"The physician who teaches people to sustain their health is the superior physician. The physician who waits to treat people after their health is damaged is considered to be inferior. This is like waiting until one's family is starving to begin to plant seeds in the garden."
—Yellow Emperor's Classic on Internal Medicine, ca. 500 B.C.E.
The American medical establishment is in crisis. A major sign is the dramatic medical doctor shortage today. An article in Forbes, "Free Med School Won't Solve the Doctor Shortage" was a stark reminder that medical doctors are jumping ship in droves, or just not getting on board in the first place. The author estimates that by 2030, the U.S. will experience a medical doctor shortage of 120,000.1
Added to the ever-increasing complexity of record-keeping and the threat of decreased financial rewards that will result from the move to universal health care (against which the lobbyists for the American Medical Association, insurance companies, hospitals, and Big Pharma are currently fighting tooth and nail), medical doctors are feeling the increasing distrust of the public as patients turn to holistic and preventative health care disciplines for safe and effective answers to their health problems. Folks are just plain fed up with the disease-maintenance frequently offered by drugs and surgery. The public is searching for good health. "Wellness" has become the new buzzword.
Prevention is the Best Model
Inexorably, emergency medicine is being forced out of the field of general health care, its monopoly over people's minds broken, its drastic methods confined to emergency clinics and heroic situations, it's numbers of practitioners leaving for greener fields, many hopefully absorbed into research on holistic technologies such as bioengineering and tissue replacement.
Filling the void left by emergency medicine is the rising popularity of holistic and preventative health care. Drifting into disuse are the outdated and second-class monikers "complementary" and "alternative." Leading the pack is theory-based Chinese medicine—time-tested, universally applicable, user-friendly, connecting everything and explaining everything, safe, and effective.
For too long, licensed acupuncturists have been considered medical technicians or specialists, restricted to the application of acupuncture and herbology to problems after they occur, in mimicry of the emergency medical model. With the unstoppable threat of "dry needling" breathing down our necks, it is time to take our medicine to the next level, the highest level—wellness coaching. Wellness coaching allows us to help our patients eliminate medical problems in such a way as to prevent those problems from returning. Prevention and cure fit together like yin and yang.
How We Can Help
The practitioner of Chinese medicine will teach patients how to eliminate the three pathological syndromes of excess that are responsible for the majority of health issues in the U.S., namely liver qi stagnation, heart heat, and spleen damp. These three excesses reflect the learned habits of worrying, hurrying, and overeating. Wellness coaching teaches our patients to substitute healthy habits for unhealthy ones.
Wellness coaching will become the third major weapon in our fight against disease and disharmony, right alongside acupuncture and herbology. Wellness coaching is the noblest form of health care when you consider that sometimes, you can throw all the acupuncture and herbology you want at a problem, but unless the bedrock causes are addressed, the syndromes keep returning in one or another form.
These three syndromes explain so many health issues that we encounter in the modern world, making our job of diagnosis easy. Let's examine a common example—hypertension. High blood pressure is a major contributor to a long list of health problems, including and especially heart disease, the number one killer of Americans. Chinese medical theory offers simple, common-sense explanations for hypertension that can lead to the kind of life-style changes necessary for a cure.
Liver, Heart & Spleen
Chronic liver qi stagnation can cause people to tighten muscles continuously in a 24-7 fight-or-flight response to non-emergency situations. Squeezing down on the blood vessels reduces the space inside, thus increasing pressure on the inner walls and on the heart. Taoist philosophy, breathing exercises, self-trust, and other confidence-building measures can relax muscles and allow the qi and blood to flow freely, thus normalizing blood pressure.
Chronic heart heat is the result of hurrying and scurrying through life while "keeping busy" and denigrating sleep and rest. Multi-tasking and living in the fast lane create excess friction which leads to a buildup of pathogenic heat. The heart, always moving, is most susceptible to friction and overheating. As excess heat expands in the blood, pressure mounts on the vessels and heart. Wellness coaching will teach patients self-trust, to sleep and rest as their bodies require, and to let go of the mistaken belief that constant activity and excessive speed are virtues.
Chronic spleen damp will increase the volume of fluids in the body, including the blood. Increased volume presses against the interior walls of the vessels and heart, thus increasing pressure. This excess yin condition is usually the result of food stagnation, which in turn is what happens when a person eats more food than the body calls for.
Most often this excess yin is used to push down the excess yang that rises as a result of the first two syndromes. In other words, while excessive food intake is regularly used by Americans to calm their pathogenic heat, it adds to the hypertension epidemic by expanding the blood. Wellness coaching will teach patients to eat less food by trusting their own eating instincts, and thus clean out accumulations of dampness and toxic damp heat.
The world is changing faster than most realize. "Medical care" is being transformed into "health care" because people demand better. We, as practitioners of Chinese medicine are well suited to lead the charge, to introduce ancient wisdom into the modern world with our own version of prevention and cure.
Reference
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
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One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
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