In conversation with the system

Your patient is a living system. Touch it, and it answers — with tension, sensitivity, resistance, relaxation. The question is whether you can read that answer.

Kiiko Matsumoto Style acupuncture (KMS) is built on that conversation. You palpate the abdomen and find an active reflex. Based on this, you then prick a distal point and palpate again. Within seconds, the system tells you whether your intervention is correct: if the point is right, the reflex softens; if the point is wrong, it does not. Diagnosis and treatment are not separate worlds here; they are snapshots of one continuous interaction.

While other diagnostic methods rely on the practitioner's experience, sometimes built up only after years of study and practice, KMS palpation provides feedback that the patient experiences himself, together with you. The spot that was painful is no longer so; you do not need to explain that, he notices it. That is a fundamental difference. Also in how your patient experiences the effect of the treatment: the proof lies under your fingers, and he feels it along with you.

Japanese palpation methods have been refined generation after generation to an extraordinary level. Knowledge from the Nei Jing, Nan Jing, and modern anatomy is combined. Kiiko Matsumoto built upon this work and continues to develop her own style after more than forty years of clinical experience. KMS is therefore a living tradition: a system that continues to learn, just like the people who practice it.

John Jaarsveld stands at the heart of that tradition. He studied with Kiiko Matsumoto and continues to attend her classes to this day. In addition, he brings twenty years of his own clinic experience and the acumen of a researcher. In this three-day workshop, he passes on the system as it is intended: at the table, with your hands on a belly, for as long as it takes until you yourself understand what the system is telling you.

Key points of the course

You will learn why Kiiko works the way she does, as well as the history and logic behind her style. Afterwards, you will get to work yourself: you will learn to methodically palpate the abdomen according to the KMS sequence. Which zones, in what order, and what active reflexes tell you about the constitutional and structural imbalance underlying your patient's complaints. The reflex zones build upon the classical framework of the Nan Jing, deepened by the clinical experience of generations of Japanese masters.

Next, you work with concrete protocols: what to do, and more importantly: why. The eclectic nature of KMS gives you room to maneuver in this regard: the system offers multiple treatment options for each finding, allowing you to choose what suits *this* patient. The workshop is explicitly practical.

Benefits for you as a participant

You go home with a diagnostic tool that provides immediate feedback. Within the same session, you know whether your treatment choice was correct — and your patient experiences this together with you. This changes the therapeutic relationship: something shifts, perceptibly, for both of you.

This method proves its value particularly in complex, persistent cases, because it looks beneath the symptoms for the imbalance that is blocking recovery. And you learn from someone who knows the system firsthand: John is in the direct lineage of Kiiko Matsumoto and translates her work to Dutch clinical practice. What you learn on Friday, you use in your own clinic on Monday.