The Top 10 List 1. It's All Connected 2. It's Mysterious 3. It Works 4. It's Simple AND Complex 5. It's Intuitive AND Intellectual 6. It's Interactive 7. It Benefits You Too 8. It's Traditional and Ancient 9. It's Theories have Broad Implications 10. It can be a Lucrative AND Altruistic Career 11. There are so many Options Ok, so there are 11. Deal with it! ;-)
#1: It's All Connected (Holistic Medicine)
If you're interested in Alternative Medicine, you probably have heard this phrase over and over again. What is holistic medicine? Holistic health? What is a holistic veterinarian? Well, I'm not going to speak for everyone... What I can tell you is how Chinese Medicine is a holistic mind body medicine, and by that I mean: it is all connected.
Chinese medicine connects you with your environment. It integrates natural metaphors into its system of diagnosis. Cold weather can cause a cold condition (for example, a "cold" common cold where
mucus is clear and chills are stronger than fever), and hot weather can cause a hot condition (e.g. a "hot" common cold with sore throat, or a worsening of inflammatory (hot) rheumatoid arthritis).
Chinese medicine connects your mind and body. Or maybe it's better to say: Chinese medicine never disconnected mind and body. After centuries of mind body dualism, western medicine (biomedicine) has only recently begun to bring mind and body back together, most notably in an interesting new science called psychoneuroimmunology. Chinese medicine diagnoses according to patterns (groups of symptoms) and every pattern has implied states of mind and emotion. There are also Chinese constitutional types with their own particular mental and emotional tendencies. These are two pivot points for Traditional Chinese Medicine's holistic mind body approach.
This is reason I got into Chinese Medicine. A life-changing self-examination led to realization that hidden parts of my psyche had controlled my thoughts, emotions, and decisions for most of my life. Then I saw that CM also had a way of relating body, mind, and emotion. I thought, "Wow, maybe I can find out more of hidden things that are keeping me from maximum health, happiness, and effectiveness, and then help people too!"
When you come to see an Chinese Medicine Doctor as a patient, we listen to your symptoms, ask questions, look at your tongue (it's only muscle we can see and it provides us with clues about state of your internal organs), take your pulse (not just your heartrate, but 6 positions on each hand that correspond to state of 12 major organs), listen to sound of your voice, how fast you talk, look at tint of your skin, quality of your nails, and even note your smell! It's said that superior physician can diagnose you after just watching you walk into his office. Indeed, some practitioners only have to ask 4 or 5 questions to nail down your pattern and then can predict remarkable things about your health and emotions. The rest of us are still learning; that's why they call it a practice!
Diagnosis is connected to treatment. Once we have a good diagnosis, we know best food, exercise, lifestyle, herbal formulas, and acupuncture points for you. Biomedicine often has a name for your disease but no treatment; Chinese Medicine can take a look from another angle and find treatments based on your pattern or meridian diagnosis. For every disease, there is a treatment.
#2 - Chinese Medicine is Mysterious.
There are many systems and theories by which we practice CM (Chinese Medicine). They often overlap... 10 practitioners might diagnose same patient differently. Perhaps 6 of them are just plain wrong- but 3 or 4 of them could help. There's more than one answer? That challenges western mind. This doesn't mean there's more than one reality- just more than one perspective on it.
Real people are complex- they could have a pain, emotional problems, and a digestive complaint at same time. Sometimes, treating one aspect cures another one. Other times, all must be taken into account for there to be any permanent results. Yet totality of a human being is always a mystery.
Symbolic Medicine
Chinese Medicine comes from a culture whose language is written in symbols... The Chinese language has a new symbol for every word, instead of building words from phonetic building blocks as English does. Because of this, ideas are more symbolic and fluid. There is a logic to it, but sometimes borders are a bit more blurred than in Western medicine.
The Mystery of How
How and why does Chinese Medicine work? We can describe in Chinese Medical terms how acupuncture and herbs work, but research is still clarifying how it works in biomedical terms (for a summary of what we do know, click here).
These are two different ways of decribing same reality. Two angles on same object. Think about binoculars... two slightly different vantage points yield a three-dimensional view. Each medicine is incomplete and has strengths and weaknesses. Together they help us see truth more clearly. Just as when our eyes merge two binocular images into one, as western and eastern medicine become more and more integrated, we are seeing more and more of three-dimensional picture of human health.
#3 - Chinese Medicine works - It's Practical
The theories (however intriguing or mysterious) lead to treatments that usually work. Healing occurs to amazement of MD's and sometimes even to new practitioner!
As an intern, even before graduating from schoo, I:
* Stopped a severe asthma attack... effectively preventing a trip to ER * Lowered a man's blood pressure enough to get him kicked out of a blood pressure medication study (his BP was no longer high enough to qualify him) * Prevented allergy attacks * Eliminated pain and restored lost feeling from diabetic neuropathy * Decreased severity of PMS symptoms * Alleviated lupus symptoms (quenched a "flare up") * Restored sleep to insomniacs * Chased away all kinds of musculoskeletal aches and pains * Eliminated severe medication-dependent acid reflux vomiting; man no longer needs medication or herbs and is fine
