chinese medicine and more. Join Toby Daly, a seasoned acupuncturist of the Saam tradition, and Angelique Britt, a nurse-turned acupuncturist who is brand new to the field as they explore topics in and around the world of acupuncture and Chinese medicine. There's something for everyone here. Drop in anytime.
Toby: Philip. Welcome to Office Hours. Thanks so much for joining us today. Yeah, it really nice to see you. If you don't mind, just in case some of our viewers aren't familiar with your work, would you mind giving us like a little bit of your background, your Chinese medicine background and things like that, so people kind of have an understanding of where you're coming from for discussion today.
Philip: So much. Sure, wonderful. Thank you. Hello, everybody. It's a pleasure to be on. My name is Philip Suger. I'm sorry I have myself listed as Dr. Sugar just because I teach a lot. And I graduate from the Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine. I've been practicing in the States for a while. I'm currently in Connecticut, where I'm working on an integrative practice. I've been practicing Saam for about five years. I manage the largest. Saam community on the internet right now on Facebook. And it's it's really exciting to talk to Angelique and Toby. Thank you.
Angelique: Glad you're here. So as a newer psalm practitioner, and sadly I'm not on Facebook, when you have new students or students that show interest in the system, what are some of the tips that you give them starting out?
Philip: So it's wonderful. Again, you know, five years isn't very long at all, but it's it's still wonderful to see how much interest there is in Saam acupuncture. Every I teach at a couple of schools. I teach at ACCHS in Oakland and then also ACAOM in Houston as well. And it's always really encouraging to see how many people are interested in learning about Som. And of course it's my favorite thing to talk about. So I'm I'm very eager to always mention or lecture about it. So I guess for newer students, again, I just really repeat what Toby has taught me and just focusing on the basics, just working on the supplement prescriptions for the first year or so and taking it nice and easy because it's it's a demanding style in a sense. It takes a lot of I get I don't want to say faith, but it takes it takes a lot of trust, trusting in the system, especially in the early days when things might be a little bit more difficult to understand or apply. So trust the system would be would be my advice.
Angelique: Which is definitely harder to do sometimes. I've been in practice for a year and have been practicing Saam the entire time, but not exclusively, and have definitely interfaced with that trust, both in my ability to diagnose and in the system itself. But when you get it right, it's really a beautiful, beautiful thing that happens.
Philip: I know that's that's the alluring part of it. It's almost intoxicating in a sense to be able to see that gigantic change on the table. And I feel like a magician sometimes and I say, you know, you know, surprise, you know, ta-da. And it's it's it's a really encouraging feeling. The only problem is when it that doesn't happen, right? When the opposite happens, when you're running up against a wall and you are left scratching your head and you don't know. What you did wrong. So what kind of issues have you found yourself going up against in this first year of practice?
Angelique: Wet, dry issue, you know, when you have somebody with conflicting or multiple areas of like maybe dry on the outside in some places and then wet on the outside in some places and vice versa, like a patient that has really dry skin, but really, you know, loose stools and then has a dry mouth, but like really teary eyes, and like what category you put that in. And from what I've learned that if there's enough of a divide, you sort of put that to the side and find the next imbalance. It's a little bit more clear. And then try to proceed from there. Another is just being afraid to hurt people with the needles, you know, because I use the same 40 by 30s that Toby does and I've just I've stuck with that. There's been a couple of patients that I've I've downgraded for, and I have actually noticed less of a clinical impact when I've used the smaller needles. So I don't know if that's because my point location is not so awesome or if because it's the needle size itself. But having that fear of you know. The pain of the system. And is it me or is it the system? That's been a couple of the big ones that I can think of in this moment.
