SENDING LOVE FROM THE TLC TEAM!
JANET, MARY FRANK, HUNTER, EMALINE, JOSEPH, FONDA, ASHLEY & JESSIE
JANET, MARY FRANK, HUNTER, EMALINE, JOSEPH, FONDA, ASHLEY & JESSIE
Reopening the Clinic September 7th, 2020
The second week of September will be the relaunch date for all our services: Chinese Medicine/Acupuncture/Herbs, CranioSacral Therapy, Art Therapy, Family Constellation Sessions, Dream Work/Spiritual Direction. We are getting the clinic and all the procedures in order to comply with state regulations and make it a safe and relaxing, healthy experience for all of us! We would love to just be able to open with "business as usual," but just like everywhere else in the world, we are having to update to the "new normal" in keeping everyone healthy and safe.
We hired an infectious disease epidemiologist out of France, Jessie Abbate, PhD, and she guided us through all of the specifics and clarifications with keeping everyone safe to function in the clinic during this COVID-19 pandemic. She was amazing and super thorough, and we feel very confident in pandemic safety moving forward. She is definitely on the front lines and in the know. And we have a Chinese Medicine friend in Richmond, VA who consulted with Jessie and has been humming along safely and smoothly with her clinic since then, so we know we are in good hands!
Below you will find a break-down of some "new normals" you will see at the clinic (which are pretty standard now in health care facilities nation-wide), and what to expect when you come into the clinic during the new normal. Please read this and share the information, as you can use this safety knowledge from Epidemiologist Jessie for your home, business or when you are out in the world. Hopefully this will provide some clarity in the midst of the whirlwind of information we receive. The smarter we all get at working with this virus, the healthier we all will be!
Also wanted to say- our hearts go out to everyone, as we have all been impacted in different ways by this pandemic. We LOVE you all so much and look forward to reconnecting in this new and strange time. You guys are the reason The Light Clinic continues (in our 10th year now!). It's been a long journey with many twists and turns, but we look forward to continuing to shed light, health, wellness and love within and beyond.
We hired an infectious disease epidemiologist out of France, Jessie Abbate, PhD, and she guided us through all of the specifics and clarifications with keeping everyone safe to function in the clinic during this COVID-19 pandemic. She was amazing and super thorough, and we feel very confident in pandemic safety moving forward. She is definitely on the front lines and in the know. And we have a Chinese Medicine friend in Richmond, VA who consulted with Jessie and has been humming along safely and smoothly with her clinic since then, so we know we are in good hands!
Below you will find a break-down of some "new normals" you will see at the clinic (which are pretty standard now in health care facilities nation-wide), and what to expect when you come into the clinic during the new normal. Please read this and share the information, as you can use this safety knowledge from Epidemiologist Jessie for your home, business or when you are out in the world. Hopefully this will provide some clarity in the midst of the whirlwind of information we receive. The smarter we all get at working with this virus, the healthier we all will be!
Also wanted to say- our hearts go out to everyone, as we have all been impacted in different ways by this pandemic. We LOVE you all so much and look forward to reconnecting in this new and strange time. You guys are the reason The Light Clinic continues (in our 10th year now!). It's been a long journey with many twists and turns, but we look forward to continuing to shed light, health, wellness and love within and beyond.
Clinic Lobby & Masks:
Lobby & Tea/Water: For your safety, we will be limiting the use of our lobby as a waiting area and moving the tea and water station away from communal access. This has been the procedure adopted by most medical offices nationwide. When you come to the clinic, we ask that you arrive as close to "on-time" as possible and not early or late. It will be our goal to bring you straight back into a private treatment room when you walk in. If you do arrive early, please wait in your car or outside and let us know you are here. Then we can call you up when your room is ready. :) We will be able to offer water or tea in disposable cups; it will be located behind the front desk, just ask Janet or Ashley and they can get a cup for you!
