The twelve-year-old girl who came in to see Dr Julie Zhu at the Five Branches Clinic was faced with not just the challenges endured by all the other girls of her age, she had had the added stress, trauma and fear as a result of things going horribly , horribly wrong.

For many young girls, the arrival of their first menstrual period can be a bewildering and frightening experience which foists upon them a whole range of challenges and changes.

Puberty is a daunting time for any teenager, the way one’s body changes, the awkwardness, the clumsiness, the embarrassment of sexual changes and sexual awakening confuse and challenge their  self image and sense of identity.

The onset of her first menstrual period had been marked by dysfunctional uterine bleeding,  a gynecological condition which had thrown the poor girl and her parents pell mell into a battery of medical tests and gynecological examinations and pharmaceutical and hormonal interventions which, save to mortify and traumatize the young girl and her family, didn’t help.  The doctors were stumped!  Expensive scans and blood tests and examinations revealed nothing abnormal. The family was desperate, the young girl disconsolate.  The ongoing blood loss had lead to anemia , with the concomitant fatigue and the emotional and psychological impact that it brings.

Dr Julie Zhu is one of the sterling team of doctors at Five Branches University clinic, bringing a wealth of knowledge from long years of experience both in China and the United States to what is rated the best acupuncture school in the bay area, teaching students and treating patients with incredibly good results.

After just a couple of sessions the bleeding had stopped, the young girl had begun to recover her strength and energy, the family had hope restored, and within two months thereafter the young patient’s menstrual cycle was normalized and she has since been completely recovered.

Ten months of this nightmare had brought her parents to seek some other approach.  They came, not so much looking for or expecting answers, so much as hoping for something  miraculous, anything, to help their daughter.  They were not disappointed.  The treatment was short, and to the point!

Nothing proves the point more sharply than a well-placed needle, a well thought out treatment strategy, and a quickly recovered patient.

“What was the most amazing thing that you have witnessed with acupuncture?” the person lying face down had just learned that I am a student of Chinese Medicine at Five Branches University and that I had practiced acupuncture in Johannesburg, South Africa, for almost twenty years. … Continue reading

Traditional Chinese Medicine mainly uses Acupuncture, Herbs, Tuina or Therapeutic Massage, Energetics and exercise such as Qigong or Taichi, as well as dietary therapy; the Five Branches that our school is named after.

Acupuncture has been found to assist patients suffering from a wide range of conditions. Among the most common are lower back pain, hypertension, osteoarthritis and severe headache. The practice of acupuncture may help individuals with many more ailments like seasonal allergies, infertility/fertility, PMS, as well as digestive disress…

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Obesity has became a serious issue nowadays. In the United States, actually 65% of the adults and 15% of the children actually are overweight, and obese. And diabetes, this disease actually already increased 70% in 30 years old in the past 10 years. And this may be the first generation in which our children, they die 10 years younger than their parents. So, this, you can see that it’s actually a very serious problem that exists globally, not only in United States, the United States actually influences the whole world. In the webinar, Dr. Chi will explain to us how Traditional Chinese Medicine can actually offer a solution to this issue.

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Dr. George Lu, L.Ac, DAOM, is an infertility specialist serving northern & southern California for more than 20 years and currently teaching at Five Branches University of Traditional Chinese Medicine at San Jose Campus. In Dr. Lu’s clinic, he works with Bay Area fertility specialist and Bay Area Reproductive centers to optimize patient’s success in pregnancy. Throughout these years of experiences, Dr. Lu is going to share some of the stories or cases with us during the webinar. There will be discussions like when should you start acupuncture, should you do IVF or IUI, or what kind of lab tests that are needed, etc.

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What is Dietary Therapy? Diet is one of the key contributions to the body’s health in Chinese medicine. What we should and should not eat depends not only on our body types and activity, but also our lineage as well as the roll the local environment and weather has on our bodies.
By taking into account our body types, environment and other factors, TCM can help balance the influences one’s food intake has on the body by adjusting a patient’s diet, whether it be through educating patients on how to adjust what food they eat, or adding herbs to help balance the dynamics of yin and yang. Dietary advice is individualized based on numerous factors such as age, sex, activity level, environment, constitution and the season of the year. We are honored to have Dr. Jeffery  to give us an introduction on  how to use TCM as Dietary Therapy.