Philip: You know, when we're treating patients, especially with difficult cases, where we're faced with this problem of trying to apply the appropriate amount of stimulation, right? Saam is such a directional treatment, it's pushing the body in such a strong direction. And if we don't meet that point of that catalyst where we're able to actually initiate that change in the patient's body, right? Might need you might need a bigger needle. You might need more stimulation. You might need better point location. Right. If we can't reach that threshold, that's that was the word I was looking for. If you can't reach that threshold of stimulation, you might not be able to get the results you're looking for. And it's always hard to figure out where that line is, where that threshold is.
Angelique: Yeah. And the patients that I've I've downgraded the size have been ones that are like, I don't, I don't, I don't want the pain, you know. And there have been others actually, and I have joked and I think I've talked about it on here before, but there's one patient that I had treated with Saam for a period of treatments, had really good results, and they were like, Can we go back to the TCN style for a little while? And it's like, sure. And thought, like, okay, they were done with Saam, but then actually asked to go back. And then it became a running joke between us that she comes to visit me to get punished to feel better and then she would like laugh about it. But the results that she would have is are quite profound. So that's been a gratifying experience for sure. It's just such a fascinating system, fascinating in so many ways.
Philip: It is for sure. And that's the thing. Sometimes I feel like I'm torturing people. It's like what am I doing? Yeah. I'm I'm eliciting all this discomfort in them. At least when I'm accurate with my diagnosis. I know it's for their better, but still.
Angelique: Yes. And I've employed one of Toby's lines, which is like if there's been a patient that's been a little bit on the brutal side, you know, during the insertion process, just going up and being like, We still friends, you know, they'll usually laugh, which so thank you for that, Toby. So I've done that a couple of times and that seems to soften it a little bit and you know, yeah. So that's
Philip: I've been using the word spicy a lot. Yeah, I think this one's gonna be a little spicy.
Angelique: Yes, exactly. Like bladder sixty six. I that's the worst one I think. Worse than the Jing Wells. For sure. I treat myself with that system and that's the worst one to self needle. Boy.
Philip: It is. Yeah. It was funny. And I joined this practice that I'm in a little over two years ago. And you know, they used more of like a tan balance method sort of approach, a little bit more TCME. They used a little bit of tongue, but I was coming with my big needles and with my Saam treatments. And in the beginning, I got a lot of pushback, right? From people who weren't used to the system. But then slowly and surely I've sort of convinced people over time. Or they've come into the clinic not really knowing the difference between you know previous approaches and they've become full adapters. You know, I think the vast majority of patients now that I treat are perfectly fine with it. Hopefully that's a result of me just getting a little bit better at needle technique and whatnot and being able to deploy the needles in a less uncomfortable way. But you know, there are definitely a lot of patients who just sort of bear and grin it because they know it's it's helpful.
Angelique: Yes, for sure. Do you notice having practice in China and practicing here? Is there a level of needle sensitivity tolerance between the two populations of people that you've treated?
Philip: You would think so, because that's our common understanding is you know, people in China they're they're tough and they're able to take these big needle stipulations and everything, but that's not really the case. You know, when I was studying with Wangjui and other practitioners in China, you still had a lot of people who are very sensitive to the needles, right? So it's not this clear-cut difference between American and Chinese populations. You could say that there's more maybe more acceptance and there's more willingness to deal with the discomfort in China. But still there's a lot of people, especially the younger generation, are still quite sensitive to acupuncture as well.
Angelique: Good to know. Glad to dispel that. Yeah.
Toby: I still think it's really reasonable, right? For the body to react. I mean, the body, as far as the body understands, it's like a thorn puncturing it, right? So it there should be some kind of illicit something, right? Some kind of response to the body, like, it wants to keep its integrity and my integrity is being violated. So I think it's super reasonable, right? We just have to kind of manage that super reasonable response.
Philip: Right, for sure. You know, we're we're creating this big physiological change in the body. So it makes sense that there's some sort of counterforce involved. There's some reaction that the patient has. Now that's not always, but right, it makes sense that there's a significant stimulation that the patient's gonna feel. Yeah.
Angelique: Do you prepare them for that?