If you want to buy something at the clinic at a non-appointment time: If you are visiting the office to purchase supplements or other retail products like tea or herbs, the process has gotten even easier than before. Give us a call, text or email to let us know which product you wish to purchase and we will prepare and package your product(s) for you. You can pay over the phone via credit card or we can send you an electronic invoice. Then we will place your items downstairs inside the lobby of the McClure building in a secured bag for you to pick up at your convenience. Easy peezy! We've been doing this since March and it has been working really well!
Appointments & Masks: As we mentioned above, please arrive for your appointment right on-time and not early or late to try to physically distance from other patients. Just bring yourself if possible, and try not to bring much extra, other than a set of keys or purse. If someone else is with you, please have them wait in the car or go for a stroll around Frankfort's lovely downtown. Of course if a companion is needed for communication reasons, we totally understand and will work with it the best we can. They can either step out during the actual treatment and come back later or stay in the room with you.
When you arrive to the McClure Building, you will need to have your mask on to enter the building and elevator, and keep your mask on while in the office and during your appointment until you exit the McClure Building (so basically just keeping your mask on). I'm sure everyone knows this well by now, but COVID-19 is highly contagious, and spreads through touching surfaces, but mainly spreads through respiratory droplets and inhaling air that has not been ventilated. Keeping our large respiratory droplets to ourselves (what the mask does) helps keep those around you safe. We're sorry to not be able to allow patients to take the mask off in the private treatment rooms. I asked Epidemiologist Jessie a lot about this (being able to take the mask off while the practitioner is out of the room, etc), but for virus spread it was a hard "no." Fine and large droplets get released into the air even with regular breathing/respiration, and because we are indoors it is not safe to allow any non-mask respiration to get airborne.
Thank you all so much for understanding and respecting virus safety during this wild and strange pandemic time.
If you are not able to keep a mask on for the course of your 60-minute treatment, unfortunately at this time we just won't be able to see you. There's just no real way around that right now.
Below is a nice little graph too that shows it visually. Epidemiologist Jessie clarified that we can get COVID through ingesting it orally, inhaling it through our nose, or through our eyes, so the practitioners will be additionally be wearing masks and eye protective gear.
How Your Appointment Will Look:
Coming for a clinic appointment:
New patients: Our new patient consultations are transferring to online telehealth appointments. We have switched over to a new clinic management software, which has transferred all of our intake forms and charting to electronic form. This will give our patients greater control over managing their appointments and access to their own data, and it is a much more virus-safe way to operate.
For most new patients, we will schedule a 1-hour telehealth (online) chat before the actual physical appointment, to be able to talk openly without masks in our respective private homes or office areas, and over the course of that conversation we will lay out what to expect from appointments and set up a treatment plan. It's going to be awesome. Joseph has done a few telehealth online appointments with herbal consults and has found it to be very useful.
Follow-up patients: For follow-up patients, once you get to the clinic just park like normal, put on your mask and come on into the McClure Building and up to the clinic. Remember to adhere to the social distance practice of a minimum of 6-feet apart when applicable.
There will be a sign outside TLC's door to remind you, but make sure to clean your hands with the hand sanitizer outside the clinic door. Epidemiologist Jessie said that hand sanitizer that has at least 70% alcohol does a great job at killing the COVID-19 virus if you let it totally dry before touching anything. At the clinic front door, your temperature will be taken with a non-touch thermometer (this is another one of the recent COVID health regulations). If your temperature is above 100 degrees, you will not be allowed to enter (because that means you are probably sick). If you are well, you will be taken straight back to your private treatment room.
You can go ahead and take off your shoes and socks and lay on the table on your back, face up. Pull up your pant legs and arm legs (or wear shirts and t-shirt), and relax and the practitioner will be in with you. You will need to keep your mask on the whole time during the appointment. Hopefully you guys have gotten used to this in various clinic and store settings and it won't be a big deal. We will come in and treat you, let you rest and then send you on your merry way. All the same love and goodness from TLC you've always known, just now with masks and lots of additional cleaners!
