In understanding the anatomy of the human body as a whole, the hands and feet themselves represent a smaller, but nevertheless true, mirror image of the whole body. Within this view, the thumbs and large toes represent the head. Also, in addition to serving their normal functions as appendeges to the four limbs (legs and arms), the hands and feet are endowed with an exquisite "remote control" function which can cure diseases throughout the whole body. A knowledge of the principles through hand and foot acupuncture will provide an impressive vehicle for personal and family health care.
One of the characteristics of the human body is existence of a certain correspondence system between the whole of the body and some of its parts. Through this system the whole of the bofy is represented in many place all over the body. Correspondence works in such way that the whole of the body and its representations are interactive. Thus if a part of the body is affected with a disease it is also reflected in the place which represents the affected part. And on the other hand a stimulation of a place which represents a particular part of the body rises a reaction in the represented part. A general idea of existence of this type of body correspondence has already been proved by anatomy and physiology.
A new type of therapy which I have generally named Hand and Foot Acupuncture (Su Jok Acupuncture) is a method of curing diseases by stimulation of the hands and the feet with a combined use of acupuncture, medical treatment aids like moxibustion, finger pressure therapy and others.
Research has already established correspondence between the body and the hand led me to a discovery of a new system of correspondence, in which the thumb represents the head. In addition to that, I was also able to confirm the fact that the foot has the same type of correspondence as the hand. Presuming that an autonomous system of therapy will also be possible through the foot I approached it with acupuncture and moxibustion. This way an application of the domain of Oriental Medicine - acupuncture - exclusively to the hands and the feet developed a new and unique method of treatment and the same established the birth of Su Jok Acupuncture.
Hand and Foot Acupuncture may be classified as a pluralistic system of treatment which has several levels.
The first level, which is based on physical science, utilizes for treatment a simple stimulation of the following body correspondence reaction, body corresponding areas on the hands and the feet. Since a part of the body where sickness appears has it's counterparts - corresponding areas- on the hands and the feet, a stimulation there yields results in therapy. If only there is an understanding of the relation between the body and related to it correspondence structure on the hands and the feet, a practical application of this type of therapy is possible and easy for anyone. Treatment results obtained from stimulation of the corresponding areas of the hand and the foot are tremendous. This popular way of treatment can successfully relieve almost all the complaints.
The other levels of treatment differ from the described above Correspondence Therapy as they utilize distinguished in the Classical Acupuncture and established by the pathways of metaphysical Energy, the Twelve Classical Meridians, the Eight Extra Meridians (Ki Kyong P'al Mek) and belonging to them Points (Hyol). More over it also utilizes a reduced form of those which exist as a result of body correspondence on the hand and the foot in organized flow and branches of Byol Meridians and Byol Points.
Thus on this level we have for disposal a particular system of treatment in which it is possible to utilize experience accumulated from the Classical Acupuncture and to apply its theory just as it is also to link it with the art and the theory characteristic for the newly researched Hand and Foot Acupuncture. Since these two differing from each other systems of treatment are independent no matter which one we will allows to use it will yield a positive result. However they also manifest a flexibility which allows to adjust them to the conditions of the disease and also to use them jointly in order to obtain the best results when efficiency of treatment i.e. its duration is taken in to consideration.
By using the pit of the human stomach as the center point and rotating the head 140 degrees, the parts of the hand will correspond to particular parts of the body. The thumb identifies the head and the neck; the chubby part of the palm under the thumb is the chest and the palm as a whole refers to the abdominal region. The middle and ring fingers are legs while the index and small fingers correspond to the arms. From the structrual point of view, it is the hand which has the closest resemblence to the whole human body.
The principles of body correspondence structure which apply to the feet are the same as those of the hands: the big toe to the head and neck, the round shaped pad under the big toe to the chest and the palm of the foot to the abdominal area. Respectively, the third and the forth toe correspond to the legs, while the second and the fifth toe to the arms.
The correspondence structure of the toes is more particular. On the left foot: the second toe to the left arm, the third toe to the left leg, the fourth toe to the right leg and the fifth toe to the right arm. The right foot is reversed: the second toe to the right arm, the third toe to the right leg, the fourth toe to the left leg and the fifth to the left arm.
The parts of body related to the Yang (places which naturally are exposed to the sunlight), i.e. the outside parts of legs and hands, the buttocks, the back of head and others are represented in the Yang sides: back of the hands and the top of the feet. Consequently, the treatment of more areas, especially the shoulders, spine and waist yield excellent results when undertaken on the Yang sides of the hand and foot.