Philip: Yeah, based on the my experience with the patient and their level of sensitivity, I can prepare them, you know, whether it be I rub the point usually a lot, especially it's the Jing Well points or something like that. Just to sort of prepare the patient a little bit, maybe loosen the discomfort just by a hair. And I let them know sometimes if they're kind of nervous, this one might be a little spicy. Or I'll let them know that if I did the Jingwell points and I'm gonna use do the hosey points. That of the rest of the needles are very gentle and you won't feel a thing just to ease their mind.
Toby: Okay. All right, Philip. It's nice to see you in person. Is it okay if I ask you the question that I've been asking you over email for the last approximately year? Sure. Do you do you mind if I ask you?
Philip: The book question, okay. Yeah.
Toby: When's the when's that book coming out, Philip?
Philip: Okay. So this is funny. I thought I would be done with the book, you know, maybe a year ago or something like that. I think that's when I first told Toby, this will be done like at the end of 2024 or something like that. So I've been I've been writing or no, I've been translating a book with my with my team with Michael Brown. And they're they're both very well known in the translation scene in chinese medicine they published several books already and so they've agreed to help me translate the original text of psalm acupuncture there are two that we really consider that being the psalm chimbop the acupuncture methods of psalm acupuncture that was written by our mythological figure we refer to as psalm And then we have this other guy who we refer to as Jison wrote a companion text about a hundred years later that sort of built upon the original ideas of Saam. He also added a whole bunch of case studies to the treatments that were employed by Saam. So it's it's the it's where Som came from. And it's pretty much done. Really, we're only just putting on the final touches to the book where we I have to Write the bibliography and I have to write the introduction and then I just I'll have Michael go over thing everything one more time and then we can we can publish it. So it's almost done. It's just we've been so busy it's hard to get those last little parts done.
Angelique: Some nerds of the world are anxiously awaiting.
Philip: A really interesting book. And you know, of course this is all thanks to Toby. He was the inspiration for this all because it all started with Toby's teacher giving him a book by Kim Honggyung. There's this very influential person in modern Saam acupuncture. A book called the Halto Sam Chinbap in Korean, which is An analysis essentially of that original psalm text. And when Toby gave it to me, or let me borrow it, right? Let me borrow for a little bit. I thought, okay, this is just going to be a regurgitation of what Toby's been talking about this whole time, right? You know, it's going to be talking about the counterbalance pairs, all these different ideas and treatments that he's been talking to us about. And when I started to look into it, I found that really wasn't exactly the case. Now, of course. It's not completely different, right? There's a lot of overlap that was going on, but there were things missing. There were different things being talked about. There were different treatments. And it was a big question mark, right? Where did these ideas come from? Why is Toby talking about something slightly different? And I wanted to get to the to the to the root of this. What was exactly happening? How did Saam acupuncture developed? And what I found is it's a very different than what a lot of people were talking about nowadays. So It's it's been my goal. I started digging and trying to find out all the resources I could. Because I have a Chinese language background, I was able to go to the original texts that are in traditional Chinese and start reading it and start translating it. And so I've been working with my team to translate these books for the first time in English, to have both the original prescriptions by Sam and then also the case studies by Jisan. All together and in English. So it's it's been a labor of love. It's been a very interesting look back into the future as how psalm was originally practiced, the original ideas behind psalm acupuncture, and how it's developed over time.
Angelique: Wonderful. Thank you for doing all of that in advance. I'm very excited to order it.
Philip: It's just fine. It's been fun.
Toby: Not as excited as I am, Angeli. Philip, I remember th this is one of the questions in your mind. You were really gonna try and figure out where the counterbalancing concept came into Salem MacBuncture or any closer to that mystery?
Angelique: No, I don't know.
