Bob Doane is an internationally acclaimed East Asian Medical Practitioner, master herbalist, and an expert acupuncturist. He has one of the busiest acupuncture clinics in the United States, located in Seatle. He was a monk for 10 years in the Alps and became interested in western herbology. As a monk he meditated for 18 hours a day and he was interested in anything that would improve the meditation, especially natural. He then went on to teach 2,000 people meditation in the United States from 1970-1971 and in India from 1973-1974. In the early 1980s he took a detour into the oil business to amass enough wealth, so that he could help as many people as possible without having to worry about financial enumeration. In the mid 1980s when he was in the oil business the health food stores became shelved by Chinese herbs and he was always fascinated by it and would constantly ask the owner what they were and started consuming them. After his oil company he retired at 40 years old and while on his boat he started studying Chinese medicine to try and figure out what herbs he should be taking. He then went on to study at the Santa Barbara School of Chinese Medicine in 1993 and graduated in 1996. Chinese medical school gave him an opportunity to enrich his understanding of herbs and acquire some kind of medical degree, so he would have some credentials to help people medically.
At his clinic he typically does a five month plan for his patients which is composed of Chinese herbs, Chinese herbal consultations, acupuncture, and nutritional counseling. Generally people do 12 Chinese herbal consultations and it is set up so that the patient comes in once a week for a month, then it transitions to every other week for four months. His clinic lays out the plan for each patient at the beginning, so they are aware of what it entails. The purpose of the plan is to reduce the symptomology by about 70% or more. They have done over 500,000 treatments at his clinic which allows them to use their past data in order to tell their new patients upfront what their chances of failure will be.
TCM (Traditional Chinese Method) acupuncture is a modern method of acupuncture and is composed mostly of if you have pain in a certain area then they put in some needles on the corresponding area. The problem is it doesn’t work that well and is only about 50% successful. So, when Bob Doane started to practice he decided he needed to come up with something better and over the years there were luminaries in the field with other techniques. Some of these other techniques are called distal methods where the needles are placed at a distance from the problem, not directly in it. He found these techniques to work a lot better and would produce an 80-90% success rate. After using someone else’s method, over the course of 10 years it started to morph into his own method. He changed and adjusted some areas of the method as he learned more and worked on more and more patients. He refers to his method as DNA (distal needling acupuncture).
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