Pathways to Healing

by Elaine Zablocki

Acupuncturist Advocates Balanced Lifestyle, Nonjudgmental Mind

Liz Fukushima has been treating difficult cases with acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine for nearly 30 years. “I built my practice by letting people know I wanted to treat complex conditions,” she recalls. “I told them, ‘the more doctors you’ve flunked out of, the more I want to treat you.’”

Fukushima practices at Life Gate Healing Arts, in Burlington, Vermont. She named her practice after the Life Gate, an important acupuncture point, called Ming Men in Chinese. “At the moment of conception, when yin and yang/egg and sperm come together, there is an energy that enters at that point and activates life. That’s why I chose Life Gate as the name of my practice.”

Fukushima started out taking pre-med courses in college, but decided she wanted a broader undergraduate education. She ended up majoring in religion, with a concentration in Tibetan Buddhism. Then she spent a year in India studying literary and spoken Tibetan.

Soon after she returned, Yeshe Dhonden, the Dalai Lama’s personal physician, arrived on a visit to the US. In addition to a series of lectures, he visited a number of acupuncture clinics to treat difficult cases. Fukushima, with her Tibetan language skills and her interest in medicine, was invited to serve as his interpreter for patient consultations. “At that time I was still considering finishing my pre-med requirements, but this experience led me to study acupuncture instead,” she says. She trained through a two-year program at the New England School of Acupuncture, and became one of the earliest licensed acupuncturists in Massachusetts.

Fukushima had a special interest in women and gynecological health, so in the early days

she treated many women with endometriosis, and developed a protocol for working with infertile couples. Nowadays in vitro fertilization and other forms of assisted reproduction are common, so she often sees patients who want to combine acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine with assisted reproduction.

From the beginning she worked with people with many different forms of cancers, using acupuncture and Chinese herbs to boost white blood cell counts during chemotherapy.

Today there are expensive medications to boost white blood cells. “Nowadays on many protocols these medications are a standard part of every round of chemotherapy,” Fukushima said, “If we only had more individualized treatment, it’s possible you could do acupuncture and herbs on the early rounds, and bring out these medications later on. If these methods were fully integrated into treatment, we could lower costs and also lower toxicity.”

Healthy Living: Eat, Breathe, Move, Sleep

In addition to dealing with specific complex illnesses, Fukushima’s practice focuses on

finding ways to support health. “The more years of clinical practice I have, the more I realize how important it is need to eat well and sleep well to support a healthy organism,” she says.

After she’d been in clinical practice for two or three years, Fukushima went to Nepal for six weeks. “It was the first time I had been out of the United States for an extended period of time after I had learned to cultivate my medical practitioner eyes,” she says. “I watched how human beings there live their lives, and I saw clearly that this human organism is meant to be in motion many hours of the day.”

Our society has evolved so that many people spend hours sitting at a desk with their vision fixed at a point 12 inches in front of them. “This is so stressful for the human organism,” she says.

“I encourage people to build more movement into their lives, in informal ways: take the stairs, park three blocks away, walk around the block. Every chance you get, move a bit more.”

She believes it is important to teach people to be aware of their breath, and to breathe well.

“Your diaphragm is a big muscle, and all the organs in your abdomen could be massaged by this muscle on every breath. Instead, when you just take shallow breaths, everything gets stagnant.”

Fukushima doesn’t rely on standardized recommendations about the best diet for everyone. Instead she works closely with each patient to discover what foods are most appropriate. “I have an opportunity to get people to really pay attention to what they’re eating and how they feel after they’ve eaten it. I often recommend that people eliminate something for one to three months and then add it back. After that, if it’s not good for you, you’ll see very clearly how you react to it.”

Often she suggests new approaches for people to try. She asked one person with chronic fatigue syndrome to keep a food diary, and noticed that she wasn’t eating any protein at breakfast or lunch. When this person increased her protein intake early in the day, many of her symptoms improved.

At the same time, Fukushima notes that the preservatives, food additives, and flavorings in our food supply are very stressful. “I’ve always believed in eating whole foods,” she says. “I encourage people to distinguish between what’s a treat and what’s a basic food. Biologically we are not prepared to handle the profusion of sweets that constantly surrounds us.”

Most of us sometimes experience periods when we don’t get enough sleep. “Even if you wake up early, you can take time for relaxation exercises, or focus on your breathing,” Fukushima says. “You’re resting, and in many cases rest is as valuable as sleep.”

The standard advice for people who have trouble sleeping is to turn off the TV and computer around 8:30 at night, but many resist these suggestions. “I had one client with severe hot flashes, what we would call too much fire energy, so she was willing to give this a try. She was also getting acupuncture and taking herbs. Within six weeks her sleep improved, and all that revved-up energy quieted down.”

Fukushima encourages people to rethink their choices and priorities in relation to sleep. “At one point I really focused on sleep. I asked every one of my regular clients, no matter how much sleep they were getting, to try sleeping 30 minutes more each night. I said, ‘You’re not feeling well, you’re spending an hour a week and a chunk of money to come see me …. try sleeping a bit more and see what that does.’ I can’t tell you how many of them felt better within the next month.”

Enjoy Rest and Nonjudgmental Mind

Many of our current chronic health problems relate to inflammation. “These inflammatory processes come about because the body doesn’t have enough rest,” Fukushima says. “It doesn’t have rest in the form of sleep. It doesn’t have a chance to rest from digesting food. Our world is full of constant entertainment and news, and it’s not so easy to let the mind rest. The most powerful way to calm down inflammation is to support good rest.”

Fukushima finds that many people in the US have deep-seated moral judgments about their health issues. “They say, ‘If I ate better, if I just exercised more, if I wasn’t so angry….’ It’s almost a puritanical control thing,” she says. “I try to help people understand they don’t need to have moralistic judgments about everything they experience.”

For example, some people have a tendency to put on weight. This may be related to minute amounts of BPA in the environment. It may be a genetic tendency that runs in the family, a tendency that would actually be useful in times of food shortage. “We don’t know why you’re 30 pounds overweight, but it doesn’t make much sense for you to beat yourself up trying to lose 30 pounds,” Fukushima tells her clients. “Why not just lose 10 pounds, eat healthy foods, be active … and consider that’s OK.”

She mentions a friend who didn’t have any of the signs that predict heart disease … then it turned out he had a blocked major artery. “We know many steps that will help prevent heart problems, but they only account for about half the cases of heart disease,” she says. “For the other half, we don’t have a clue. You can do everything recommended to prevent cancer, but if you do get cancer it’s not a moral failure. It’s just something that happened.”

As a practitioner, Fukushima supports her patients in finding creative ways to increase health, and she also supports them in when they are dealing with serious illness. “I say to them, ‘How can you find ways to live well, if this is just how it is?’ I’ve seen people adjust to very difficult situations. People can experience a deep interior sense of wellness, even while their body is failing. It is a sense of acceptance: this is just what is happening, this is how it is.”