New Rootdown.us podcasts now available on iTunes

We are excited to announce the launch of our Rootdown podcast series, now available for free download on iTunes* and soon available on Rootdown.us.

The podcasts are a combination of segments from CEU courses available at Rootdown.us, as well as short pieces from Rootdown.us members on their perspectives of Chinese Medicine. Our goal is to increase the dialogue within our field, to share something with students who may not have the financial ability to purchase full courses, and to introduce the general public to interesting aspects of the field.

Do you have a perspective you'd like to share?

Contact us and share your thoughts with the Rootdown.us community and beyond! We'd love to talk with you about how we can include your voice as part of the Rootdown Podcast Series.

The first three podcasts we have released are:

"The Five Elements" excerpted from Dr. Marc Grossman and Andy Rosenfarb's class Healing your Eyes with Chinese Medicine, Part 1.

"AOM Theory of Drug Dependence" excerpted from Katherine Berry's class Understanding Chemical Dependence from an AOM Perspective, Module 1.

"Hips and Legs Sequence" excerpted from Dr. Pamela Maloney's class Structural Integration: In the flow of Qi, Phase One.

Check it out and tell us what you think! Watch iTunes over the coming weeks as we continue to add new podcasts.

* Don't have Itunes? Download it for free here.

Take Note, Chinese Medicine Notes

Chinesemedicinenotes.com just gave Rootdown.us a pleasant review on their site. In the post "10 Chinese Medicine Links You Must Bookmark," Rootdown.us is mentioned as:

A wonderful website that invites all those in the Chinese Medicine community around the world to join forces and share their knowledge. What a smart concept! After all, this is what the Internet is all about right? Join in and create an account. The site is friendly, easy to use and the more we share, the more we’ll know. Note it.

Rootdown.us proudly takes the number 2 spot, after the blog Deepest Health, which is maintained and run by a community member Eric Grey. Deepest Health also wrote a review of Rootdown.us in October, and is an active site with interesting articles focused on TCM education and students.

Chinese Medicine Notes is maintained by Yael Ernst, another active member on the Rootdown community. Her post mentions other helpful sites relating to Chinese Medicine, most of which we didn't know about until we read it. It's good to know there is more TCM presence developing on the web for acupuncturists and herbalists. Thanks Chinese Medicine Notes!

Acutonics and Acupuncturists

On ABC 7 11pm news, Los Angeles this evening I saw a quick review of acutonics in use in a clinic. The focus was on how it treats chronic pain like acupuncture, only through sound vibrations, rather than with acupuncture needles. As usual, the story brings in an MD that is enthusiastic about the therapy yet quickly acknowledges that there may just all be Placebo Effect.

I remember seeing an Acutonics booth at the Pacific College's Pacific Symposium in San Diego this Fall, although I didn't talk with them. It seems though, that tuning forks are in demand by acupuncturists wanting to expand their treatments though. I always hear requests on where to get them.

I wonder, is there is a great enough interest to set up a series of CEUs? One that would involve a combination of using acupuncture needles and the Acutonics system. I think without using any needle techniques it would be difficult to convince the boards to approve the courses for CEU/PDA credit, especially the CA state board. Still, there could always be courses online that would be of interest to members, even if it doesn't reward credit. We'll have to look into whether this group does continuing education courses and seminars nationally, maybe we can host their distance courses.

You can watch the video clip on their site here.

Continuing Education Units (CEU) online

We’re busy over here at Rootdown.us, putting the finishing touches on our new online CEU platform. Very soon, you’ll be able to take those last CEUs or PDAs you need to renew your acupuncture license easily from home, in your pajamas if you want! Acupuncture CEUs online have never been so easy.

We’ve had a ton of inquiries into when we’ll be going live with this service, and we’re working as hard as we can to bring this to you before the end of the month. We have been really impressed by the appetite among acupuncturists for online CEUs – and when we go live, we’ll want to hear from you how we can improve our service. We’re building it for you, so please don’t hesitate to let us know how we can make it even better.

If you have specific questions about online CEUs or Rootdown.us in general, please don’t hesitate to contact us!

AcuMapper

We are pleased to release a new feature on Rootdown.us, which we have been calling ‘AcuMapper’ - in Beta (or still being tested and developed).

It’s actually more of a tool than a service on the site, and it’s the most interactive piece we’ve made so far. The premise is to create something similar to the acupuncture models that we usually find, the rubber figure that is saturated with points and information.