Philip: So it's still a mystery. I think that's going to be the subject for my next book after that. So because that's still the big question. And as you guys were mentioning, Angelique and Toby, you were you were mentioning how beautiful of a system saw acupuncture. And for me, at least it really comes down to the counterbalance pairs, that it gives it such a wonderful flavor and A fullness of its theoretical layout. Everything fits together perfectly, as anyone who's attended Toby's lectures can see. But the fact is that those counterbalance pairs aren't the original ideas of Saam. Now, again, it's not completely removed at all, but the actual the actual laying out of those prescriptions and that the fact that they are counterbalancing each other, those channels are counterbalancing each other's are not. Literally described in the original text or that by Jisan. So from Jisan to now, someone somewhere came up with this idea of counterbalance pairs. I don't think it's Kim Hong gyung. Kim Honggyong in his Hwaltu Sam Chimbab, he does have a little chart in his book that he doesn't really even describe at all of the counterbalance pairs. So it does suggest that it's probably Started somewhere in the monastic tradition, but again, a lot of there's a lot of fog involved. I don't know exactly when and where. So my hope is in the future to go to Korea and to really dig deeper and find out where that came from.
Toby: It's so obvious once it's pointed out, that paramount, right? So I it almost I wonder if it was like just implied early on and then people just didn't it wasn't written down or something, right? Because it's it's so once you see you can't unsee it. Right.
Philip: Right, right. It fits perfectly. It's it fits it's it's like a missing puzzle piece. Yeah.
Toby: I was gonna ask you too about Chinese characters used four hundred years ago in Korea. Special flavors for that? Like would they take characters out that was associated with the emperor and substitute other things, you know, like I know all kinds about all Chinese. You always have to be careful about that kind of thing. When it was used, how applicable how much adaptation did you have to do with your Chinese knowledge to l read the Korean text written in Chinese characters?
Philip: So that's a very interesting topic because they're essentially writing in a foreign language, right? Yosam and Jisan, they wrote in a foreign language that of course they were very familiar with, but it wasn't exactly their mother tongue. And so you'll notice these oddities, especially in the grammatical structure. I'm not sure if there were avoidances of specific characters or anything to respect emperors or anything like that. I didn't notice that per se, but what you'll notice is that the grammatical structure of the Chinese is not native. You could say there they're using a lot of the times, especially Jisan, he'll use Korean grammar with Chinese characters. Right. So the grammar structure of Chinese and Korean is slightly different. And so you'll actually it's reading like a Korean statement or Korean sentence, but it's written in Chinese characters. So there is that difference. So working Alan Sore is a genius. He is a linguistic genius and he helped us dramatically with getting a clearer translation of traditional Chinese. And without him, our translation wouldn't be nearly half as good. But he also mentioned that there is this apparent stylistic difference where these Korean authors were Writing in a Korean grammatical style using Chinese characters. Right. Because it's like it's like Roman Greece, right? Where the upper class of Roman society, they could speak Greek, they could write Greek. That was the lingua franca. It was the academic language. Right. And same thing with East Asia, right? Chinese, the Chinese characters for Japan and Korea and China, of course, was the sort of upper class language where, you know, the religious orders, right, the monks, the Buddhists and the Taoists and the Confucians, they would all be writing in Chinese, whether they're in Japan or Korea or China, right? 'Cause it was the sort of accepted literary language.
