From Seated II — Face, Jaw, Ear, Sinus
The arrow that nobody drew A composite, assembled from the camps where a face is treated by whoever is free that morning.
Her card said Facial point , and under it, in a careful hand, the days and the block it sat in. What it did not say was which way.
Kusum Ratnaparkhi was thirty-four, a schoolteacher from Sangli, and eleven days earlier the left side of her face had stopped working between the morning register and the lunch bell. She had been sent on by people who did everything right: seen the same day, started on tablets, given ointment and a pad at night because the lid would not close. She came to the camp beside all that, not instead of it.
In the first week the therapist who took her worked from the right — the side that opened properly — drawing the tissue across her face to the left and finishing upward at the temple behind the hairline, exactly as the treatment is given.
In the second week he was at a wedding in Kolhapur. The therapist who took the mat read the same card, stood on Kusum's left, and drew the other way — from the dead side toward the living one. Four mornings. On the fourth she said, in the flat voice of somebody who has decided not to argue, that it felt as though her face was being pushed further down. Then she stopped coming.
The senior who was asked about it afterwards did not ask what had been done. She asked one question. "Where is the arrow?"
There was no arrow. There is a symbol for this treatment and there are two of them — a pair of eye-marks with arrows pointing right, and the same pair pointing left — and looking at the patient, whichever is appropriate is written on the card, so that the therapist knows from which side it is to be done and no mistake occurs.
They drew it. Kusum came back, and her recovery afterwards was ordinary and is claimed here for nobody's hands. What the arrow did was smaller than a cure and more important than one. It made sure the hands went the same way twice.
Seated I — Brain, Medulla, Neck took the seated group as far as the base of the skull and stopped at the Necklace. The patient has not moved; your hands are about to — up over the edge of the skull onto the back of the head, round onto the forehead, and then down onto the face. (Figure 19.1)
Until now the patient has not been able to see your hands. At the nape, work arrives from behind and is simply felt. On the face it is watched — and a body that has not been warned will flinch, blink, pull back, or tighten every muscle you were about to work. Telling the patient what is coming is not manners laid on top of the technique. It is part of the technique.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN HERE By the end of this article you will be able to: Say what the face adds to the seated rules of Seated I — Brain, Medulla, Neck — the telling, the nails, the hair , the steadying hand — and give every point here without a nail touching a patient.
Give Brodmann's Area 17 & 18 Ghisai with the edge of the thumb, and state the limit that replaces a count.
Give Hammering with the cloth, the hammer or the finger pads, the whole forehead or the left side — and carry its two precautions exactly, the ear and the nails.
Set a patient up for Shivaji and work its three stations in order, from the shoulder joint to T6–L3.
Give Bell's Palsy from the correct side and write the direction on the card as a symbol, so the next therapist works the same way.
Teach a patient the Teeth Points on themselves, and give Jaw Points and Lacrimal Point with the count that names the card.
Give the four sweeps of Sinus Point and the full sequence of Satnam — both counts, both directions, and the hold that is never released between stages.
Give the four stations of Ear Points in order, left ear first, and say why the patient hears better for a moment after the third.
