SEEDS FOR YOUR EARS - AND YOUR BRAIN One of the most versatile and effective tools that we use at Seekers is ear acupuncture. We typically use needles to treat specific points we locate on each individual patient, but there are other ways to treat these points. Another approach, which we can use instead of needles or in combination with them, is ear seeds. The use of ear seeds for healing was recently profiled online by CBS. This is old news for us, but it is nice to see our methods validated in a major media outlet. It seemed like a good time to review some key aspects of this treatment for those of you who already know and love your ear seeds. For the rest of you, I would like to explain this treatment in more depth. It is truly amazing. Where does it come from? Ear seeds are part of a comprehensive treatment system called auricular medicine. This was ‘discovered’ in the 1950s by Paul Nogier, a neurologist practicing in Lyon, France. And his discovery is an interesting story. During the course of his regular clinical practice, Nogier noticed tiny scars on the ears of several of his patients. They told him they were treated by a local healer named Madame Barrin, who had cured them of their chronic low back pain. Nogier had already studied acupuncture, so he recognized that this might be important. He was so curious about this unknown technique that he went to seek out Madame Barrin. She said she had learned it as a young girl, from a wanderer who had been passing through her father’s farm and was allowed to stay. She said she was ‘Mongolian’, and that she had since treated hundreds of people with the technique, most with lasting positive results. Thus began Nogier’s quest. He started carefully examining every single one of his patients’ ears. He found tender points that he documented on a diagram of the ear, along with a list of the places in their bodies where they experienced pain. How does it work? Nogier’s first major insight was that there is a map of the body on the ear. Modern neuroscience has established the same kind of body map in the motor cortex of the brain, which is called a homunculus - which literally means ‘miniature man’. It is similar to the map used in reflexology to find and treat specific points on the feet. Modern imaging confirms that stimulating these ear points triggers neurons in a deep brain structure called the thalamus. The body map is the same. His second major insight, which was apparently an accident, was even more important. While examining a patient’s pulse, he brushed past an area on their leg and felt a surge in the strength of the pulse wave. On closer examination, he observed this response