Angelique: Sorry, I'm I'm blown away just by l just listening to you talk about the differences in the language and the amount of knowledge that you must have to
Philip: It's very limited. It's very limited. What I came to realize I wanted to talk a little bit about, and I'll I'll mention it in my introduction to the book that I'm writing, but is the realization that Saam acupuncture is probably the oldest extant style of acupuncture that we have today. Right. I would because I started with the question, what is an acupuncture style? Right. We have all these different styles, whether it be tan or tongue or a TCM style or applied channel theory or what at five element, Warsley five elements, whatever it may be. Even though those style or like secret family traditions, those styles they all refer back to the ancient texts, like the Huangdi Naijing and the Nanjing and all those different texts, but they are recent inventions, right? Because the way that acupuncture was practiced. 2000 years ago is very different than how acupuncture is practiced today, right? We have much higher quality needles, we have a lot more of those needles, we use a lot more points, we're using only filiform needles for the most part. And when you think about it, some acupuncture started about 400 years ago. And there really isn't a style that Is still in practice today that's still used, right? Because you didn't really have these big schools of acupuncture or really that were passed along per se, right? You had the books written about certain prescriptions you could use. And again, those were only usually a couple of points or something like that. And Saam is similar to that, right? Our advocacy for only using four points, right? That was this idea that we didn't want to overstimulate the body by using too many acupuncture needles. And some generally adheres to that. And so we still have that carry over from that older tradition, that older way of practicing acupuncture, right? There's this more limited use of needles, this more, this greater focus on choosing the correct points rather than sort of using what I sometimes call a shotgun approach with treatments where you'll just needle every single point. And hope for the best, essentially.
Toby: No, I was just gonna I was gonna say that's such an interesting contention, right? I hadn't really thought about that, but that makes sense. Yeah, it's hard to date some legal line ages, but the ones we can date mostly are more modern. So that is really interesting.
Philip: Exactly. Yeah. So Saam is the OG in a sense, right? When it comes to acupuncture traditions nowadays. You need an a very skilled and often very charismatic teacher or practitioner who has students who has the ability to pass on this knowledge. And it's it's a unique mixture. And so what we have today are a lot of the times You have this practitioner who's very gifted and very talented, and their treatments were effective, and they wrote it down and they taught other students, and it persisted to this day. But again, most of the styles that we have now are maybe 50 years old, maybe 20 years old, maybe 100, maybe 200 years old at most. Saam is about 400 years old. So, in that sense, we are still practicing psalm. It obviously in a modified form than what psalm originally practiced, but we're still using the same points, we're still using the same theories and the same ideas as he was. So there's much more overlap than let's say a modern TCM student in school from what Quatul and Bianchay were practic how they were practicing 1800 years ago, right?
Angelique: I think one of the best parts of the system is that it's four needles. And that once you've got the diagnosis correct, you got the it's right there and you know what to do. Versus when you have a TCM style, especially as a newer practitioner and even, you know, as a student, it's like the temptation to do the shotgun approach. It's like to do all of the points is really there because you want to be helpful, but sometimes it's really hard to be definitive in a concise way. And so this sort of takes the pressure off of us, I think, in that way. It's like here you have four.
Philip: There's a funny Wang Jui story for people who don't know. He was a very influential person in modern acupuncture from China and he passed away a few years ago. But he had this story where he would often go teach, both in China and internationally, and he would he would talk usually about what he wanted to talk about or about subjects that would interest him, the finer points of Chinese medicine, essentially. And of course, most students when they attend seminars or anything, they want to pick something up. They want to have something that they can use immediately in their clinic and apply, right, to help improve their patients. And a lot of the students felt like that, that he would teach when he would do these seminars. And they would ask, what points do you use for headaches or what points do you use for back pain? And what he would do as sort of a coy way of answering it is he would just start listing off every single point that You could use for headache, right? You say, you know, liver three, li four, GB34, stomach 36. And you would just go on and on and on. And then the students would eventually become a little bit frustrated. It's like, what are you doing, man? Right? Right. Why you just listing 20 points right now for headaches? And obviously he would he was getting at the point that it's all about the diagnosis, right? You have to have the appropriate diagnosis. And if that's correct, in certain circumstances, this point's good for headaches. And in certain circumstances, another point is good for headaches. It's we just can't use this broad stroke approach and saying that this point always treats headaches, right? We can't use that approach, especially in Saam acupuncture, where we're always up against the fact that symptoms for one issue can be caused by a whole number of different imbalances in the body. And this is something that new practitioners and myself as well, of course, very often fell into. I've got back pain. You know, I'm going to treat it with plus small intestine. Someone has a headache, I'm going to treat them with plus liver, right? Or something like that. We were creatures of habit and we want thing to simplify things and hope that it'll work. But oftentimes, especially in some acupunctures, we can't take that approach because people Can express those imbalances in very different ways.