For payment, you can pay at the front desk or keep a card on file that we will charge after your appointment. We encourage you to use our online scheduling system to schedule multiple appointments into the future (i.e. 4 appointments at once a week, once every 2 weeks, once a month, etc), so as to reduce the time needed for check-out post appointment.
*All appointments at this time will be individual, private appointments to reduce risk of COVID-19 transmission.*
We are VERY sad that Group Acupuncture will be temporarily put on hold until the pandemic conditions change. Emaline and sometimes Joseph and Julie have done Group Acupuncture weekly for the last 10 years, and we are so proud to be able to offer such a healing and affordable sliding scale option to patients. The moment we can start it up again safely, we will.
Clinic COVID Cleanliness Procedures:
Gloves & Hand Sanitizer: The front desk staff and practitioners will have on mask and gloves at all times. We will attempt to open and close all doors for you. By you not touching anything in the clinic, and us doing the touching with fresh sterile gloves, that greatly reduces transmission spread. Epidemiologist Jessie did say that as long as we are using hand sanitizer and letting it fully dry after touching anything, that it is just as safe to either wear gloves or not wear gloves. So for the TLC staff, we will use hand sanitizer after each contact, and some people may choose to wear gloves and some may not. But we are being 100% safe either way!
Appointment Spacing & Cleaning: Appointments will be limited and spaced out to allow for thorough cleaning of treatment rooms between client visits with 90% cleaning alcohol solutions, non-chlorine bleach, or hydrogen peroxide. We will also keep our overhead fans running on low and windows open to allow maximum fresh airflow.
Epidemiologist Jessie said that after an hour in an unventilated room, 50% of the virus that is in the air (not on surfaces) is shed or inactive. With increased air flow in a ventilated space, even more of the virus is shed, so we will maximize that airflow with our big historic windows and overhead fans! We will be cleaning hard surfaces between each patient (chairs, door knobs, treatment tables), as well as have our HEPA and ionizing filters running. Epidemiologist Jessie said that masks help stop larger droplets, but the fine droplets are still in the air. HEPA air filters are good at catching those fine particles in the air and neutralizing them.
Linens: We will continue to use a clean cotton sheet on the treatment tables, which will come directly from a clean bag to the treatment table and then back directly to a "dirty" bag with a closed lid. The tables will be wiped down with alcohol and aired out between each patient, and we will not be allowed to use face cradles because of their high exposure rate to illness. Not using face cradles means that all patients will be lying mostly on their backs on the table, face up. Don't worry- we are able to treat back problems from the front! It's pretty cool. If needed, however, we will find ways to work directly on the back.
Epidemiologist Jessie said that in general COVID-19 spreads through air transmission, or from touching slick surfaces (the virus can live on those surfaces for days if the surfaces has not been properly cleaned). The chances of it spreading from linens or porous material is very miniscule. Per Jessie's guidance, our launderers will wear a mask when taking linens out of the bag (to protect themselves, because the virus can get airborne then) and will wear a mask when folding the laundry (to protect the laundry from their respiration!).
Meditation:
Meditation: If you haven't been getting or had a chance to follow along in the free guided Monday Meditation's, they are amazing and wonderful, and have been scientifically proven to calm and center the mind, regulate the nervous system and hormones, reduce stress and anxiety, reduce memory loss, generate kindness and help fight addictions. Click the link below to access the free guided meditations by Joseph. They are all about 10-15 minutes so very easy to do daily.
