One very astute student at my martial arts school grabbed a copy of Black Belt Magazine the other day and found an article about pressure points. She brought it to me and wanted my take on it. After reading the article, I found myself trying to convey a lot of ideas to her that may not have seemed to string together very well. In thinking this morning, I realized that it may be a good topic to blog about, since I haven't had anything occur to me that seemed worthy to type. Anyway, I hope to be more articulate here, where we don't have the demo team out during a 2 mile run, Diane!
When I was a Hapkido student in the late 90s, my teacher was an acupuncturist. Admittedly, I had a great deal of skepticism about it all. I thought much of it was psychosomatic and a few inches away from being what many other martial artists referred to as "woo-woo." Woo-woo is a nickname given to anything that smacks of mysticism or any other area that contains liberal uses of words like energy, spirit, or chi. While I appreciate that people have all sorts of different opinions on pressure points, I prefer to stand on things that are testable and measurable in life. Knowing this, my old teacher decided to confront my skepticism while I was in the throes of my usual twice a year head cold - let me explain.
While studying Hapkido back then, I was a full time private music teacher. While I love the job and still do it, I basically worked in a large closet with no windows and little ventilation. Since about a third of my music students are under the age of 18, I'm constantly having people come in with seasonal head colds. I don't care how great a person's immune system is: if you're in a room breathing the same air as someone with a nasty head cold (or possibly multiple people in the same day), you're getting sick. I was in the throes of one of these head colds at that time. To add to this, I was playing in a band and had to play a gig that night in DC. The cold was affecting my voice on top of my overall disposition. My old teacher seized on the opportunity to give me some new insight.
Seeing me with this cold, he asked if he could treat me. I shyly declined while trying to hide my obvious lack of faith in the field. He insisted, and confronted my thoughts on it. "You don't think it will work?" he asked. I politely told him that I didn't. He then said for me to find out for myself and to see what happened. He poked holes on the palm side of my middle joint on my middle fingers with a sterile diabetic's needle and put alcohol on the small marks. After that, he stood up, grabbed some tissues, and leaned against his desk with a smirk on his face. It was about that time that it felt like someone took a wallpaper remover to the insides of my lungs and throat. He handed me the tissues as I coughed up horrible amounts of material. From that point on, he had my attention.
While this wasn't acupuncture in the sense of using meridians in the body, it was a traditional Korean method of dealing with illness. Many Korean people may have memories of parents or grandparents doing the sort of thing with different levels of effectiveness. Still, this got my attention.
Since then, I've had other brushes with traditional Korean or Chinese medicine - everything from acupuncture to herbal medicine. Some of it worked really well and others were useless from what I could tell. There are arguments to be made that some of that could be psychosomatic, or that the treatment was effective.
In martial arts, pressure points are used in order to cause pain or to distract someone as another technique is being executed. There are stories about people being able to make someone lose consciousness or die from an attack on a pressure point, but I have a very high level of skepticism about this. If those techniques were consistently effective, then they would be commonplace. So, what then is the final result - what place do I think pressure point study should have in martial arts?
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I think that there may be different nerves or blood vessels to correlate to pressure points used in classical acupuncture study that may have application in martial arts. My experience has been that someone prepared for an attack on a pressure point is far less susceptible to it. Use of these points requires a level of accuracy that would be hard to execute against an opponent that's engaging you aggressively. As a surprise move against someone not expecting retaliation, this would be more effective.
Should you know them? Sure - why not. Should you rely on them if confronted with someone actively looking to cause you harm? Well, I think some other techniques might be better suited to that task. While it's good to not be closed off to something that could add insight to study, it's also important not to fall into the many woo-woo traps that are all around martial arts and that annoy many modern martial arts practitioners when they think of traditional martial arts - quite reasonably, I might add. Still, there are many things in both camps that are problematic. Maybe, that'll be another blog entry - if anyone's interested.
Thanks for reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment