The Healing Power of Moxa

Video Transcript

"SARAH HAUER: Hi. I'm Sarah Hauer. SIG HAUER: And I'm Sig Hauer, and we're professional practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine. SARAH HAUER: We're here on behalf of Expert Village. SIG HAUER: And welcome to our video. So next, we're going to demonstrate moxa and this particular form of moxa is pole moxa. There are the other forms. There are plugs that we can literally put onto the needles and allow them to burn there, and there's also loose moxa that we can make in to cones and lie on a point as well with a little protection over the point. But this is pole moxa. It's my preferred way of using it because it offers me more control as to how hot I can get the needle. So, of course, the first thing we're going to do is light it. And I always check and it's lit now. So now, what I'm going to do is use the moxa on the needles. So I will ask the patient to tell me when it's starts to feel too hot for them. And typically what I like to do with the pole moxa is kind of do a little pumping action as though I'm slowly moving the qi and moving the heat down the needle itself, and I'm literally trying to heat the needle so that the heat will penetrate deep into the point. And this is a tonifying method that I'm using here to help strengthen the spleen, help strengthen the digestive system. And as soon as it starts to get a little too hot, the patient will tell me, "Hey, hot," or "Stop," or something like that. I always ask people to say, just say, "Hot." Cook for a second? And you notice you get a little bit of smoke. We typically will turn on an air filter to help with the smoke, but that can be kind of noisy. But this is a very tonifying method. The moxa itself is an herb called Artemisia. And it has properties of helping to move qi in blood and vessels so helping to tonify the qi in blood. SARAH HAUER: Is that good? SIG HAUER: And this--as we're heating the needles, is that too hot, Gina? GINA: No. It's still pretty comfortable. SIG HAUER: Okay, then we'll move over to the other needle and we'll do the same thing. Give me about 10 seconds, Gina, and then tell me if it's too hot. And again, I'm using this pumping action where I'm, so to speak energetically pumping the heat and pumping the energy down into the needle to help tonify that point. Typically, I like to do it three times on each side and after we're done doing that, we place the moxa into a moxa holder that snuffs out the moxa as well. And again, this one of those things that you don't want to do at home, we've had a lot of training in doing this and what are the proper methods and proper conditions to use this for."