The parts of body related to the Yang (places which naturally are exposed to the sunlight), i.e. the outside parts of legs and hands, the buttocks, the back of head and others are represented in the Yang sides: back of the hands and the top of the feet. Consequently, the treatment of more areas, especially the shoulders, spine and waist yield excellent results when undertaken on the Yang sides of the hand and foot.
The hand's anatomic likeness to the body is too evident to be just incidental or concidental. This likeness bears proof of the profound internal relationships between the hand and all of the body; it explains the high therapeutic effect noticed by specialists when influence is applied to the correspondence points of hands and feet. The law of the fastest and strongest Homo-interaction is in effect between the hand, foot and the body.
Existence of the numerous signs of the likeness proves irrefutably that the thumb and big toe are in correspondence with the hand, the third and fourth fingers and toes are in correspondence with the legs, the second and fifth fingers toes with the arms, and the hand's palm - with the trunk.
Since the time the Su Jok therapy principles were made public, many people in Korea and other lands, both with and without medical background, have learnt the theory of the method and applied it in practice with remarkable success.
One of man's most cherished dreams is to live a life in perfect health. A persons diseases are not only his or her misfortunes of fate but just as much are a consequence of conditions of work, social environment and economic situation. It follows from this that dissemination of the simple, inexpensive and at the same time effective method of cure meets the interests of all countries and peoples.
Two levels of knowledge are best to be marked out in the Su Jok System; one for people without a medical education and the other for medical practitioners who are apt to employ the therapeutic potentialities of this method more profoundly.
If the population gets trained in basics of the treatment to a level that would enable everyone to help oneself when necessary, many people would not need apply to medical institutions in cases of minor indispositions or * benign * diseases. Such people would get rid of inconviences, loss of time and many apprehensions caused by indispositions and so could live a happier life.
Meanwhile the government institutions and public health systems could save much resources that are spent on building new medical facilities, training institutions, education and upkeep of many physicians and other medical staff.
Every person has the right to learn and master the simple methods of self - cure.
Su Jok Therapy is a synthesis of natural treatment methods and is based on certain philosophical principles; some of these methods can be used by every person for self - cure by acting on one's hands and feet.
We have mentioned above that hands and feet house special curative correspondence system. These are so simple and understandable that they cannot but be seen as a proof of the Creator's love for mankind. In the spirit of the lofty Love embodied in these curative systems the author strives to bring the knowledge of these systems to the people of the world so that every person could learn and use them.
The system of curative correspondences of hands and feet is quite simple and can be achieved even by a person having no specialized medical background. There is no particular need of special medical instruments to work with this system. The target can be achieved with the help of natural stimulators such as grains, thorns, small pebbles, etc.
Any disease is basically caused by disturbances of the energy balance in the organism or in a part of it. Hands and feet are more than just miniature copies of the physical body. They carry also the likeness of the energy system of the body and its components; meridians and chakras. It has been proved by experience that comparatively simple methods of stimulating different links of the energy system can produce remarkable curative effects.
Various magnets are used widely for this purpose. The principles of magnetic stimulation of miniature projections of the meridians (byol meridians) and chakras (byol-chakras) on hands and feet are relatively simple and can be learned and mastered in little time. Thus, the second step in Su Jok treatment is non-invasive treatment by byol-meridians and chakras.
Treatment via correspondences of hands and feet is the principal method of the Su Jok therapy that can be used by all people of the planet to provide first aid. I am sure that the dissemination of the method will play a major part in building a healthy society.
Translated from Korean means , and means . Thus this method is one using hands and feet for medical treatment. Hands and feet carry specific curative systems that follow the principle of likeness; the shapes of the hand and foot resemble the human body. These curative systems are given the name of correspondence systems of hands and feet.
Much time had passed the therapeutic effects produced empirically could be related to the likeness of hands and feet to the body and proved the possibility of existence of such correspondence systems. But are the correspondence systems exclusively located on the hand and foot?
Ancient physicians knew that there are some parts of the body that reflect the whole of the organism. Quite a few methods are known that use certain areas of the human body as correspondence systems; craniopuncture treats the points of the hairy portion of the head, rhinoacupunture makes use of points on the nose, etc. Ancient Chinese treatises described the correspondence of a person's face to his body that made it possible to make an adequate diagnosis of afflictions of different organs. Methods of diagnosis by eye iris were known an ancient Egypt. Methods of diagnosis by the tongue are used by Indian and Chinese physicians to this day. These treatment methods are largely empirical, that is, it took millennia to accumulate the knowledge of what point corresponds to what organ or body part. So called maps of face, nose,tongue, eyelids, etc were drawn up.
