Top 10 Ways Chinese Medicine Can Help You, Part 1 by Brian Benjamin Carter, MS, LAc

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 the mucus is clear and chills are stronger than the 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 the reason I got into Chinese Medicine. A life-changing self-examination led to the 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 the 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 the only muscle we can see and it provides us with clues about the state of your internal organs), take your pulse (not just your heartrate, but 6 positions on each hand that correspond to the state of the 12 major organs), listen to the sound of your voice, how fast you talk, look at the tint of your skin, the quality of your nails, and even note your smell! It's said that the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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, the ideas are more symbolic and fluid. There is a logic to it, but sometimes the 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 the same reality. Two angles on the same object. Think about binoculars... the two slightly different vantage points yield a three-dimensional view. Each medicine is incomplete and has strengths and weaknesses. Together they help us see the truth more clearly. Just as when our eyes merge the two binocular images into one, as western and eastern medicine become more and more integrated, we are seeing more and more of the 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 the amazement of MD's and sometimes even to the new practitioner!

As an intern, even before graduating from schoo, I:

* Stopped a severe asthma attack... effectively preventing a trip to the 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

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BIO:

Acupuncturist, herbalist, and medical professor Brian B. Carter founded the alternative health megasite The Pulse of Oriental Medicine (http://www.PulseMed.org/). He is the author of the book "Powerful Body, Peaceful Mind: How to Heal Yourself with Foods, Herbs, and Acupressure" (November, 2004). Brian speaks on radio across the country, and has been quoted and interviewed by Real Simple, Glamour, and ESPN magazines.

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