Angelique: Very true. Which is why the answer is always it depends.
Philip: I mean.
Toby: Frustrating me, right? Frustrating me. I remember my teacher many times saying that. Well, you know, sometimes this, sometimes that. And I was like, tell me the answer. It's so valuable, right? It's so valuable to frame it like that, right? Because it's immediately not very satisfying at all. But for long term, it's so satisfying, right? Because it forces you to clearly diagnose. You have to. You're gonna use such a clear treatment. So you have to make sure you've clearly diagnosed process. You can't just kind of guess and then put that treatment out. I guess you could, but that's disaster making.
Angelique: I know. You just can't. Gotta be eighty percent, right? Eighty percent sure. And then you can proceed.
Toby: So we talk about Chinese medicine in general here, but Saam really particularly. But if it's okay, can I ask you more of a general clinical question? Of course. What role does intuition play in your clinical practice?
Philip: I it's important, it's definitely important. You know, I've worked at practices or even worked with people who rely a lot on intuition and almost too much, I would say. Like they even called it intuitive acupuncture. And I think there's a time and place for that, but I think intuition is very important. Thumb is so much or Chinese medicine in general, too. Is so much about reading a person, right? And you can have an intuition about a person. And that's that's sort of what we're trained to do is we're trained to come up with these intuitions. We're can't we're trained to come up with these hypotheses about what's going on with this person. Where is their imbalance? And so I think that's always part and parcel of every time we're treating a patient. Cause we can't ever be a hundred percent sure. We can a lot of the times we can get pretty confident, like maybe ninety five percent or eighty percent, whatever it may be. I like
Toby: I like eighty.
Philip: But there's always that doubt, right? There's always that twenty percent where you've got it's a little bit of a leap of faith where yo, all the signs point to this. I've got this inkling, I've got this intuition, I think this is the right treatment and I'm gonna go for it.
Toby: Philip, you know how I ended up at 80%? I because I was so certain. I was 100% uncertain so many times that was wrong. Just couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't keep, I had to recalibrate, right? I couldn't I couldn't keep doing that to myself. So I had to recalibrate down. But I feel like 80% is max for me now, right? Because again, like you're saying, human biology is way too complicated to be certain about anything. So yeah, that's I think that's just a reasonable cal
Philip: How did you do that?
Toby: A calibration. It was crazy that I ever thought I could be a hundred percent certain. I feel like looking back on it, I think that was that was just that was like a fool's errand to try and get to that level of certainty. True.
Philip: I guess it you could think it's almost a form of arrogance to say, you know, you're a hundred percent certain. I because there's always the possibil and I've had with my limited experience, have had so many instances where again I like you say, I a hundred percent sure this is definitely it. Everything is correct, I'm going for it and it falls flat. It's a it's a dud, right? And you're like, my god, what's going on? Right. And you're you're left scratching your head.
Toby: That's why patients that stick with us are so valuable, right? When they let you recover from that and try again. Again, that's so valuable because as you get to know the patient a little bit better, then you, you know, insights emerge, you know, clinical reasoning emerges that you just were blinded to before, all that kind of thing, right? So it's I feel really indebted to patients that have like almost sometimes for no reason, right, seemed to stick with me, right? And then and then, you know, not everybody, but eventually a lot of those patients were rewarded with actually some good clinical work. Because as we make this is the nice thing about the Saam system too, as we make errors, then that scratches things off the list, which is really valuable rather than having unlimited things to do. We've got really confined things to do. And so if that strategy doesn't work, well, that's really valuable. It's even more valuable if that strategy is completely wrong, right? That's the most valuable thing. But if the valuable if the street treatment doesn't work much, that's still valuable, right? So between those two things, completely wrong or slightly wrong, again, that's value. We'll be able to help the patient. You know, if we pay close attention more in the future by getting that information back.