While this may have been a useful tool in the past, I couldn’t help to think that there has to be a better way to look at this information, a way to filter out only what you need to see in a tool online. While it’s true that this may be a tool geared more for students of acupuncture and Oriental medicine (or TCM, Traditional Chinese Medicine), I think that teachers and professionals will also find this helpful when showing it to their classes or patients.

AcuMapper allows you to turn on or off layers of skin, musculature, skeleton and combinations there of. You can also turn on or off lines of acupuncture meridians (the lines really aren’t that accurate yet), and the acupuncture points themselves. The images also show the front and back of the body. All of these can bee zoomed in and out and panned around by dragging the images.

This is all made possible by using the image tilling from Google Maps. We created our own 3D images of the male body and flattened them into front and back files. Since they are high resolution files, the best way to deliver quality images was to use a service such as Google’s. Luckily, we were able to create a hack that allows us to ‘throw out’ the geographical data and substitute them with our own images. The points work as they would on a map too, only instead of towns or directions, they pull in data from our database. All the acupuncture points have point descriptions from CAM and Deadman’s books and have their titles or names are in both English and Chinese.

The feedback that we’ve received from members has been great and many people have been coming to the site just to use the tool. As result, we want people to use the tool so much, that we are literally giving it away. So now, if you want this tool on your own website or blog, just copy the embed code below the map and paste it into your site! The map will work the same as it does on Rootdown.us.

We are really excited about this new feature and we look forward to hearing about how we can improve upon it still. Already we are making individual maps for each acupuncture meridian that has the proper posturing, and are working on getting the maps to work in several different languages as well. We know there have been a few bugs in it as well, regarding the Google maps API key and we think we have that fixed now. Please let us know of any bugs or requests that you may have. Thank you and enjoy AcuMapper!

CLINICAL PEARLS

Today we are announcing a new feature for professional acupuncturists to share their practical experiences: “Clinical Pearls.” This new area of Rootdown.us is a place for your pearls of wisdom. Pearls are short, practical medical tips submitted by members that may not be widely known but can be used to solve everyday clinical problems. Share tips for successful practice management, or herb, formula, and acupuncture point prescriptions.

Clinical Pearls are submitted by members only and are then subject to voting. The most favored or appreciated Pearls will rise to the top of the page as they become more popular. Comments are allowed on all posts and those are subject to the votes of members as well. In the near future, as more and more Clinical Pearls are added, we’ll add in an easy sorting filter to show New posts, Highest ranked posts, etc.

All this information will be generated by community involvement. Acupuncture students and professionals can both benefit from this community of sharing, but we need help expanding and sharing this section, so please, review it and add some Clinical Pearls.
As always, constructive feedback and bug reports are always welcome via the ‘feedback box’ on the left hand side of the page.

Deepesthealth.com

Rootdown.us just got a great review from blogger and now, new member, Eric Grey. Eric is a third year student of Classical Chinese Medicine at the National College of Natural Medicine in Portland, OR. He has been writing his blog, www.deepesthealth.com for a couple years and it's a great source for students, teachers, patients and professional acupuncturists alike. From his blog:

"The blog is dedicated to exploring Classical Chinese medicine. Inevitably, Because it is written by a student, it will grow and change as my knowledge and experience expands. On the site you will find archives of material on a variety of topics related to Chinese medicine from basic information on acupuncture and herbal medicine to frank discussions about professional ethics and the status of our profession today. The information is intended for a number of different groups of people:

• For patients and the general public, provide basic information about Chinese medicine as well as suggestions on how to use the philosophy and methodology of Chinese medicine to live a fuller life.

• For students, provide the above, plus book and study material reviews, information about student organizations and early professional development, study tips and resources as well as a platform for passionate discussion about the medicine in which you are investing so much.

• For current practitioners, can only respectfully offer the above and hope you will participate in discussion - allowing us all to benefit from the power of your experience. If you are new to Classical Chinese medicine, you may benefit from the discussions on that topic."

I wish that I had been reading earlier, while in school, because his articles are easy to relate to and is full of tips and reflections on what it's like during the starting years while engaging this medicine. Actually, the site is also a good read for school admins. who are interested in getting an understanding of what a student goes through while studying acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine. We look forward to having Eric as an active member in Rootdown.us Community and we are pleased that he took the time and energy to write a such praising review of the site on his blog.

Please read his review of Rootdown.us and his other articles here (or better yet, subscribe):
http://deepesthealth.com/2007/a-new-awesome-online-community-for-chinese-medicine-students-and-practitioners/