The same points work for one patient and not for another.

You already know the feeling

A patient comes in with a textbook picture. You take the pulse, you choose the points the syndrome calls for, you needle. Next week they are back and nothing has moved. The patient after them gets the same treatment and walks out different.

Most of us are taught to read that as a technique problem — deeper, longer, more points, a better angle. It usually is not. Two people with the same complaint are not the same person, and the textbook combination was never written for either of them.

What Stems and Branches reads

It gives you a second reading of the patient, taken before they say a word: four levels built from the moment they were born. The Great Movements. The Ten Heavenly Stems. The Twelve Earthly Branches. The Six Divisions.

Each level describes a tendency — what this person reaches for by reflex, and which energy they have the weakest contact with. Together they tell you where to look. The pulse then tells you what to do. The chart never overrules the fingers.

What this system does in your treatment room

1. It shows you how the meridians lean on each other.

Take the liver. Through the heavenly stems it is paired with the large intestine. Through the earthly branches, with the small intestine. In jue yin, with the pericardium. I know no other system that lays these connections out as clearly. With your fingers on the pulse you can tell which of these levels the imbalance sits on, and you treat on that level. That is what makes a treatment personal in the literal sense, and in my clinic it is where the better results come from, though not in every patient. Working on that level from the pulse is what the 2-Point Acupuncture course teaches.

2. It tells you which points of a combination belong to this patient.

A date of birth shows a person's tendencies, and those tendencies show up as meridians that run toward excess and meridians that run toward deficiency. When a textbook gives you points on four meridians, you keep the ones on the meridians that match this person. In my clinic the great majority of patients fall ill along their own meridian tendencies, so that is most likely where the illness began. The chart stays a hypothesis: if it does not agree with the pulse, the pulse wins.

3. It gives the patient something to take home.

You can tell the patient, in plain words, which level is involved and which meridian is struggling, and give them one thing to practice every day. That way they keep using, in their ordinary life, the energy the needles just strengthened.

Six volumes, one level at a time. Volume 1 is free and so is the calculator, so you can try this on your own date before you spend anything.

Why this series exists

I learned this system from Joan Duveen, a student of Dr J.D. van Buren, and then from Joan himself. What I got was a two-year course, very dense, very theoretical — and almost nothing I could take into a clinic on Monday morning.

Then came five or six years of testing. What holds up, what does not. What is beautiful in a lecture and unusable at half past eight in the morning with a patient who has low back pain. This series is what survived that.

It is the material of my own twelve-hour course, written out at length — the reasoning, the five elements one by one, the ten stems one by one, the twelve branches one by one, the six divisions, and finally the whole chart drawn and read in front of you.

What you get

Every volume ends with a one-page cheat sheet. The last volume carries a cheat sheet for the whole series. Both PDF and EPUB are included, so the series reads on a desk and on a phone between patients.

Who this is for — and who it is not for

It is written for acupuncturists and acupuncture students. It assumes you needle, you know the meridians, and you either take the pulse or want to learn. The boxes marked FOR THE PRACTITIONER are where the story stops and the clinic starts.

It is not written for patients, and the descriptions of people in it are a tool for talking to someone on the couch — not a way to diagnose yourself.

Read a third of a volume before you decide

Three chapters are available in full, free, as a 35-page PDF: what a needle actually does, why these are tendencies rather than determinants, and one of the five elements from beginning to end. No summary, no teaser — the chapters themselves, exactly as they appear in the books.

Questions people ask