Why crowdsourcing treatment advice almost never works
It’s exhausting when you don’t have a system to work within. When every patient that comes in is like starting over and not knowing what to do. Every treatment is guesswork and not knowing if something will work, or why it did one time and not another. Or worse yet, why what you’ve used before flared up this new patient.
Too often practitioners work on assumptions or guessing. They base treatment on what worked for a past patient, or because a colleague said it worked on their patient.
And much of these recommendations come from Crowdsourcing for treatment advice on social media. I started a group that has over 7500 members. But I had to get away from it.
The issue is, absent using a working system, crowdsourcing is ineffectual at best, and reckless at worse. It was the same thing over and over. Tons of people hopping in offering random suggestions absent any real case history, and it was all piecemeal. It was unhelpful and only confused the practitioner who posted the original question even more. The practitioner wasn’t taught how to fish. They were just fed temporarily. But even worse, the fish wasn’t even edible. (Ok enough analogies)
Can you imagine if your patient knew you were trying some random technique because another practitioner offered advice on Facebook?! When you think about it that way it’s pretty crazy.
But asking for advice CAN be helpful when it’s done in a certain way. Asking questions on a forum is much more valuable when it’s within a system and we’re speaking the same language. You can build within a system. You can make sense of the patient when you have a base of knowledge to work from. When someone posts a history of the patient, better advice can be offered. This also helps practitioners grow and not just have a crutch. I want practitioners to ask questions and learn more than just “here try this”. It’s much better to know the why and empower them to be more self sufficient…to grow into getting the answers themselves and knowing how to find them. Offering treatment advice is much more profound in this way.
A forum works much better this way and it works extremely well on our Locals community, where EXSTORE is the system that everyone works under. Its just a more responsible - and very effective - way of running a forum.
Size doesn’t matter. Having a smaller more effective community is better. The community continues to grow, but not just for the sake of growth.
Thank you to @susan_beck for showing me this
Neat little feature on the Locals Phone app.
Bookmarks Help you save post and videos that you want to go back to later.
Give this a read after you watch the video: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7689775/
Hello!
I started treating a patient (male 80y, very active – former professional athlete) who had radiation therapy (2024) applied to his throat and lower face areas, following a throat cancer. The radiation therapy had a heavy impact on his salivary glands, resulting in xerostomia (dry mouth).
The principles of my treatment plan include:
1. Electroacupuncture: Stimulate the involved nerves, i.e. the parasympathetic fibers of the glossopharyngeal (parotid gland) and the facial (submandibular & sublingual glands) nerves.
2. Electroacupuncture: Increase blood flow to the salivary glands.
3. Manual acupuncture: Improve the overall body fluids metabolism (TCM approach).
As for the EA, I am applying the 2-needle technique to the following pairs:
2Hz: RN23 – SI17 (for submandibular & sublingual glands)
5Hz: SJ17 – ST7 (for parotid gland)
QUESTIONS:
1. Did anybody have a similar case? If yes, how did you treat it and with what level of success?
2. Do you think that the ...
51 year old man with bilateral hand and wrist pain, numbness, and weakness. He gets numbness and tingling in 4th and 5th fingers and pain in thumbs and thenar area. Hands feel cramped and like they need to be stretched open. Weakness and zinging pain on gripping objects and opening jars, loss of hand strength.
Onset has been recent, over a 2 month time period.
I know it’s systemic but I did EXSTORE anyway and didn’t find anything that seemed like it would contribute to this. L side supraspinatus and serratus inhibited.
I have been doing perfusion treatment around c7-T3 twice a week for 2 weeks with no effect. Any thoughts? Not sure what else to do or test.
I had a new patient come in yesterday (63 years old, female) with complaints of burning, numbness, and hot pain in the lateral portion of her right thigh for 5 years. She says it's always there but doesn't cause pain or disrupt her lifestyle so she lives with it. She was also VERY sensitive in that area to touch. She has no history of spine issues. She is active and exercises 5-6x/week, primarily walking and running.
Lower exstore scan revealed weakness in bilateral psoas, which I restored using the pointer plus. Not sure if its related to the case, but she is active so i knew it would benefit her anyway.
I did some local needles on motor points of the quadriceps which was VERY sensitive for her. She could not tolerate needles on that leg, but everywhere else was fine. Since I already had her in that position, I did distal and auricular points. I finished up with light gua sha to draw blood to the area.
After doing research, I found what she is describing is Meralgia Paresthetica. This ...
