By treating the weakest link in the Elemental chain, the practitioner achieves a deeper and more lasting change. Treating this constitutional imbalance also forms an important part of any treatment designed to improve symptoms and/or a patient’s overall well being.
The constitutional imbalance is diagnosed by colour on the face, sound in the voice, the patient’s body odour and the most-out-of-balance-emotion. The emotional imbalance is the most revealing of all of these. Each Element produces a wide range of related emotions. For example, anger is the emotion associated with Wood, but an imbalanced Wood can produce depression, mild frustration, anger and ballistic rage – with many variations.
Simple observation, whilst sometimes successful, is rarely sufficient to determine the emotional imbalance. J.R. Worsley developed the process he called ‘emotion testing’ which produces what simple observation alone cannot achieve.
John will show you:
• Through demonstration and lecture, how to develop an ‘emotion-testing’ strategy,
• By using videos of patients, how to see the difference between a normal and an abnormal response, and
• Through exercises and practise, how to develop the required skills.

Amidst the vast diversity and rich history of acupuncture styles and lineages, schools of practice have evolved and changed, adapted to times and places, blended with other medical traditions and philosophical insights. In this, development of tradition, debates about clinical protocols and practice can sometimes detract from the originating motivation of their wisdom and insights.
For acupuncture styles which claim traditional lineages, the Chinese medical classics are a cornerstone of both theory and practice, constantly finding context in new times and places. But it is the wisdom of universal transformations contained in such classics that is the lifeblood of acupuncture practice, the warp and weft of the meridians and how a simple needle can intervene in the complexity of human life.
In this presentation, Paul Hougham will profile an approach to acupuncture practice that finds the pluralism and complexity of its history not only non-problematic, but the lifeblood of its clinical relevance. Through an exploration of the five elements as rhythm, texture and transformation, Paul will explore clinical practice as the finding of such rhythm for our patients, a restoration of their movement towards health, however that may manifest. This will track how the five elements are our interface with the natural world, how effective treatment can become a landscaping of the qi, where point combinations, using the spirits of the points, can bring the elements of the patient into a greater balance and relationship, always unique to the patient, to the time and the place of the treatment. Sculpting the elements in this way is the basis of alleviating pain and treating the symptoms of ill-health as much as it is supporting the patient’s dialogue with their destiny.