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Qi Gong:
Qi Gong: Joseph has also been guiding free Qi Gong lessons for Wellness Wednesday. Qi Gong is an internal martial art, like Taiji (Tai chi), and is a wonderful exercise to move the blood and lymphatic system, while gently opening and unwinding the fascial body and connecting you with your center of health and vitality. Click the link below to access The Light Clinic's Youtube page with those free practices (along with some other fun stuff like the talks from the Taishi Kyil Tibetan Monks from 2019, Joseph and Emaline's talk from this Chinese New Year on what to expect from the year, and an hour long yoga flow from Joseph). Subscribe to TLC's Youtube page to stay up-to-date on all our new free health and movement videos!
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Chinese Herbal Options at the Clinic
We carry safe, Chinese herbal formulas at the clinic to help strengthen the lungs and immune system. Please give us a call to inquire! The herbs are in a granular/powder form, and we have some in capsules. With the granules, you put a few tiny scoops in a cup, mix them with hot water, and drink like a tea daily. With the capsules, you take a few daily. Pretty easy. This has been used for thousands of years, and is incredibly effective! Joseph is offering telehealth or phone herbal consults that are super easy and super effective.
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Natural Herbs & Ointments for Health during COVID-19
Beyond the known recommendations of thoroughly washing your hands for at least 20-30 seconds, wear a mask when going out, staying clear of high trafficked areas to limit exposure, and calling your primary care physician if you begin to have sickness symptoms to discuss receiving a COVID-19 test, here are some helpful thing you can take or do at home to help strengthen your immune system, promote health and deter COVID-19:
- Chinese herbs (you can get from the clinic, read above)- strengthens the immune system, boost lungs, dispels damp (COVID-19 creates lots of dampness/phlegm symptoms) and helps kick out sickness
- Get fresh air and sunlight- medics found that severely ill flu patients nursed outdoors recover better than those treated indoors. Outdoor air is a natural disinfectant, and fresh air kills the flu virus and other germs
- Morning hot lemon water, apple cider vinegar and trace minerals- overall balances the body's pH/alkaline-acidic ratio. The ideal body ratio is 70% alkaline and 30% acidic. The body is naturally alkaline, but foods we ingest and things in our environment make our body more acidic. Most illness, disease and bad bacteria grow in an overly acidic environment. If we are too acidic, your body "borrows" crucial mineral from tissue, bones and organs to neutralize and remove the acid from your body. If your body is over-acidic, that can cause a weakness in multiple systems, creating symptoms such as weight gain, joint pain, diabetes, fatigue, hormone imbalance, bladder and kidney damage, lactic acid build up, yeast overgrowth, slow elimination, free radical damage (which can lead to cancer mutations), and premature aging. ****Lemon builds up immune deficiencies, detoxifies, maintains digestive health and pH balances in the body. Apple cider vinegar has antimicrobial and antioxidant effects. Trace minerals give healthy minerals to your body, makes the body more alkaline and has the potential to prevent infection. To drink: squeeze 1/4 lemon into cup, add a spoon of apple cider vinegar and 5-10 drops of trace minerals. Poor a little cool water over lemon mixture (to not "kill" the healthy attributes in the lemon and vinegar and then pour hot water over. Best to drink in the morning 30 minutes after waking on an empty stomach.
- Elderberry Extract- alleviates cold and flu symptoms, strengthens immune system
- Bee propolis- antiviral, boosts immune system and cellular immune response
- Vitamin C, Vitamin D and Zinc- most research shows about 6,000mg of Vitamin C daily and 5,000 IU of Vitamin D daily (you can also get this from the sun!).
- Eat fresh fruits and vegetables and whole foods- food really is medicine, and the more we stay away from processed and sugary foods, and the more we eat whole foods, the healthier our body and immune system will be!