Philip: That's so true. Those patients are so very valuable. And it sort of also accentuates this idea that I was mentioning in the beginning of trusting the system. Once you are the system is very potent and powerful. And like I said, we've been using it for 400 years. There's a reason why it's lasted this long. That if you can really parse out your patient and really get to the root and balance, you're able to get them better. Now that might take a while, unfortunately, and there might be errors made in between. But once you're once you're there, you can see those amazing results you are searching for. There's this recent patient I had who was very much like this, who an older woman, very nice woman. She's actually a pediatrician. And she was a couple of years back in this horrible car accident. She was Unconscious for several days. She had to undergo a whole bunch of surgeries and everything. And thank God she survived. But she left, she became conscious again and regained her function. But she was left with all these issues. And the biggest thing that bothered her was this elbow pain, the this elbow, this discomfort, this nervy elbow discomfort that just would not go away. And so I started to treating her, thinking being all cocky and thinking, I know exactly what to do. I'm going to treat small intestine. You know, she was in these major accidents, she had all these surgeries done. I'm going to be a rock star and I'm gonna treat, you know, plus small intestine, and all of her issues are gonna go away. And unfortunately that's not what happened. And I kept prodding and prodding her with all these different treatments, really trying to understand what was going on because. It was very much a channel based problem to me in the beginning because it was right on the small intestine channel. You could push on it. It was better with pressure. She had a lot of tension in her upper back and stuff. So I also helped loosen that up as well. There was a bunch of scar tissue and whatnot. So I got to loosen that up, but the elbow, it would never get better. And it would just drive her insane because of how uncomfortable it was. And then just recently I'd been treating her for a few months and The only reason why she really kept coming to it in a in a sense, not only her insurance was covered, but one of our new practitioners used to be a massage therapist and she really enjoyed the massage afterwards. So she sort of just dealt with the needles and then got the massage afterwards. But most recently I went back to the drawing board. What in the world is going to go on? Because I did everything that I thought I could and I just tried, okay, we need to try something else. And the she's a fairly portly, she's a fairly large woman with soft skin. And I said, let's let's try small, let's try plus large intestine, let's treat the large intestine. And obviously she fit the constitutional pattern for it, but because I was so focused on the channel and where and the quality of the pain, it wasn't too swollen. She sort of burned herself with ice because she would put ice on it to sort of alleviate the pain and whatnot. And it sort of looked swollen in that sense. But it was such like a sharp stabbing pain. I ended up treating her a lot with plus kidney a lot because she had frequent urination and that did help, but it didn't solve the elbow issue really. And so I finally did plus large intestine and look lucky enough that treatment, the new practitioner couldn't Do the massage. So she was only given the acupuncture treatment. And she was like, you know what? For some reason, my elbow isn't really bothering me as much. You know, it's actually moved a little bit over here. And I was like, my goodness, did we did we finally hit the nail on the head? And I did the treatment again. And she's actually starting to see results now. So because I was able to. Mess up a whole bunch of times, I was finally able to hit on the correct treatment and start to get her some relief. So I guess even though sometimes patients won't stick around if we mess up, we need to be grateful for the ones that do stick around and figure out what's going on.
Angelique: Great story. There are plenty of us out there using Som that do the wrong treatments and man, doesn't feel good.
Philip: No, it doesn't. It's I tell my students like it's such it's it's a very demanding style because you're you have these highs and lows, right? You have these highs of this person reacted so well to the treatment, her muscles melted away or their stomach pain instantly was gone. And then you have those other cases where you just can't seem to find the right treatment. Yeah.
Angelique: Totally that, where you feel like a wizard for some people and like a complete fraud for others. Yeah. Totally can relate.
Philip: Exactly. But you've got to trust in the system. You've got to put the blame on yourself, unfortunately. You've got to say, I need to find out what the answer. It's not the problem with the system. I need to figure it out.
