AcuDestress overview: a unique space where mindfulness intersects with neuroplasticity Click page handout HERE
(powerfully augmented by AcuDetox ear acupuncture) by Brian C. Bailey M.D.
There’s very little that occurs during and after AcuDestress that feels at all like what I used to do in psychotherapy or was reported to me by psychotherapy and counselling patients. With tongue in cheek, I often speak of it as “magic.” But what I’m really doing is translating how mindfulness and neuroplasticity work - and how they’re in a whole different ballpark from what is familiar.


By using ear acupuncture, it becomes a matter of starting being over-run and overwhelmed by how many balls we have in the air one day, and the next day knowing which ball to follow, while letting go of the others. This is where mindfulness takes one and where neuroplasticity leaves one off.
Perhaps that’s all you need to know - but the more deeply one becomes involved, the more it is natural to want to know more and more. Perhaps you’re reading this while actually doing your session, or perhaps you’re a health care provider whose patient is doing or has done an AcuDestress session, and they’re asking you to explain.


Psychiatrist Dr. Michael O. Smith discovered in 1974 that he could replace New York City Lincoln Hospital’s methadone program which took 3-5 years to wean patients off heroine with five point ear acupuncture, which worked in three weeks. Then in 1979, the Miami Drug Court, using It with incarcerated substance addicts, found that not only was it superior to other means in treating addiction, but that it also reduced crime recidivism from 45% to 3%. Later Dr. Smith reported on successfully treating 25 cases of alcohol-addicted Borderline Personalty Disorder (results unrivaled in the treatment literature.) By 1990 Dr. Smith invited me and others to adapt his discovery to non-substance-addiction stress management.


The Day-to-Day Process of AcuDestress
