What is Moxibustion (Moxa)?

When people have ideas about what Chinese medicine is, they often have this romantic vision of the monk in the cave reviving the hero after they've just suffered some great loss in battle. One of the things you tend to see is not only acupuncture, but also the burning of a medicinal herb on points in the body. That's called moxa or moxibustion. You know, in Chinese, you often see acupuncture and moxa going together in a term called jianjiu, which is needle and moxa. So in this video, I want to talk a little bit about moxa and what it is while I'm demonstrating a little bit of moxa on Julie's stomach here. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hein, doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine. So very interesting plant moxa comes from. So moxa comes from the mugwort plant and it's basically, the way it's processed, it's rolled into this little spongy sort of material and we use the moxa in many different ways, but the way I'm going to demonstrate it today is called direct moxa. So we're actually going to apply the moxa right on the acupuncture channel and the point and we're actually going to burn it directly under her skin and we're going to take it off as it gets close. Now the patient should just feel a warming sensation. It should feel pleasant and warming, but even going back thousands of years, there's a practice called scarring moxa where you actually repeatedly burn moxa, primarily on a point, Zhu San Li, stomach 36, to improve immunity where you actually burn it to the point where it actually scars the area and blistering over and over. So there are dozens of different kinds of moxa. There's a moxa box where you put a large box on the umbilicus. You can put this moxa on ginger or on aconite. You can put moxa on an acupuncture needle. You can have pole moxa, but the one I'm going to demonstrate is direct moxa. Now I'm just going to show a little demo doing some direct moxa on Julie's abdomen here. So we're just going to find the midpoint. This is REN12, commonly moxed for people who have epigastric issues like acid reflux, indigestion, nausea, that sort of thing. And then we're just going to demonstrate here. I've rolled this moxa into little pea-sized what my mentors call this rat turd moxa. Very eloquent. And what we're going to do, I'm just going to light a little incense stick. And then I have a cup of water. And we're just going to light this. And there are all kinds of ways of sizes of moxa, amount of moxa cones you do. This is not a Japanese style of moxibustion. I'm going to let it get about two-thirds of the way down, take it off, and then throw it into the water jar here. So moxa, the earliest text that I could find where that term was used, apparently from these Portuguese explorers or missionaries that were in Japan. And apparently the word sounds like mogusa and ended up becoming shortened to moxa because of just the way that it's actually pronounced. And so eventually this term moxa or moxibustion came to be. And there are all kinds of cultures all over the world, particularly in Southeast Asia, that do moxibustion of various kinds. But one of the ways that we use moxa in Chinese medicine is for increasing the function or increasing the yang or resources in that channel, right? So very often when patients are very, very sick and they have very, very weak pulses, one of the issues is that the body doesn't even have enough resources to generate a healing response. So we utilize moxa to increase the energy in the system, like the way we use formulas. Very often I use primarily formulas to do that. But a mentor of mine described acupuncture as almost being the traffic conductor, where you're trying to tell the body, there's too much this way, not enough this way. And so we need to adjust the functioning of the organs in terms of their resources, right? In Japanese meridian therapy, you're actually trying to adjust what they consider the chi in those channels. So you're actually trying to balance the channel chi. But in terms of moxa, most often we use it to warm. So you can use warmth for areas where there's a decrease in circulation. For example, decrease in circulation often leads to decrease in functioning, like for example, physical pain can be indigestion related. And also one of the areas where moxa is the most well studied is in immunity. So moxa has been clinically shown to improve biomarkers of immune system functioning. This is interesting because going back through history, one of the famous physicians, Sun Tzu Miao, he would give all of these prescriptions for when you go to this part of China. And he was describing a part of China that had a tendency or had a lot of epidemics. And it had many areas where there were infectious diseases. And he said, to moxa certain points, one of the most famous today is Zhu Sanli, moxa that to prevent yourself getting sick. I don't remember his direct quote, but that was very, very long time ago. And it's interesting that clinical research today, almost 2000 years later, backs that up. So moxa is one of the great ways to improve immunity, great ways to improve functioning of certain organs or certain channels, right? So for example, someone who's chronically getting indigested, often due to low stomach acid, you can moxa REN12 right here, and will actually improve the functioning of the stomach. So people will get less indigestion and less bloating and distension after meals. But in general, there's one other final quote I want to leave you with here, which is that in the Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic, there's a saying that for diseases that acupuncture and herbs cannot treat, moxa will be able to treat it. So moxa, very interesting practice in Chinese medicine. Those are some of the ways that we typically use it. That was a very simplistic example of how I tend to use it on a day-to-day basis. And it's something that is relatively inexpensive. You know, people can do it at home, although I do not advise it because you'll probably burn yourself. And otherwise, interesting practice that has more and more clinical research. So that's moxa 101. Again, before you guys go, if you want to learn more about my practice in becoming a patient in LA or via telemedicine, check out the link right below this video, and I'll catch you guys soon.