Chinese Herbs Chinese herbs, like acupuncture, can work systemically, and/or they can be targeted. Chinese medicine discovers your particular constitution and patterns of imbalance, and seeks to balance them, thus giving body strength to restore normalcy.

Working With Medical Professionals Find health practitioners who are qualified AND that you can trust, because they have training and experience to make accurate diagnoses, choose appropriate remedies, and make best plan for your healing. Once you've found good practitioners, follow their advice. Trying to save money on alternative health care may tempt you to ignore your practitioner's treatment plan and see them less often than they suggest. Or, you may try to avoid professionals and get your information from magazines (whose number one goal is to sell advertising - thus, they do not go into complex medical issues or therapies in kind of depth needed for safe and accurate usage of natural medicines, nor do they print articles that compete with or contradict their advertiser’s products).

The Chinese Medicine Fibromyalgia Expert If there is a FM/CFS expert in Chinese medicine, it's Lynda Harvey-Carter. I haven't heard of anyone else who's had as much success. To follow her program, you'll need to go to a Chinese medicine practitioner for a good 12-16 weekly visits, get herbs and take them religiously, do some counseling on any emotional issues you have (pre-FM, or just dealing with FM),change your diet, take certain nutrients, and get involved in spiritual growth that requires growth of character, trust, surrender, hope, and faith. The patients who were most willing to make most changes in their lives were most likely to recover completely from their FM.

The other insight that Lynda had about recovery from FM is that sooner you catch it and treat it, better recovery you can have. It's not unheard of for people newly diagnosed with it to get serious about treating it and completely recover. I mean it goes away. For good.

But if you only go halfway, or you wait too long to do something about it, you may be ensuring that you have to put up with this pain for rest of your life.

How to Find a Good CM Practitioner in Your Area Use my website's acupuncturist-finding resource (see below). Most people end up at National database. Remember, when you search your city or state, that although some practitioners have not taken national herbs test, they may still be trained in, good at, and legally allowed to prescribe Chinese herbs. Many states only look at acupuncture test, and include Chinese herbs in acupuncturist's scope of practice.

A common question patients ask is "how many people have you treated with my disease?" That's a sensible question, but perhaps not always best one. Most CM practitioners treat a little bit of everything. Some try to specialize, or end up get referrals for a particular disease, but most are general practitioners. I'd say this is possible because, although CM is quite complex, it is not nearly as complex as most western medicine (WM) specialties. Also, WM specialization has become norm, and because there are 800,000 of them in U.S., may have to specialize! However, there are only about 15,000 acupuncturists here, so we need not, and perhaps cannot specialize yet. Fortunately, we learn enough in school to be good general practitioners, and there are more and more reference books. Many experienced practitioners have shared their successes with rest of us, and translators are constantly offering English-speaking acupuncturists new Chinese experience or research on many topics.

This map of life must integrate mind, body, and spirit - it must explain how our emotions can get in way, and how we can make them healthy- it must show how bad mental habits lead to physical problems. It must give remedies for our habitual imbalances. It must suggest viable strategies for improving our health, our habits, our abilities, and ourselves.

You know where you are. Balance is where you want to go. You need this map of life to get there. But who has such a map? Where would you find it?

Chinese medicine has a mind-body life map that acknowledges your uniqueness, explains how everything is connected, describes imbalances, and suggests remedies for them. When you fail, it can explain why and what to do next.

This Chinese medicine map of life is quite forgiving. You don't have to be or live perfectly. It's better if you improve, because you prevent disease and save money, but if you mess up, and while you are making progress, you can take advantage of remedies that return you to balance, increase your energy, relieve stress and pain, improve mental function, and smooth out your emotions.

This is essential, because then we are not thrown miles off course with every mistake or surprise - we get back on track immediately - we don't make bad decisions or plans that come from disturbed emotions of someone who's been thrown off track. Thus, we get where we're going faster, and save time and grief.

Since life is always a journey, always a learning experience, hardly ever an arriving or stopping except for a short rest, Chinese medicine is an indispensable guide and companion for confusions and vagaries of adventure.