in this video we're going over Korean four point needle technique and to get there we're going to be reviewing some fundamentals like five phase Theory including the Shang and kuna Cycles five shoe transport points and their correspondences to the five phases and some of the basic concepts around tonification and sedation and hopefully when we put these ingredients together that will help us understand why this four-point needle technique Works rather than just memorizing a huge list of Point combinations and this video is brought to you by students like you so to everyone who supports the channel and the website thank you so what is four point needle technique and when do you use it well basically this is a needle technique that uses Four Points and we use it in situations where we have a channel that's Afflicted and we're diagnosing it as either excess or deficient so this would be for things like spleen deficiency gallbladder excess kidney deficiency this is not for complex zongfu patterns like spleen Qi deficiency with excess damp and liver overacting or kidney and heart not communicating with deficiency Heat this is just for a channel and it's either excess or deficient so four point needle technique gives us an elegant way to tonify the spleen or drain the gallbladder or tonify the kidney and so on so to understand how this works we're going to need to review some fundamentals starting with the five elements or the five phases so way back in the very beginning of Chinese medicine school we learned about the five phases would fire earth metal water and we draw them in a circle like this that's called the shung cycle or generation Cycle Wood generates or engenders or gives birth to fire fire generates Earth Earth generates metal and so on and when we look at a consecutive pair along this cycle we could call this a mother-son relationship so for example fire and Earth have a mother-son relationship because fire gives birth to Earth or if we just single out one phase like Earth we could say that fire is the mother of Earth and metal is the sun of Earth or the child of Earth so these are just some terms that we use to talk about relationships that occur along the Shang cycle when we draw a pentagram in the middle this gives us the cycle or the controlling cycle or restraining cycle so each phase controls restrains or keeps in check the next phase along the cycle so for example wood controls Earth it restrains it or keeps it from becoming too big or too excessive now some people will refer to this as a grandmother relationship so they say that wood is the grandmother of Earth because it's the mother's mother but personally I prefer to just call it the controller because that's more descriptive and it's emphasizing the role of controlling or restraining so if we use the Earth phase as our example along the Shang cycle fire is the mother of Earth and metal is the sun of Earth and along the Cycle Wood is the controller of Earth the next piece of the puzzle we need is the five shoe transport points because this will allow us to take these five-phase relationships and translate in them into actual points on the body so in the beginning of points class we talked about Point categories and one of those categories was the five shoe transport Points each of the 12 channels has a jing well Ying spring shoestream Jing River and C now each of these points has an action that's related to how the chi is Flowing at that particular point on the channel but besides that each of the five shoot transport points corresponds to one of the five phases on the yin channels we started with wood so wood fire earth metal water on the Yong channels we start with metal so metal water would fire earth so now each of the 12 channels has a set of points on it that corresponds to each of the five phases hopefully this is all review but now with these five phase correspondences we can introduce the concept of a Harari point it turns out the word Harare is not Chinese I think it's related to the French word horror which means a schedule or a timetable so this is talking about how the QI flow according to the clock and ideally these points would be needled at certain times a day or in certain Seasons but that's not important right now for the purposes of this conversation we can say that a Harari point is the point on the channel where the five-phase correspondence of the point matches the five-phase correspondence of the channel on which it lies that's a really confusing definition let's just say it like this lung 8 is the Harari point because it's the metal point on a metal Channel spleen 3 is the Harari point on the spleen Channel because it's the Earth point on an earth Channel small intestine 5 is the Harari point because it's the fire point on the fire Channel and so on the element of the point matches the element of the channel so this is just giving us some additional terminology to talk about the points on a particular channel so for example if we look at the lung Channel lung 8 is the Harari point because it's the metal point on the metal Channel lung nine is the mother point because it's an earth point and Earth is the mother of metal long five is a child point or sun point because lung 5 is a water point and water is the sun of metal and then lung 10 is the controlling point because long 10 is a fire point and fire controls metal and again some people will call this the grandmother point but I'm just going to call it a controlling point so we built up all this terminology to talk about the points in terms of the five phases but now what we need is the last piece of the puzzle which is a treatment strategy that we can use to apply all this stuff that we've been talking about well it turns out in four-point meal Technique we actually use two treatment strategies one that uses our knowledge of the shung cycle or the mother-son relationship and one that uses our knowledge of the cycle or the controlling relationship so the first one goes like this it comes from chapter 69 of the Nanjing which says in cases of deficiency tonify the mother in cases of excess drain the Sun and this should make sense so let's say we're looking at Earth and Earth is deficient so what we can do is tonify the mother give energy to the fire phase and that energy will flow Downstream into Earth and strengthen earth now let's say on the other hand that Earth is in a state of excess it has too much energy what we can do is drain the sun take energy away from the metal phase and because the energy flows Downstream that will draw energy away from Earth and sedate it so that's our first treatment strategy in cases of deficiency tonify the mother in cases of excess drain the Sun our second strategy uses our understanding of the controlling cycle and I actually don't know where this