This year marks my 30th year in full-time practice as a Chinese medical practitioner (医生 yi sheng), and my sixtieth birthday will be in the spring. So it seems like an ideal time to contemplate medical practice and where we stand in our emerging field. I have some thoughts about where I'd like to see [...]
So, our goal in Chinese medicine is to 'deconstruct' the image of disease into a pattern or patterns, and then reconstruct an image of health for the patient through the educational tools of acupuncture/moxabustion and herbal medicine...
When the Jews were in the desert, on the way out of Egypt, there was a point in time when they lost faith in G-d, and were attacked by fiery serpents. G-d told Moses and Aaron to prepare brass serpents on poles, hold them over the people who were bitten, and they would be healed [...]
“Yi zhe li ye” ( 医者理也), medicine is a principle, if the principle is transparent, the heart is luminous/ming 明 . Those who want to learn the spirit of Bian Que must be clear about principle, and those who want to clarify the principle must search in the classics, and only after draw from the [...]
It can be difficult to practice Chinese medicine in a Western society, because it cannot be simply grafted onto a different culture or medical system. Studying Chinese medicine means immersion in the world view and historical source texts that reveal the theoretical foundations of the subject. Chinese medicine has a unique view of the phenomenal [...]
In Confucian ethics, one's body is a gift from one's parents, and it is under our care and trust as long as we are alive. In addition, preserving our health is our obligation so that we may produce healthy children, who in turn will produce healthy offspring. In other words, health, like the environment, is [...]
I am presently working my way through "Pulse Diagnosis in Early Chinese Medicine: The Telling Touch", (Cambridge University Press, 2110) a translation and commentary of Chunyu Yi's Memoir with twenty-five case histories. The translator is Elisabeth Hsu, one of our most prominent medical anthropologists, who researched and worked on this text over two decades What [...]
Welcome to my new blog, everyone. I am honored to share my thoughts on Chinese medicine and life with you all. I intend the impossible, i.e. to communicate the subtleties of Chinese medicine as revealed in the classical texts such as the Nan Jing (Classic of Difficulties), Su Wen (Simple Questions), and Shang Han Lun (Treatise on Cold [...]