FRIEND OF MINE once mentioned that his daughter, who was 10 years old at the time, kept receiving poor grades at school, mostly Cs. Her highest grades were for physical education, and even they were Bs. My friend's explanation was that he and his wife were low-achieving students and that their daughter's grades were genetically predetermined. His concern piqued my interest. Another time when I visited him, his daughter was playing with a hamster. He asked her whether she had done her homework. The girl looked down and mumbled, "No." "Go and do your homework," my friend told her. She stood up and slowly went to her room. Half an hour later, I asked my friend to check what his daughter was doing. He went upstairs to his daughter's room and came back gloomy. "Is she studying?" I asked him. She's sitting at her desk with an open textbook in front of her and staring at the wall, absentmindedly." "So, what did you do?" "I told her to study!" "Can you ask her to come down with her textbook?" I asked him. Without saying a word, he left and soon came back with his daughter, who looked puzzled and alarmed. I asked to read one paragraph from her textbook. "Just one? Okay," the girl replied and began reading silently. In about 40 seconds, she said that she had finished. "Can you tell me what you've just read?" I asked her. The girl looked at me for a second and replied, "Hold on." She then began reading the paragraph, again. "She's now actively reading, purposely looking for information" (Hinckley et al., 2012), I told her dad. Once she finished reading, she told me what he had just read in her own words (Karbalaei & Rajyashree, 2010;Malone & Mastropieri, 1991). "Whenever you can," I told her dad, "have her do her

Background: Much of the world's population suffers from knee pain. Treatment options are too extreme (surgery), have side-effects (drugs), or take too long (physical therapy). Research has shown that acupuncture can provide modest relief of knee pain. This article presents ways to improve the effectiveness of acupuncture for treating knee pain. Using 3 composite ''cases,'' the author offers specific modifications to acupuncture treatments-particularly palpatory techniques-that produce more-successful relief of patients' knee pain. Cases: Analyzing 3 composites of multiple similar typical cases, the author compares what made the treatments more successful than would be statistically anticipated. Composite case 1: Women, older than, 50 had knee osteoarthritis (OA), periodic pain, more at night and during weather changes. Composite case 2: Men and women, in their 40s and early 50s, had mild knee arthritis, and were given injections to relieve pain that was mild-to-moderate and worse at night. Composite case 3: Men between their late 20s and early 40s, experienced knee pain 1-4 times per week, with some patients reporting knee buckling after some activities. Results: Palpation of these patients' knees revealed the causes of their knee pain-spasms, adhesions, and/or fibrosis-and the patients were treated with individually selected points based on results of the Four Examinations. Most obtained relief lasting from 4 months to 2 years. Conclusions: Mainstream acupuncture treatments rarely involve using the Four Examinations of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Instead, these treatments involve common point selections for addressing knee pain or moreadvanced approaches, such as Five Elements or Zang-Fu pattern diagnosis, often disregarding such basic but essential diagnostic techniques as visual inspection and particularly palpation. According to the Four Examinations, OA is not often the cause of knee pain; instead, adhesions and fibrosis of the soft tissues around the knee joint cause nerve entrapments, and knee pain is referred from those sources. While muscle fibrosis is well-known to cause pain, it is rarely addressed in detail in acupuncture literature. If palpation of the soft tissues around the knee joint evokes a patient's pain-thus, locating the nerve entrapment in each specific case precisely-this allows the clinician to insert acupuncture needles into the soft-tissue fibrosis. This needling could improve the clinical outcomes of acupuncture treatment of knee pain significantly, providing shorter-as well as longer-term relief.

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Various types of headache comprise a widespread health problem. Among the possible treatment options, acupuncture is one of the most effective, with the least number of adverse effects. While the locations of acupuncture points have long been established, slight and specific modifications in point locations, as well as needling angles and depths in each individual case, can increase the effectiveness of acupuncture treatment for some types of headaches. Two typical "cases," which are composites of several similar cases, are discussed. One case is a 31-year-old Caucasian woman with persistent headaches for 8 months and the other case is a 52-year-old Caucasian woman with frequent headaches for years. In both cases, usual care provided only temporary relief; acupuncture treatment was more effective. The patients' headaches went away-as they usually do for months or even years after only several treatments, provided that the acupuncture practitioner finds the points to stimulate that can reproduce each individual patient's exact symptoms of his or her headache. In treatment of headaches, the effectiveness of acupuncture can be increased if the acupuncture practitioner identifies, or modifies, the point selection and/or location to identify active points. As the acupuncture practitioner examines the active points, he or she can monitor the treatment's progress by palpating the points while observing and communicating with the patient about whether or not the headache is being reproduced.

Ability to communicate using spoken language occurs naturally in children earlier than they learn how to use written language. Throughout persons’ lives, their ability to use spoken language is being continuously maintained and further developed. As a result, spoken language has greater capacities to form and organize thoughts than those of written language. This article discusses one such capacity, to grasp mentally the initial idea, which is essential for beginning any writing process. An integral tool for using spoken language is a voice-recording device, which has become widely available as an application for mobile telephones and other portable devices. The use of spoken language, referred in this article as free-talking, allows a wide range of idea-generating possibilities, only few of which are discussed in this article.