CHINESE MEDICINE & ACUPUNCTURE

Practitioners of Chinese Medicine and natural healing often have more than one area of expertise. Patients are often curious about this, since the dominant medical system of Western culture, biomedicine, trains its physicians to be experts in just one area.  Biomedicine, developed as an offshoot of Western thought, religion and philosophy, applies a reductionist lens to get increasingly specific information and therefore extremely precisely targeted interventions (drugs, surgery) regarding discreet zones. Cardiology, pulmonology, gastroenterology, neurology, etc.

In contrast, Chinese medicine applies a globalist perspective to evaluation and diagnosis. Developed from Eastern thought, religion and philosophy, it stresses the relatedness and transformative nature of all life, human physiognomy being no exception. Chinese medicines questions center on relationships between parts and systems, evaluating the patient as a whole. Its solutions and interventions, then, relate to those findings. Why does the body permit situation X to take place in location Y? What is the relationship between the system affected and other systems? Between the affected system and the whole? How did this evolve? What else may be affected? What element(s) can be introduced energetic (acupuncture), biochemical (food or herbs), structural (bodywork), etc. that may request the body to redirect or adjust itself so that situation X is no longer possible? In other words, Chinese medicine is about balancing a system that has lost the ability to regulate itself. It is intervention  acupuncture, herbs, food, touch are all cues that initiate a cascade of self-directed events causing the body to reorganize and therefore to heal.