Pulse Diagnosis and a Mother’s Heartfelt Gratitude

This is how a grateful mother understands when a practitioner can make a good diagnosis – as told by Dr. Lucas:

For those of you who don’t know, my specialty for more than 20 years has been pulse diagnosis. No matter what the person says on their medical intake form, I see what is happening with them in their pulses. That is where we meet the patient. Asking them questions is not the way to make a proper diagnosis in my professional opinion.
I have a story that the mother’s remarks to me about my care for her son made me so so grateful (again!) that I had the proper training in pulse diagnosis to become an expert at it. Some of you might be familiar with the story of this little boy because I’ve been seeing him for years, since he was born actually. He was diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer when he was about five years old. His mother told me at the time, “you were the only one who has constantly been telling us that there is something going on with my son. You said as soon as he was born that there were some issues around what you call original qi and his digestion and now we have this.” I of course told her that you can’t go to Children’s Hospital and say “my acupuncturist said that there’s something wrong with my child.” That just is not the way that modern medicine works.

I treated her son through his grueling radiation, chemotherapy, and whatever treatment they could throw at him. Even though they couldn’t remove the entire tumor, they more or less said that he was in remission. Unfortunately, about 15 months ago, again he was diagnosed stage 4 stomach cancer, a neuroblastoma. He went through 13 months of horrible treatments, one of which left him almost deaf so now he wears hearing aids. About 2 weeks ago he came back to town after receiving a Whipple operation done at a center back east. However, his pancreas seems to not be working right. So he’s back in my office and I’m giving him acupuncture and gua sha. A couple days after our last treatment, his mother wrote to me and told me, “He went to school for the first time. I can honestly say that you have helped him more than anything! He even recognizes it and has several times in the past couple days said that ‘Dr. Martha has helped me so much’. We love you Dr. Martha and will see you as often as we can to help him get better. You are the person who has worked the hardest over the years to keep our son alive and with some sort of comfort throughout everything.”