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AURICULAR CHROMOTHERAPY FOR THE TREATMENT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA
I dedicate this chapter to my parents, who gave me a happy childhood; to my wife Adriana and my children Julia, Cecilia and Antonio, who gave me a happy life; to Dr. Raphäel Nogier, who taught me Auricular Therapy, and encouraged me to always develop my own ideas, while opening doors for me to show them; to my dear friend from Natal, Brazil, Dr Jorge Boucinhas, my teacher in the art of seeing the patient in a holistic manner; to Dr Raquel Solvey and Dr Pablo Solvey, who taught me to dive into the deepest traumas suffered by the human being and how to treat them.
Auriculotherapy
The discovery of auriculotherapy goes back to the year 1956, when Dr. Paul Nogier, from Lyon, France, presented his frst article on “The ear pavilion and refex points” at a conference in the French Society of Acupuncture. In this paper he describes in detail the “cartographic” or somatotopic pattern of the human body on the human ear pavilion. It took Nogier over 5 years of through work and detailed observation to describe the body’s organs and locomotor system and to reach his conclusions about which point on the ear pavilion represent its corresponding area in the human body.
Dr. Nogier’s research was later divulged by his German disciple, Dr. Bachmann; who traveled to China, during the time of Mao Tse Tung’s “Cultural Revolution”. Bachmann hoped to palliate the decline in the population’s health by massively spreading his knowledge on these affordable, easy-to-practice methods. The ‘Barefoot Doctors’ of Mao were then trained; they use to carry the Red Book of Mao and a plastic ear marked with the therapeutic points in their satchels. Even though it was the Chinese who popularized the auriculotherapy technique, they do recognize Dr Nogier as “the father of auriculotherapy” in a paper submitted to the WHO (TN: World Health Organization).
In 1980 Psychologist Terrence Oleson, who worked at UCLA’s “Pain Management Unit” in Los Angeles, published an article in “Pain Magazine” reporting the results of a double-blinded research study, which proved with a 75% effcacy, the concordance between a point of pain in the ear and its correlating area in the body. An easy, practical way of fnding a point is to press a thumb with a clamp, causing a certain amount of pain; after a few minutes it is possible to identify the corresponding point in the ear; it is quite a painful area. It is possible to verify a decrease of electrical activity in the same spot, which can be measured with an ammeter type device. When the clamp is removed, both events, the pain and the electrical decrease, disappear within minutes (see fgure below).
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