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Traditional Chinese Medicine holds that if you replenish the Blood/Qi you will tonify the body and also fortify the organs. Using herbal prescriptions and acupuncture, customized for the patient, Chinese Medicine can improve the body’s ability to fight cancer, relieve complicated symptoms and control cancer progression. It also helps to reduce complications that arise in conventional therapies and increase the body’s tolerance towards radiotherapy and chemotherapy. We are honored to have Dr. Joanna Zhao LAc.,MD China, NCCAOM to give us an introduction on how TCM for cancer symptom support.

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2015 Dr. Youyou Tu won Nobel prize for her contribution in developing novel malaria therapies with Traditional Chinese herbal medicine. Her search catches everyone’s eye. Not only on this dangerous disease, TCM herbal medicine can only work on many different common disease such as flu.We are happy to have Professor Bill Schoenbart, to give us a introduction on Traditional Chinese Herbal medicine.When you study Chinese herbs, you’ll learn the individual functions of each herb. Every herb’s unique. You’ll learn them within therapeutic categories, and then you’ll learn the energetic properties. All this helps the practitioner to formulate an effective formula. So here’s the example I gave of warming herbs. There’s some ginger, some black pepper. Especially ginger is in many, many formulas.

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The popularity of cupping has recently exploded with the recent images of Olympians, most notably USA swimming star Michael Phelps, covered in several dark colored circles on their bodies. Besides looking like they were attacked by giant octopi, these elite Olympic athletes and their trainers provide anecdotal evidence that it aids in post workout recovery, rehabilitates injured muscles, and most importantly, gives them a competitive advantage by allowing them to be in optimal physical fitness. Let’s go a little deeper than the superficiality of these marks and testimonials and look at the history and context behind this ancient East Asian medical modality. … Continue reading

The diabetes, type-1 diabetes, is the almost, I think young kids’ diabetes. ..But most time with treatment, used the Traditional Chinese Medicine, the type-2 diabetes is more successful. Okay, type-2 diabetes, this is because the problem with your body that cause blood glucose level to this high. Okay, they’re normal. This is also we called hyperglycemia. Type-2 diabetes is the most common form of diabetes. If you have the type-2 diabetes, as your body does not use insulin properly, this is called insulin resistance. As the first, your pancreas makes extra insulin to make up for it, but over time, isn’t able to keep it up and can’t… But it can’t forever, to make the enough insulin to keep your blood glucose at normal levels. So this is the diabetes the, for example, generally introducing.

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Infertility has became a common issue nowadays. Couples spend thousands dollar on different kinds of fertility Western treatment but the result may not meet their expectation. So are there any other solutions?Yes, Traditional Chinese Medicine is the way you may want to go. It’s natural, cost efficient and most importantly it works well.We are happy to have Professor Danling Zhang to give us a lecture on how TCM can help with infertility.And acupuncture definitely can help. And how we can do it? “Some fertility Western treatments said, “Okay about 10% of the women they are having infertility issue.” I think that number is about true and then in this area, it might be a little bit more. So here is the number, so about 60% of the women aged between 15 to 44 that has, it’s hard to conceive. And then plus some of the women, they have miscarriage, or some other reason that cannot carry the baby to full term, that’s up to about 12%, so that’s relevant. About 10% people, they are having fertility issue. And acupuncture definitely can help.”

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When children get sick, not only the children suffer from it but the parents also. With traditional Chinese medicine(TCM), how can parents help their sick children. We are please to have Dr. Lucy Hu to give us some TCM tips on pediatrics.There is a different set of measure when making a TCM diagnosis for children. Children’s blood and Qi is not fully developed yet, so they get blood and qi deficiency easily and get sick. In addition, their channel or the heart vessel is not developed yet, so it may also cause some problems with channel or blood vessel and make them sick. If children get sick, their syndromes change quickly. A TCM practitioner’s job is to follow the children’s conditions, in order to make correct diagnosis and treatment plan.

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In Traditional Chinese Medicine, by looking, listening, questioning & feeling the pulse with 8 differential diagnosis, a TCM practitioner can identify the conditions of a patient. A patient’s tongue is usually what practitioners look at when they do the diagnosis.
A person, particularly if it’s a new patient, walk into the clinic treatment room. We start asking them, “Okay, now go ahead telling us what brought you here.” And the person started to talk about his or her own situation, right. And then, we interrupt them, asking questions here and there, trying to rebuild the patient’s condition, according to the signs and symptoms the patients tell us. And then, finally when we can catch a break, we say, “Now, let me look at your tongue. Let me feel your pulse.” And that’s when we start to see a lot of puzzled faces. Okay, the patient listens to us. They follow our instructions.They stick their tongues out, and then they’re wondering, “What’s up with my tongue? Why is that so important? What do you see in my tongue?”

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