Hey everybody, Dr. Julie McLaughlin here and Dr. Jacob McNamara, he is my patient today, and we are going to be talking about acupuncture today on our wellness Wednesday. So what we're going to do is a pattern that we start with. It's called pattern one, right? That's a good place to start, and we're going to be doing some points on his arms and on his legs.
And on the top of his head and this pattern, it helps balance all of our meridians. Now we have 12 meridians and they are 10 of them are bilateral to a unilateral unilateral ones. Our conception vessel and governing vessel may run right down the middle. So when we do these points, the majority of the needles are going to be on both sides. With acupuncture, we want to balance those meridians is the yin and yang that everybody hears about. But maybe you don't really know what it means. So think about this. If you were going to take a shower, would you take a scalding hot shower or a freezing cold shower? No, you would take a temping shower, right? So you want that middle.
So it's the same thing with the yin and yang. So another way to think of it is one, a mom is pregnant and they're carrying this baby and they get to the very end of the pregnancy. And they're so exhausted and they go into labor, right? So the mother is very yin because they're very exhausted. And the baby is very yang. When they're born that newborn baby has the most adrenaline that they'll ever have in their body. And what does the baby do when they come out? They cry. So the mom holds the baby skin to skin and that energy transfer, the mom calms the baby because their energy is very low. And that baby makes that mom very happy. So the same thing with acupuncture, we're balancing the meridians. And I have to tell you, I took this acupuncture study for six years and it's still kind of crazy to me, but I can tell you it works. So these are some of the points I'm going to show you what the needles look like. So the needles are really, really tiny and they're, one-time use, they come in these little packages and they're very, very fine. Okay. So they have a little handle on it. And it has a really small point. Now we're going to start here with this person point and it's called L I four.
So every Meridian runs through an Oregon, right? So this one runs through his liver, Oregon. You think what the heck? His liver's not in his hand, it's in here because that track of Meridian runs through it. And some of the points he'll feel, and some of them, he won't. And we put the needle in just about an eighth of an inch. And when we measure, we measure in soon. So that's a human inch. So if you look at Dr. Jake's fingers and you look at mine, his are bigger than mine. So if I'm going to measure in three of my fingers, which would be about four of his, we have to measure it that way. Cause I'm measuring on his body. So we're going to do bilateral. Now at that point, it's probably the strongest. Did you feel that one was really good? And so when you feel them, these are master point. And now I don't know if you can see it, see the little red circle, see that that's a reaction around the needle. And that point was really blocked on him. And that point controls, headaches. It controls all the things in the head neck, as well as the digestion. So he said, we want to balance the digestion in Chinese medicine.
We balance the digestive system first because this is a scary thing, but we have more nerves in our gut than we do in our brain. So we always want to balance that first. So now these on the top of the head, we are going to have five points and these are really just to make him really relaxed and calm and just turns everything off in his system.
So you can see there's two on each side that are bilateral, but we have one in the middle that unilateral, and that's going in through the governing vessel. Now we're going to put one right here between his eyes and this one is going to go horizontal and we're connecting two points and is called Taishan. And this is to get them really into a deep, relaxing state. And I know many of you are probably thinking, how is he going to relax when he's got a bunch of needles in him, but he will relax. He's going to lay here for about 20 minutes and he'll tonight he'll sleep really, really well. So we just have a couple more points on this first pattern. We're going to put a stomach point and we're going to put a spleen point because our immune system is in our gut as well.
And we want to balance those. So with this first pattern, we're not using a ton of needles, but just enough. So now all the points are in and he gets to take a nap for 20 minutes and he's going to feel really, really relaxed. And so the way that this works is it's on an hour where he cycle. So those of you that have pets, you know, your dog eats at the same time every day, it goes to the bathroom the same time every day. Well, as humans, we sometimes try to block that and say, well, I'm going to hold it. I'm busy. I don't have time to do this. And we mess up that cycle. So our body cycles all of our hormones and all of our systems once every 24 hours.
So 24 hours from now, Dr. McNamara is going to have the full effect of this acupuncture. So now he gets to take a nap. And by the way, the table's heated too. It feels good. So that's it for wellness Wednesday, if you want to know more about acupuncture, just give our office call bye-bye.