French physician Nogier advanced and perfected the ancient method of treatment by points on the floor of the auricle. He noted that the shape of the ear resembles the human embryo. The likeness made it much easier to learn the method and was a big qualitative leap in the development of auriculotherapy. But that was not the end.
Suffice it to recall the resonance effect of tuning forks; when one of them is made to sound another tuning fork of a closest tone would sound, too. A weaker sound may be generated by other tuning forks that are less like the first one. The fact is the likeness ensures the fastest interaction with a least loss of energy. It would be logical to assume that the fastest and the most effective treatment can be one that is produced by influencing the parts of the body that are most similar to it in shape.
The human ear does look like the human embryo. However, a thorough study of other body parts reveals that the hand manifests the greatest likeness to the body; the hand has a palm and five fingers; the body likewise has the trunk and five protruding parts, namely, the head and the four extremeties.
More over, fingers do have three each; likewise, the human body's extremeties also have three parts each while the head and the neck two parts. Thus, a simple observation provides information what part of the hand corresponds to what body part.
However, the likeness has another aspect; if hands are shaped so much alike to the shaps of the human body, men should have noticed this likeness and used it in treatment. That is, the Power that has created man also took care to provide mechanisms that keep him in health. Such mechanisms manifest the Creator's love for man.
Sometime in 1953 as I was scrutinizing my hand I was struck by the thumb's likeness to the head. By 1974 I had developed a clear idea of the constitutional likeness of human hand and body.
In 1841 I made a complete description of the curative correspondence system, which included hands and feet. Because of the likeness of hand and feet I came to the conclusion that they carry similar systems of correspondence which are in a Yin-Yang relationship.
The correspondence systems of hands and feet were for the first time presented officially in the press in 1987, the delay being due to the needs of other research. In October of 1987 was printed, and in December of that year . The manual (August of 1988) outlined the fundamentals of the Su Jok theory and also presented the therapeutic correspondence system in the hand and foot and all the metaphysical principles of this curative system.
Inherent in the hand and foot correspondence system is the possibility of an accurate, directional and specific influence on a specific part of the body. This possibility is materialized through the evident likeness of hands and feet to the body,and through the structural Specificities of hands and feet.
Of all the human body parts the hand possesses the utmost likeness to the body as is evident from the specifies of its structure. The hand resembles the body in:
The number of protruding parts;
The level of location of the protruding parts;
The directions of the protruding parts;
The proportions of the protruding parts;
The level of location of the protruding parts;
The positions of the protruding parts relatively to the symmetry line;
The likeness of the thumb to the head.
One can distinguish five protruding parts in the human body; the head with its neck and four extremities. The hand, too, has a palm and five protruding parts - the fingers.
Hands and feet are the only areas of the human body that have five protruding parts. This is one of the principal likeness of hands to the body.
When one looks at a person in a natural upright position that persons head is uppermost; legs are the lowest as they are on the ground; arms are located in an intermediate position. When one's arms hang down freely the thumb is uppermost. It corresponds to the head. The location level of the second and fifth fingers corresponds to that of the arms, while the location level of the third and fourth fingers corresponds to the legs.
Of course, the correlations will change when the hands are positioned in a different manner. So the likeness between the human body and its hands must be studied when they are in the natural position.
The body's shortest and broadest protruding part is head with the neck. Similar to these on the hand is the thumb. The body's longest protruding parts are the legs; the hand's longest fingers are the third and fourth ones. Being shorter than the legs the arms are in an intermediate position. Similarly, the second and fifth fingers are shorter than the third and fourth ones.
This supports the notion that the thumbs is in a correlation with the head and neck, the third and fourth fingers with the legs, and the second and third fingers correlate with the arms.
In the human body the uppermost part consists of two elements, the head and the neck. As to the hand, only the thumb has two phalanxes.
Each of the body's extremities consists of three functional parts. In the arm one distinguishes the shoulder, forearm and hand joined by the shoulder, elbow and wrist joints. In the leg such are the thigh, shin and foot joined by the hip, knee and ankle joints. Each of the four fingers has three phalanxes with joints connecting them to each other and to the metacarpal bones.