- Essential Oils:
- lemon-clears nasal passageways
- eucalyptus-reduces fever and fights virus
- tea tree oil- antibacterial and antifungal
- thyme- antibacterial and fights respiratory infection
- clove-antimicrobial, kills bacteria, relieves respiratory conditions like cough and asthma
- read here for more essential oils and how to use them: https://classicalchinesemedicine.org/natural-methods-protect-respiratory-system-infection-during-current-flu-coronavirus-season
- Neti pot- keep nasal passages open and clear
- Gargle salt water and drink warm (not cold) water- the coronavirus is showing up first as a sore throat for a few days, this helps protect the throat tissue and has been known to kick out sickness
- Vinegar on the nose- "According to a recent report I received, Chinese medicine practitioners during the 1938 epidemic in China successfully swabbed their nostrils with vinegar before seeing afflicted patients." --from our herbal teacher, Heiner Fruehauf: https://classicalchinesemedicine.org/natural-methods-protect-respiratory-system-infection-during-current-flu-coronavirus-season/
- Reduce sugar, bread and dairy intake- processed sugars can increase bacteria in our body by making it more acidic. Stick to natural sugars such as fruit, honey and maple syrup (including in pre-made foods). Breads and dairy create more damp and phlegm in the body, and this strain of Coronavirus causes a lot of damp and phlegm in the body. Decreasing our damp, phlegm and bacteria is one of the best way to help strengthen our bodies against catching this new Coronavirus!
Articles on COVID-19
- Knowing COVID Contagiousness- where to go and where to avoid: https://erinbromage.wixsite.com/covid19/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them
- National Geographic Sneeze Study, a sneeze can travel out of your mouth at almost 100 miles per hour, travel 27 feet and the droplets (the can have COVID-19) can stay in the air for minutes: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/coronavirus-covid-sneeze-fluid-dynamics-in-photos/
- Kentucky COVID-19 Updates, includes hotline number, current number of cases tested and positive, resources, etc.: https://govstatus.egov.com/kycovid19
- COVID-19 Outbreak Worldwide Graphs, really great compilation of current numbers of infected and recovered worldwide: www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/?fbclid=IwAR1Oeed9HQDXSwU-EjXGs5amJlG7BXwyfL47NtzUlGkTnajLJP3-7vbQ804https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/?fbclid=IwAR1Oeed9HQDXSwU-EjXGs5amJlG7BXwyfL47NtzUlGkTnajLJP3-7vbQ804
- COVID-19 Immunological Podcast, from our former genius teacher Heather Zwickey, Ph.D.: https://www.naturalmedicinejournal.com/journal/2020-03/important-clarifications-regarding-covid-19-and-natural-medicine
- Visual Summary of the New Coronavirus Pandemic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWMUBouaqb0
- Chinese Medicine Case Study, showing Chinese herbal remedies can be helpful for COVID-19: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32065348
- Coronavirus in Wuhan, A Report from the Ground floor from our herbal teacher, Liu Lihong: https://classicalchinesemedicine.org/report-from-front-line-wuhan/
- American Acupuncture Society fact sheet and description of COVID-19: https://www.asacu.org/wp-content/uploads/ASA-COVID-19-Info-Sheet.pdf
- Natural Methods to Protect Your Respiratory System, from our teacher and herbalist, Heiner Fruehauf: https://classicalchinesemedicine.org/natural-methods-protect-respiratory-system-infection-during-current-flu-coronavirus-season/
- Coronavirus thoughts and Chinese herbs, from our teacher and herbalist, Heiner Fruehauf: https://classicalchinesemedicine.org/initial-thoughts-on-coronavirus-prevention-and-treatment-with-chinese-medicine/
- Herbal Remedies for Acute Viral Infections: https://www.donnieyance.com/herbal-remedies-for-acute-viral-infections/
- Herbs for Immunity: https://www.herbalremediesadvice.org/herbs-for-immunity.html
- 5G & the Coronavirus: www.electricsense.com/5g-coronavirus/https://www.electricsense.com/5g-coronavirus/
- Virus Explanation and Herbal Remedies: https://www.stephenharrodbuhner.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/coronavirus.txt.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1rnVBLbmASnrPysJIqrb1nrGuJ3DvpNuQ3qP8YOjcUMc8kHH-oV_vpGXY