Gulf Coast Wellness Opening November 1!

We are so excited to announce the opening of our Pensacola clinic, located at 310 E Government St.—your new downtown Pcola location for Acupuncture, Nutrition, Herbal Medicine and Neuro-nutrient therapy!

Our site is currently under construction, so please pardon the mess. You can still find many of our posts by clicking around, and we should be fully functional soon. If you’re new to us, some great articles to start with are What to Expect at Your First Visit and Acupuncture Done Correctly Gets Results.

Feel free to check out the website for our San Francisco clinic at WoodTigerWellness.com and Like us on Facebook for great health information and promotional opportunities.

We are so excited to be living and working here in Pensacola now. It’s a wonderful community with a real need for more natural healthcare practitioners. Thanks to everyone we’ve met for being so welcoming and helpful. We love it!

Be well,

Dr. Peter Shark, AP NNTS


Help Fix the Farm Bill!

 

Happy Pastured Cows

Happy Pastured Cows

The Farm Bill currently up for a vote before the Senate and discussion in the House will cripple our local food system, unless we pass some very important amendments.

For the full story go here: Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund

What can you do to help?

Call or email your US Senators and say the following:

 

Senator ____________________,

My name is ______________, and I live in _____________________________. As a constituent of yours and a consumer of locally grown foods, I urge you to protect my access to the healthy foods that I want to eat.

Please consider voting for the following ammnendments to the Farm Bill to help protect my freedom to choose the foods I want to eat.

YES: on King’s Amendment 1033
YES: on Boxer’s Amendment: 1027
YES: on Grassley’s Amendment: 969
YES: Wyden’s Amendment: 952
NO: Johann’s Amendment to eliminate Country of Origin Labeling (COOL)

Thank you so much for your time and support. We need you to defend our rights to choose the food we eat.

Sincerely,
Your name

If you live in California, you can email
Senator Boxer
Senator Feinstein

If you’re outside California, find your Senators

As of today (6/20/13) the House is considering their version of the Farm Bill. There are several important amendments there as well.

Send an online fax OR

Write your reprensentative and use the subject line: Support Amendments 115, 136, 176, 214

Say something like:

Representative  ____________________,

My name is ______________, and I live in _____________________________. As a constituent of yours and a consumer of locally grown foods, I urge you to protect my access to the healthy foods that I want to eat.

Please consider voting for the following ammnendments to the Farm Bill to help protect my freedom to choose the foods I want to eat.

YES on Amendments 115, 136, 176 and 214.

Thank you so much for your time and support. We need you to defend our rights to choose the food we eat.

Sincerely,

Your name

Not convinced our farmers need your help? Watch Farmageddon the movie. It will change your mind. If we want to continue to access quality foods, we need to act now to preserve our rights!

It is vital that we protect our access to foods grown in a non-industrialized setting, and if we allow continued erosion of our food choices, we may end up buying our beets on the black market. No joke!

Please take 2 minutes of your time RIGHT NOW to follow the links and cut and paste the message. Our democracy can only work through participation. Imagine how you’ll feel if your farmer’s market closes down and you didn’t do anything. Act NOW!

 


My Journey from Luddite to (Somewhat) Tech Savvy

When I first started in practice, I scorned blogs, social media (I think it was just My Space then) and any other not-in-person method of communication. I had a patient who was social media savvy, and she really helped me understand the value of being able to get important ideas out to a larger group and start a community conversation (still working on how to do that exactly).

She wrote up a nice story for Holistic Primary Care that features my journey. Check it out!

http://holisticprimarycare.net/topics/topics-o-z/practice-development/1384-crowd-sourcing-health-the-intersection-of-social-media-and-medicine


What is Shiatsu?

What is Shiatsu?

Shiatsu is an Asian style of body work focused on balancing the whole system through dynamic pressures, compressions, and stretches that work with the meridian channels.  Shiatsu is done with clothes on so the brain does not get distracted by skin sensations and absorbs the pressure on a much deeper level.   Rather than just focusing on symptoms, Shiatsu focuses on the person’s overall emotional and functional state to get to the root cause of those symptoms.

Communication is an important part of the massage session.  Before beginning any of the hands on techniques, the practitioner should discuss current symptoms, past injuries, and lifestyle to paint a clearer picture of the source of imbalance. The massage then begins with finger pressure applied to Back Shu Points along the outside of the spine to help determine what channels are in an excess (jitsu) state or in a deficient (kyo) state.  From there the session is designed for the individual to bring the body back to balance, by strengthening the weaker channels and dispersing the channels in excess, stimulating the person’s own body to heal itself.

The garden analogy

Both the garden and the human body are microcosms of nature.  The processes, cycles, and conditions that exist in a garden can also be observed in the life of a human being. If we use this analogy the practitioner becomes the gardener.  The gardener does not make the garden grow. Nature does.  The gardener protects the integrity of the garden by promoting growth in some areas and restricting it in others, always observing the interaction between the garden and the outside environment.

 


Happiness Forum

This video has inspired me to start a happiness community here on the Wood Tiger Acupuncture Blog. It suggests five simple things that, when done daily for 21 days, have a measurable impact on your happiness AND your brain function!

Take the 21 day happiness challenge with us, and join us in the discussion!

What to do:

1. Watch the video

2. Write down the 5 suggestions

3. Get a notebook or journal to record each of the 5 things daily

4. Start! And start posting your comments here!
The official start date is March 12th, but feel free to start getting happy now!