Angelique: How I've heard those words in my head so many times. Like, well, it's not the system. What'd you mess up here? What didn't you notice? What need you look at more closely? Yeah. And it's often in those times where things just seem so obvious, like, that's totally not the gallbladder channel. They're feeling a little cranky. I think I have to supplement pericardium. And then you do that, and then something happens and you're like, And then you have to look at, well, why did they need a gallbladder supplementation? You know, I've had that happen recently.
Philip: Per cardium gallbladder can be some of the worst. That could be that could be the worst.
Angelique: Thank you for saying that. Yes. My when you get that one wrong. No good. What are your thoughts on pericardium gallbladder problems over there, Toby?
Toby: I have a difficulty with all the bearings.
Angelique: All of them. None rose to the top for you?
Toby: No, I feel like I feel like I sometimes miss really obvious things and then only later on realize I'm the case, right? And so I wouldn't say pericardium gallbladder especially like that. I feel like other ones, I feel like I just sometimes I don't pick it up right away. And then only in retrospect I can see, how obviously that was. I do feel like when the patient comes, it's they're blasting you with the ten thousand things. So sometimes you kind of red herring on something, right? And then you're missing the super obvious things that are just a little bit off that red herring. So Yeah, I feel like I get better at that all the time, but still, yeah, I'll I'll just red herring on something and just and really focus on that. And that's like Philip was saying too, right? That he was really focused on the sometimes channel part of that saying for my teacher and not the sometimes quality one. Again, that's that's clinical gold for me, my teacher saying that. But again, that's it's hard to remember that and then and then apply it.
Philip: Yeah, that happens all the time.
Angelique: And so you're in an insurance accepting practice?
Philip: Yeah, yep. We're a very high volume. I see about a hundred plus patients a week, something like that. So I get to see a lot. I'm very fortunate that I get to see all these different types of patients.
Toby: Do you do you have little bit of a specialty on that or is it just really general?
Philip: It's very general. Focus a little bit more on chronic conditions. You know, we get a lot of thyroid patients, a lot of long COVID, but of course musculoskeletal, you know, mental, emotional, all of the above.
Toby: How many days a week do are you in clinic?
Philip: I'm in the clinic five days a week. But it i it's a little abusive, but it's it's a great experience at the same time.
Toby: How's your stamina with that?
Angelique: You do your own coding for insurance? Do you have to code yourself?
Philip: Luckily we have a we have a big team so we have people to take care of the insurance and front desk stuff.
Toby: All right. Philip, if you had to guess, when's the book coming out?
Philip: I would say hopefully maybe February or March.
Angelique: Soon.
Toby: That's great. Do you have any cover art yet?
Philip: No, not yet. Not yet. No cover art.
Toby: If you get cover art soon, I'll display it here. It will come up on the screen if you can share it with us because people pretty interested in your book. I'm number one in line, but there's quite a few people behind me on this book. So we'd we'd love to see what the cover looks like when you when you're ready. And then yeah, we can't wait to dive into the book.
Philip: Yeah, we're we're publishing with Purple Cloud publishing. They've done a whole bunch of translations so far. So I'm looking forward to seeing the final product. Yeah.
Toby: I'm giving the mail coming soon, one of their one being translations. I think just came out last couple months. Look looking forward to that. Philip, so thanks so much for spending some time with us at office hours. Again, I've been really looking forward to hear that answer to that question personally, and that's that's pretty exciting. February, maybe March. So okay.
Philip: Yeah. Yeah, they're a great company. You can stick to it.
Toby: Well, hopefully can stick to too, because I'm really looking forward to seeing all your hard work for all this time. So we're looking forward to that. Thanks so much for being our guest. Thanks so much for putting so much effort into this translation, things like that. I think it'd be really valuable for everyone.
Philip: Thank you again for having me on. I really appreciate it.
Toby: Real pleasure. Okay, everyone take good care right now.
