POINT
BREAK!
a podcast about acupuncture in Houston
Join your hosts, Sophia Peng and Eddie Jackson, as they embark on an adventure of shadowing interns at the ACAOM (American College of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine) and learn new insights about acute diseases, emergency medicine, fertility treatment, institutional diversity, medical activism, community acupuncture, and more!
I remember when I came back around Christmas time. Right during junior year, I noticed that his face was completely swollen. Just from the cancer. It was bladder cancer. The doctors initially gave him about two months. But because we had the resources in Chinese medicine–he had a lot of herbs, Chinese herbs–so he lasted about nine extra months. For us, that was a lot. It allowed us to make preparations emotionally.
- Dr. John Paul Liang
ACAOM President
Family
Cancer Stories
with Dr. John Paul Liang
fertility &
stress
with Dr. John Paul Liang
Unfortunately, a large portion of fertility issues are not structural problems. Patients go to see doctors and they say, “Well, we don't see anything wrong.” It's unexplained. They are frustrated that nothing is showing up. They don't know what's wrong, they feel like they're a failure, they are embarrassed. So in the first month, we have to regulate the emotions first because if the individual is continuously emotional, it really impacts everything else.
- Dr. John Paul Liang
ACAOM President
What clicked for me was the way that acupuncture views the body as a whole. You treat the root cause of symptoms. In Western medicine, many women get ignored for these symptoms, or they get dismissed because, "This is your body type. That's why you're having these problems," or "It's just your hormones." For a lot of people, that isn't it. With acupuncture, you do see a big difference. You see a change in people, and it's not even just physical. People leave acupuncture sessions looking like different people. You see that they improve mentally and energetically as a person they feel whole.
- Dr. Michelle Ju
ACAOM doctoral candidate
acupuncture
&
parkinson's
with Michelle Ju
political
movements
&
Bowel
Movements
with Michelle Ju
I was desperate. I just needed to hear an acupuncturist say "black lives matter" to me. She was one of the few doing it, and I thought we would be very compatible. You care about the issues that I do. And you're also treating people how they deserve to be treated.
- Michelle Ju
ACAOM doctoral candidate
My dream job was to work at a cooperative bakery and spend my time while working, thinking about poems or stories I was working on. But baking is a very physically intensive job, and I had wrist tendinitis. So this is one of the health issues that led me to seek acupuncture care.
- SJ Zanolini
licensed acupuncturist, historian, baker
community acupuncture
with SJ Zanolini
questioning
orientalism
with SJ Zanolini
I am a firm believer in the salience of history to almost any field or discipline because without understanding where you've been, how do you keep from replicating one like strategies you've tried that haven't worked? That's the obvious one, but also questioning your premises and framework. This is something that biomedicine could do more with. There's a role of critique that medical historians and medical anthropologists should rightfully have in looking at biomedical structures. Because without that critique, what's shaping or urging change?
- SJ Zanolini
licensed acupuncturist, historian, baker
The guy to my right reaches up, grabs his chest, and falls to the floor. He has a heart attack. The gentleman to my left goes off to dial 911. During the process, the older man gets up, walks around the table, grabs the guy, rolls him over on his stomach, pulls his shirt up, and starts pressing on his back. And he tells me, "Feel here, feel here." And honestly, I was thinking, "This guy's dead. I don't want to touch him." But he insisted, and so I did. "You can feel this knot." And now it's under a point that I know is associated with a heart. He stopped his heart attack. And I thought, "Wow, I'd like to learn that."
- Dr. Gregory Sparkman
ACAOM Director of Clinical Development
HEART ATTACKS
ETC.
with Dr. Gregory Sparkman
DISCUSSING
diversity
with Dr. Gregory Sparkman
Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the country, and this school is probably the most diverse of any institution in the city. We have students from every background from Central America, Ecuador, Brazil, China, Vietnam, India, different parts of Europe, everywhere. A little over half of our students are female, as opposed to male. Their cultural backgrounds, including age, are just as diverse as where people are from.
- Dr. Gregory Sparkman
ACAOM Director of Clinical Development
Asians who eat soup during the cold winter months will always have scallions. It's a mandatory thing because, in Chinese medicine, it's called "pungent." Scallions called pungent expel the cold, so I always imagine, "I'm cold. Let's get stinky together!" So you imagine these green onions to be very stinky, and it expels the cold. This is why it's a very good herb. When it's cold outside, you put in your kanji or your soup, and you warm up on the inside.
- Charlie Trinh
ACAOM doctoral candidate, game designer
Tasty FOODs!
herb edition
with Charlie Trinh
UNBOXING
HERB CARDS
with Charlie Trinh
Here we are eating food from growing food, and that's how we survive! And that's not fun? That's magic to me! Right? … So I made sure that these cards were actually simple enough for high school kids. I really believe that if we fill kids with high school kids with things they could use right out the door, they be so more useful to society today!
- Charlie Trinh
ACAOM doctoral candidate, game designer
videos
gallery
LEARN ABOUT ACUPUNCTURE POINTS
Dr. Thalia Micah DACM sits down with Dr. Guangming Li to excavate the meaning behind particular acupuncture names. The speaker series begins with introducing features related to the Chinese writing system before excavating the philological, material, and cultural meanings of Xue 穴, Shenting 神庭穴 (Du24), YinTang 印堂穴 (EX HN 3), Baihuì 百会穴 (Du20), Zúsānli 足三里 (ST36), and Shānzhōng 檀中穴/膻中穴 (RE17).
Lauren Ginn
editorial intern
Sophia Peng
host, producer, assistant editor
Eddie Jackson
host, producer, assistant editor
Jameson Horton
assistant editor
Lan Li
director, editor
OUR TEAM
SPONSORED BY
The American College of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine
BRIDGE Systemic Racism & Racial Inequality Research, Rice University
Chao Center for Asian Studies, Rice University
Center for Black Brown Queer Studies
Learn more at