comes from it's not in the Nanjing but if we wanted to word it in a similar manner it would go like this in cases of deficiency drain the controller or sedate the controller in cases of excess tonify the controller and again this should make sense let's say Earth is in a state of excess it's too big it's too strong it's too energetic what we're going to do to combat that is tonify wood because if wood is stronger it can exert its control on Earth and restrain Earth and bring it back into check let's say on the other hand that Earth is deficient well here we're going to drain wood or sedate wood so that can't exert as much control on earth once wood relaxes its control then that allows Earth to flourish so that's why we say in cases of deficiency drain the controller in cases of excess tonify the controller so those are two treatment strategies one uses the shung cycle or the Mother Sun relationship and one uses the cycle or the controlling relationship so if we combine these two and rearrange them a bit we would get something like this in cases of deficiency we do two things tonify the mother and sedate the controller in cases of excess we also do two things sedate the sun and tonify the controller so again in each of these situations we're using both the shung cycle and the Kush cycle and in each situation something is being tonified and something is being drained so we have these two treatment strategies and it turns out for each treatment strategy we're going to use two points and that's how we end up with four point needle technique to explain that let's just use some examples suppose we have a patient that we diagnose with spleen deficiency maybe they have poor appetite loose stools weakness in the four limbs whatever we've diagnosed them with spleen deficiency so if her treatment strategy we're going to do two things tonify the mother and sedate the controller the spleen belongs to the Earth phase so tonify the mother means tonify fire sedate the controller means sedate would here's the thing when we say tonify the mother we're going to do it in two ways we're going to tonify the mother point on the spleen Channel and then we're going to tonify the Harari point on the mother Channel so to tonify the mother point on the spleen Channel That's the fire point which is spleen 2 then we're going to go to the mother channel so the mother of Earth is fire and the fire channel is the heart channel the Harari point is the fire point on the fire Channel which is heart eighth so we're going to tonify spleen 2 since it's the mother point on the affected Channel then we're going to tonify Heart 8 because it's the Harari point on the mother channel for part two we sedate the controller and again this means two things we're going to sedate the controlling point on the spleen Channel and we're going to sedate the Harari point on the controlling channel so the controlling point on the spleen channel is spleen one because spleen 1 is the wood point then we go to the controlling Channel which is the wood Channel or the liver Channel and the herori point is liver one because it's the wood point on the wood channel so we sedate spleen one because it's the controlling point on the affected Channel and we sedate liver one because it's the harore point on the controlling Channel and that gives us our four points so to deal with spleen deficiency we tonify spleen 2 and heart 8 then we sedate spleen one and liver one Let's do an example of excess suppose we have a case of gallbladder excess the gallbladder channel is a wood Channel since we're dealing with excess we're going to do two things we're going to sedate the sun which is fire and tonify the controller which is metal because metal chops wood now when we say sedate the Sun that means two things we're going to sedate the sun point on the affected Channel and we're going to sedate the Harari point on the sun channel so the sun point on the gallbladder channel is gallbladder 38 since that's the fire point and fire is the son of wood then we're going to go to the sun Channel which is the small intestine Channel because that's a fire channel the Harari point is si5 since that's the fire point on the fire channel so for gallbladder excess we sedate gallbladder 38 and small intestine five next we're going to tonify the controller which is metal and we do this in two ways we tonify the controlling point on The Afflicted Channel and we tonify the Harari point on the controlling channel the controlling point on the gallbladder channel is gallbladder 44 since it's the metal point the Harari point on the controlling channel is large intestine one since it's the metal point on the metal Channel so for gallbladder excess we sedate gallbladder 38 and small intestine five then we tonify gallbladder 44 and large intestine one and those are our four points so there are a few things we can point out here number one when dealing with a Yin Channel we only use Yin points and when dealing with a Yong Channel we only use young points that's why with spleen deficiency we chose the heart channel for our fire Channel and not the small intestine because we need to match Yin for Yin and Yang for yang so if you get a question about four point needle technique this is something you can look for if you're dealing with a Yin Channel and an answer has young points cross it out and vice versa and another thing to point out whichever channel is Afflicted there will be two points from that channel and the other two points will be Harari points so this is another thing you can look for on a test question if you have an answer that has four different Channel points cross that one out or if the other two points aren't Harari points cross that one out so I hope that that made sense it's a little complicated to explain but if you're still struggling I made a handout with some flow charts and some examples and a step-by-step process there's a download link below so take a look at that and maybe watch this video again to really understand it but my hope is if you actually understand this process and the treatment strategies behind it you'll be able to recreate this so rather than memorizing the four points for each Channel excess and deficiency as long as you know your big picture you can figure out the points on a test so that's Korean four point needle technique thank you again to everyone who supports this channel if you're getting value out of these videos and would like to give something back consider joining the patreon there's a link in the description below or making a one-time donation by hitting the super thanks button below I know that not everyone is in a position to do that so even just liking this video and sharing it with your friends classmates or study group is greatly appreciated we'll see in the next one [Music]