Opioid addictions are on the rise in the United States. At one of our seminars, AIMC students learned from Dr. Itoh how trigger point acupuncture therapy can be used to combat the over-prescription culture in our country.

The weekend of October 7th and 8th, Daiki Takahashi, Saori Tasaka, and Tisha Mallon L.Ac held a Shakuju therapy (SJT) Training Seminar at AIMC-Berkeley. Over 20 participants attended from all over the country to learn the theory and hand-on techniques of SJT, as well as abdominal diagnosis, contact needling, moxibustion, bloodletting, and how to perform root treatment.

SJT was developed by master Shoji Kobayashi over 40 years ago in Japan. He is known for his deep inquiry into the I-Ching and the Classic texts, and for applying effective comprehensive treatments to the most difficult cases. As a teacher he tried to find a system that students could acquire within a 3-year course which would treat patients with positive …

Heidi Hellmuth happens to spot AIMC President Yasuo Tanaka taking a walk along the Embarcadero and offers him a ride in her gold pedi-cab.

On any given Saturday, you can find Heidi H. along San Francisco’s Embarcadero pointing out the sights to her passengers as she leans into her pedals and the bicycle’s chains on her Gold-colored pedi-cab whir. You can imagine her pointing, there—that’s the Ferry Building, the Baseball Stadium, the Golden Gate Bridge….

It’s not only San Francisco’s skyscrapers jutting into the sky, with its gauze of clouds, that cuts quite a figure. It’s also Hellmuth herself.

Six years ago, the Fall 2014 AIMC Berkeley student had a bad accident. In 2011, Heidi was helping restore a historic villa in Tuscany and that’s when she sustained …

AIMC students got to experience an in-depth look at growing and harvesting traditional Chinese herbs during a visit to Peg Schafer’s Chinese Medicinal Herb Farm.

A class of twenty completed the Medical Qi Gong certification program led by Suzannah Stason LAc, CMQ this past summer. The program included six modules spanning over the length of a year. With the momentum of the resounding success of this graduating class, the program is being offered again, beginning with module one on September 16-17, 2017.

The practice of Medical Qi Gong is one of the original branches of Traditional Chinese Medicine. In the West, we often think of just acupuncture but when we look at Traditional Chinese medicine as a whole system, we see the many aspects that it addresses from the internal medicine that herbal formulas provides, the qi cultivation and regulation that qi gong provides and the balancing aspects of acupuncture.

Medical qi …

I have been to a few festivals, but never to one this big, and never to one occurring during a total solar eclipse. All I knew about the Symbiosis festival was from a friend—a farmer in Oregon and an SF native, who called it a mini burning man and a sanctuary of the mind. After finishing my first term of acupuncture and Chinese medicine school, I felt myself moving forward on a path leading toward complete connected-ness with the earth, life and being, and with the universe, death and knowing.

I was thinking in terms of Yin and Yang, everything was becoming Yin or Yang. So I knew seeing the eclipse in totality would be the ultimate Yin Yang experience and I needed to be there. …

Teishin is a unique Japanese contact needling technique. Our students were able to learn more at this AIMC workshop with Funamizu Sensei. Check out other upcoming events and workshops on our calendar.

I recently had the opportunity to represent the Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College (AIMC), Berkeley at the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine’s “Symposium on the Potential of Chinese Medicine in the U.S. Healthcare System”.

The purpose of the Symposium—I believe UCLA’s first on the subject—held on Sunday, July 16th, 2017 was to bring together professionals in Chinese medicine, integrative medicine, and public health to discuss the potential and challenges of Chinese medicine in the United States.

Dr. Qi Zhang, head of the traditional medicine unit at the World Health Organization (WHO) gave the keynote speech addressing his organization’s role in “strengthening integrated, people-centered health services” in 2017 and beyond. He also discussed the WHO’s current work in developing a traditional medicine chapter in the ICD-11, the eleventh …

New developments in the acupuncture field and how they will affect our students were topics covered at AIMC Berkeley’s Community Tea July 12, 2017. About two dozen students attended to share how they would like to shape the curriculum, particularly the herbal program, and learn relevant news.

Nishanga Bliss, Academic Chair at AIMC Berkeley, said the school needs to create integrative medical practitioners who can speak with pharmacists around the world.

Herbal Pharmacy Manager Jordan Wheeler, concurred: “If you tell someone that this herb calms the shen, they’re going to look at you like you have a plant growing out of your head.”

Wheeler said he is attending a symposium at UCLA’s Center for East West Medicine where many Oriental Medicine schools will convene to look at ways …

Among the multiple study abroad opportunities at AIMC Berkeley, the Japan trip that took place mid-April 2017 appeared to have exceeded student expectations. Aside from depth of practice in traditional Japanese technique, the trip was defined by a satisfying immersion into Japanese culture provided by the instructors and the community of Shikoku Medical College.

On the very first day, prior to beginning the five-day intensive course, an assembly of the president, faculty, and students of the college warmly welcomed our AIMC visiting class. In his welcoming statement, the president informed us we had missed the blooming of cherry blossom trees, but as we quickly learned, this would not detract from our experience of the beautiful harmony and subtlety that characterizes Japanese culture.

In the same day, the …