The body's left and right sides are alike to each other in appearance, anatomical structure and equal numbers of bones, and are symmetrical by the median axis.
On the hand one can also draw a line of symmetry, the only one, that divides the hand in an ideal symmetry both in the anatomical structure and in the number of the hand bones. The line starts from between the third and fourth fingers, crosses the middle of the wrist joint distal fold and from there extends towards median point on thumb top.
Relatively to the symmetry line the body's protruding parts and the fingers take similar positions. The head is located exactly on the body's central symmetry line. The thumb, is located right on the symmetry line, with the second and fifth fingers, similarly to the arms, most remote from the line. The third and fourth fingers are next to the symmetry line.
The definition of the thumb as corresponding to the head is the major prerequisite for understanding all of the body's system of correspondence on the hand. The thumb has a shape that is more similar to that of the head than the shape of any finger.
Evidently, functionally the head is the most important and perfect part of the body that controls all of its functions. In the hand the thumb is apart from the fingers and, thanks to its mobility, can freely reach every finger. The thumb's specific group of muscles and ligments ensures it a much greater range of movement compared to the fingers, thus providing the human hand with the possibility to grasp and hold objects and to do work. If a thumb is amputated a person suffers an irreparable loss of many professional and routine abilities.
When we consider the functionalvalue of the thumb we must draw the conclusion that, like the head, itplays the part of controlling all fingers. Great as the hand's likeness is to the body it is not a full one.
The human head is pointed in a different direction compared to the extremities. Likewise, the thumb's direction differs from those of the fingers. Had the thumb been positioned to point in a direction opposite to the fingers and not at an angle to the hand, the hand's likeness to the body might have been discovered much earlier.
The thumb's partial turn relatively to the palm is the contemporary man's adaptation to performing diverse work. This fact somewhat concealed the hand's evident likeness to the body and delayed the discovery of the perfect curative system.
Such position of the thumb notwithstanding, the hand's likeness to the body is quite evident to notice.
Of all the body's parts the foot is second to the hand in the likeness to the structure of the body. The five toes correspond respectively to the five protruding parts of the human body. Consequently, the foot, like the hand possesses the fundamental structrual elements of correspondence.
This likeness of the foot to the body, however, is more difficult to spot. It is simplar to begin with learning the correspondence of the hand to the body, then the structrual similarity of the foot and the hand, and so finally to understand the correspondence of the foot's structure to the body.
The correspondence of the hand has been described in detail previously. But how does the foot correspond to the hand? Animals have no basic distinctions in the structures of the front and back extremities, because originally the two pairs of extremities belonged to the same category and performed similar functions. This statement can easily be seen when one compares the anatomy of the bone structure of the hands and feet.
It follows from this that the original correspondence system of the foot is similar to that of the hand: the big toe corresponds to the head, the second and the fifth toes - to the arms, the third and the fourth - to the legs.
In general terms, the foot correspondence system is alike to the correspondence system of the hand. If one takes certain principal points as references one will have no problems with understanding the correspondence of the foot.
Anatomically, the principal difference between the foot and the hand is that the big toe is not seperated noticeably from the other toes. It may be due to the fact that the feet generally belong to Yin and perform much simpler functions compared with the hands. Because of this Specificity the body's line of symmetry is projected onto the foot in a somewhat different manner than onto the hand.
Compared to the hand the foot's structural resemblance to the body is not as evident. However, the foot gets stimulated more frequently and much more strongly than any other part of the human body. It follows that the correspondence system developed in the foot must be more effective.
The fact that's human organism is maintained in good health is probably due to the continued process of physiological stimulation of the foot correspondence systems, though the process of stimulation is not noticeable to us.
The problem to resolve is how the potentialities of this curative system can be used to maintain and fortify the health of people.
Your hand and your knowledge are always with u. And you will have no difficulties in finding a suitable material for treatment.
So far there has never been a treatment method so easy to master and produce such significant and rapid effect !
Su Jok Therapy method has been evolved by a South Korean scientist Professor Park Jae Woo who was able to make a substantial contribution to the traditional approaches to acupuncture. Professor Park Jae Woo is a man of profound knowledge and lofty spirituality. He works hard always without a self-interest. His work is dedicated to people, and filled with desire to help them, to convey them the thought that they are loved, and to make them happier. Knowledge received from such a man is Great Knowledge. You will see it by yourself when you master this uniquely simple and effective system.