Arya Nielsen presents:


Gua Sha: A Traditional Technique for Modern Practice

Friday, September 5,2003 — 9 am-5 pm

 
"By using historical examinations of East Asian medical texts, cross-cultural historical documents, contemporary scholarly sources, interviews with living elder practitioners and her own keen clinical experience (Arya Nielsen) has brought Gua Sha to the center of Oriental medicine clinical practice. She has found a precious lost ring that might have gone down the drain of disuse."

Ted Kaptchuk, OMD
Harvard Medical School
Author The Web That Has No Weaver

Gua sha is a healing technique used in Asia by practitioners of Traditional Medicine, in both the clinical setting and in homes, but little known in the West. It involves palpation and cutaneous stimulation where the skin is pressured, in strokes, by a round-edged instrument; that results in the appearance of small red petechiae called 'sha', that will fade in 2 to 3 days.

Raising sha removes blood stagnation considered pathogenic, promoting normal circulation and metabolic processes. The patient experiences immediate relief from pain, stiffness, fever, chill, cough, nausea, and so on. Gua sha is valuable in the prevention and treatment of acute infectious illness, upper respiratory and digestive problems, and many other acute or chronic disorders.

Participants will learn the history of this amazing technique, how to palpate for sha, how to perform gua sha, when to use gua sha clinically and how to interpret the results in the context of East Asian diagnosis and prognosis. This seminar is a favorite for practitioners because what is learned can be used in practice with immediate results.

 

"With a deep and broad historic perspective, Arya Nielsen has enormously enriched my associations with Gua Sha, which…I had learned from my own Chinese teacher as a remarkable and often miraculous intervention for afflictions resistant to the ministrations of biomedical technologies in which I was originally trained. …"

Leon Hammer, MD
Author, Dragon Rises,
Red Bird Flies,
Psychology and Chinese Medicine

 Biography: Arya Nielsen is a professor of East Asian Medicine, National Board Certified in Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine, a Fellow of the National Academy of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, and past Chair of the New York State Board for Acupuncture. She has been in private practice for over 25 years, is a Senior Faculty member at the Tri-State College of Acupuncture. Arya is the author of Gua Sha: A Traditional Technique for Modern Practice, and the video Gua Sha: Step-by-Step.