In June 2019 my mother suffered a stroke and nearly became paralyzed. When she was discharged the doctors told us to consider buying a wheelchair and to pursue plenty of physical therapy. Instead, at home I began daily moxibustion treatments—combining triple-point moxa with sessions on the moxa bed, and cutting out all cold foods. We never did any conventional rehab, and she never used that wheelchair. Gradually, month by month, her strength returned.
By the time I wrote the 2020 essay, Mom was about fifty percent recovered and could manage almost all her own daily needs.
A year later she’d completed three courses of summer moxibustion (sanfu jiu) and two courses of mid-winter moxa (sanjiu jiu) without missing a single day. The moxa bed deserves enormous credit—her recovery climbed to nearly ninety percent, and she still does moxibustion every day.
This year the spotlight shifts to two other women in my family—and their stories:
My cousin. After Mom came home from the hospital, my cousin and her husband came to visit. My cousin has suffered from insomnia for years and has a herniated lumbar disc—she’s what she calls a “walking medicine cabinet,” carrying pills wherever she goes. That afternoon she tried the moxa bed for two hours and said she’d never felt so relaxed. Before she left I gave her a pack of triple-point moxa sticks and two boxes of our 2012-vintage moxa rolls, asking her to give them a try.
She stuck with it—using the moxa sticks several times—and called me recently to say she’s had far fewer colds and her sleep has improved dramatically. Her back pain is still a challenge, but she’s determined to keep going—and it’s already been nearly three years.
My sister. She’s a professional-level chef, and the nonstop chopping and stirring took its toll: her thumb developed severe tenosynovitis. One day we were sitting together and I noticed her thumb was bent. I asked if it hurt—she hadn’t realized how bad it looked. She admitted it had been aching for a long time, but she never had a day off to deal with it.
I showed her how to do “wheat-grain moxa”: tear open one of our 2012 moxa rolls, roll the floss into seven tiny cones, and place them on the sore spot. At the same time I treated her other key points with a moxa seat and triple-point moxa. Two hours later she’d fallen asleep on the moxa seat.
After two months of daily treatments, her thumb pain vanished completely. The little painful lump under her arm—the size of a grain—has also disappeared. I’m not sure if it shrank or just dissolved, but it no longer hurts, so I know it’s healed.
I’ve used moxibustion on all sorts of minor aches and pains around the house. Not everyone sticks with it—three days on, two days off—but doing something is always better than nothing. Little by little, as you learn moxibustion techniques from a lecture or a live demo, you become your own family’s health specialist.
