I thought acupressure was beneath me

Clinical knowledge doesn't accumulate in a straight line. It evolves, and not always in the direction you expect.

You learn something, set it down, pick it back up years later and it looks completely different because you're looking at it through everything that came after. Some techniques you use every single day. Some you shelve and forget. Some you shelve, forget, and then one day rediscover and wonder how you ever worked without them.

Acupressure was that technique for me.

It was the first hands-on skill I ever learned. I was in TCM school, somewhere in the middle of a curriculum that was trying to pour an entire medical system into my brain in four years. Acupressure was one module among dozens. I learned it, passed the practical, and moved on. By the time I graduated and started seeing patients it had settled somewhere near the bottom of my toolbox under layers of other things I was more excited about.

For the next several years I barely touched it.

I was adding techniques constantly. Fascial work, joint mobilization, orthopedic assessment, FST, ART, and about 10 other acronyms I was convinced were going to change everything. On the TCM side I was diving into Nine Needles, Three-Needle Technique, and even One-Needle Technique (yes, these are real things in the world of TCM). Each one felt like an upgrade. Acupressure, by comparison, felt almost too simple. I had learned it before I knew anything. Surely that meant it was basic.

Then after about a decade of practice and teaching at RMT colleges I returned to my roots. I took a job teaching at the TCM college I had graduated from. Part of that job was revisiting original curriculum. Which meant revisiting acupressure.

I started digging into the research to build the course content. And that's where something shifted.

There was a growing body of work on acupressure and nervous system regulation. Not vague, not soft. Actual research connecting specific point work to measurable parasympathetic responses, to pain modulation, to the kind of physiological change that takes years of clinical experience to produce with manual techniques alone. The tradition I had learned as a student suddenly had a completely different set of words around it. And those words were ones I had spent a decade learning to speak.

The technique hadn't changed at all. I had.

I think about this a lot when I watch practitioners chase the next certification. Not because continuing education is wrong. But because sometimes the thing worth returning to is already in your toolbox. You just need enough miles on you to see it properly.

Is there something in your own practice you learned early and set aside that might be worth picking back up?

Best, Dr. Jess