Treating Plantar Fasciitis with Acupuncture

In this video I'll talk about a treatment for plantar fasciitis. This patient was a 30 year old male who was severely overweight and the problem started because he had to do a knee surgery and after he did the surgery, when he started the recovery, part of his recovery was jogging and he hadn't used his foot for so long. That plus his weight was a big problem and he developed plantar fasciitis. When I first saw him it was very hard for him to put his foot on the ground, he couldn't walk properly or anything and the pain was, according to him, 10 out of 10. I know that treating plantar fasciitis using the balance method may be a problem because you don't have channels on the sole of the foot usually when you diagnose using the balance method. Step number one is determining the affected channels and if we look at the foot the only thing we have is here kidney one. Then the kidney channel goes like this and everything else we don't have any channels. For instance in this case the pain was mostly around this area over here on the inside of the foot going towards the heel but without actually reaching the heel. So if we wanted to do the proper diagnosis according to balance method we'd be stuck because we have no channels passing through the area. But we have one thing which is called the direct equivalency. What this is is an image that's so perfect, so similar that we don't need to worry about which channels go there, we can just do a direct imaging and in the case of the sole of the foot we have that with the palm of the hand. So you can image directly if you want to treat around the big toe you go around the thumb, if you want to go around the small toe you go for the pinky and so on. You just image directly the area of the pain in the hand. There's a lot of disagreement amongst different authors if you should use the same side as the pain or opposite side when treating using direct equivalencies. My opinion is it's usually better to use the same side. So in this case the patient was complaining about his right foot and I went for his right hand first and did the direct imaging. So if this is the affected area I went and looked in this area for ashi points and needled every ashi point I could find. After that I asked the patient to stand up and to test the foot to see how it felt. He told me that the pain had gone down to about 3 in 10. So I went for the other hand as there's not an agreement if you should go same side or opposite side so I decided to do both sides and did exactly the same thing, same kind of image, looked for ashi points and needled every ashi point I could find. He tried again and now standing he could feel no pain but if he tried to walk there was still some pain. What I decided to do then was to use Yamamoto new scalp acupuncture and I went for the isomarito. So you have here the area of the leg and at the end the area of the foot and in Yamamoto new scalp acupuncture you needle the same side so this was also the right side. After this I asked the patient to try and walk again and he could feel no more pain. As usual I left the needles in for 30 minutes and the patient left with no pain. The patient came back after four days and the pain had returned but not at the same level. It was still hard for him to walk but just standing was no longer painful. So we did exactly the same treatment. Of course the ashi points might move slightly but looked for ashi points on both hands and also used the YNSA point for the foot. Again the patient left without pain and he came back the next week. Again the pain had returned after four or five days but not as strong as in the beginning and I kept with the same treatment. We did a total of six sessions spreading through five weeks and by the end the pain was no longer coming back between sessions so we stopped the treatment for the plantar fasciitis. If you like this kind of content don't forget to like and subscribe to the channel. Also if you'd like to learn more about the balanced method check out the course I have for sale here in the description of the video. Right now the course is only in Portuguese but in the next few weeks there will also be a course in English available.