I recently experienced mild heel pain around the center and edges of my right heel, if not for the first time ever, surely the first in a long time. While one night watching TV last week, I simply needled the “heel point,” located in the center of the base of the palm, just distal from the wrist crease—not one of the body’s more forgiving, gentle points, but tolerable. While the point was in, I rotated my foot and even massaged the heel a bit with my other hand. The next day it was better.
Why needle the hand? And how did this happen, beyond just the lazy etiological platitude of “getting older?”
We are embarking into autumn, the season ruled by the lungs and large intestine. The function of these wonderful organs is to distribute substances downward, quite obviously in the case of the latter, but we also think of the lungs’ function as down bearing, depurative, in distribution of gases and fluids to the lower region of the body—hormonal reserves and essential fluids.
This is why ancient Chinese called the lungs “mother” to the kidneys—the former “engenders” the latter by way of this mechanism of distribution. “Engenderment” in this case might be understood as adrenal and hormonal health’s reliance on ample distribution of fluids and gases from the upper regions of the body. This is why it is important, in my opinion, to consider daily yoga or qi gong routines before resorting to hormone replacement.
What’s more, many of us have also had the experience of having a morning bowel movement on the heels—no pun intended—of morning breathing exercises or yoga, underscoring the inseparable connection between the lungs and intestines along the gut-lung axis.
“The heel point” is not magical. The heels are where the kidney and urinary bladder vessels begin and end respectively, surely highlighting how overworked I may have been, as well as admittedly my own progress along the aging process. When we have heel pain, there is a good chance the lungs are not pulling their weight insofar as distributing anti-inflammatory substances to the bottom of the body. Located at the base of the palm, the point is just lateral to acupuncture’s lung vessel. It acts as a mirror to the heel, not just because of cute bodily holograms, but because the kidneys rely on their mother for circulation.
This “mother son” relationship exists between all our organs and structural parts. For example, pain in the groin exists along the liver vessel, whose mother is the kidneys, which reside in the lower back adjacent to the lumbar vertebrae that innervate the groin! Pain in the knees usually exists along the stomach or pancreatic vessel whose mother is the heart, another organ whose primary function is to distribute blood downward—and the knees can be a long way to travel.
If you or a loved one experiences pain, it’s great to understand it from a musculoskeletal perspective and take care orthopedically, but if you are interested in its root cause, why it happened to land in that place on your body instead of elsewhere, please reach out!
