Chinese Medicine is the Exchange of One Natural Life with Another Natural Life (20120804)
Chinese Medicine is the Exchange of One Natural Life with Another Natural Life
Guan Qingwei
2012.8.4
I was born into a TCM family — grandfather, uncle, father, elder brother, all in TCM work. I myself have been in TCM work for over thirty years, soaked in clinical work all those years, soaked in the most traditional TCM environment of Tongrentang, witnessing with my own ears and eyes the cultural drift of TCM in the past century. I bring many thoughts and doubts to exchange with you all.
Though I lived in a TCM family, from childhood I was at odds with TCM culture. As a boy I read Lu Xun's Medicine — seeing TCM use human-blood bun to treat — and I felt TCM was especially backward and ignorant; so what my father taught I resisted. Though I memorized what he had me memorize, in my heart I did not want this calling. After my teens, a few of my father's cases shocked me; gradually I took interest in TCM, and finally entered the trade. I have done nothing else this life — only TCM work; I feel I have grasped something from clinic, and wish to pass on what I have grasped.
Disease and Pattern
In clinic I often meet this: a patient reports dry eyes, lumbar ache and weak legs, dry mouth and tongue, dizziness with a swollen head, neck stiffness. Pulse-taking and tongue-reading — it is liver-and-kidney yin-deficient. I tell the patient: "You are liver-and-kidney yin-deficient. I will write a formula to lift this deficient state, restore yin-yang balance — and these symptoms will vanish." He says: "Doctor, what disease do I have?" I say liver-and-kidney yin-deficient. He says "What disease do I have?" I say liver-and-kidney yin-deficient. He says "What disease do I have?" … The patient is seeking the Western-medicine language — hypertension, cerebral underperfusion, cervical spondylosis — names he can grasp. But these are not what TCM attends to.
TCM is pattern-discerning medicine; Western medicine is disease-discerning medicine. When we speak of body yin-yang imbalance in TCM's idiom, people often do not catch the meaning.
Western medicine is antagonistic — in treatment it takes the antagonistic mode: find a pathogen in the body's structure, fight it by war-mode, kill it; if cannot kill, cut it out. This is the Western cultural notion.
TCM is not so. TCM treats the human, not the disease; TCM reads the body's zheng (pattern). The human, as a living life, like all life lives in nature's qi-and-climate motion; in the integral interaction of Heaven-Earth-and-human, the body's yin-yang loses balance, falls out of accord. Once the doctor catches these imbalance states, with herbs' leaning he corrects the body's leaning, restoring the balance. Once the body recovers balance, it cures the disease itself. Every direction of TCM medicine-use, every value-orientation, is to adjust yin-yang balance. So TCM is balance medicine. The TCM phrases liver-and-kidney yin-deficient, liver-yang ascending, heart-blood insufficient, heart-and-kidney not interacting — all describe yin-yang imbalances within the body's zang-xiang functional systems.
Form-above and Form-below
TCM's decline in nearly a century has been at the clash of Chinese and Western culture. Western industrial-revolution success dazzled us Easterners with its splendor; so we worshipped Western culture without limit. China's century of education has used both hands to take in Western culture wholesale, throwing the essence of our national culture in the corner — none reads it, none recognizes it.
Today's children, from young, read Western science — this form-below science. Its thinking mode is very simple: only one lab to study drugs, another to diagnose disease — so simple, so easy to learn, that people slip easily that way. And modern medical research's object is basically already-disease — disease has occurred in the body, pathogens have been found, biochemical markers have changed, ratios are off. This thinking has us recognize only what can be seen and touched, or extended sense (instrument-observable); what is unobservable is hard to accept.
What TCM studies is exactly the form-above, unobservable — jing, qi, shen (essence, qi, spirit); wei-fen, qi-fen, ying-fen, xue-fen (defensive-fen, qi-fen, ying-fen, blood-fen), and so on. TCM attends to imbalance states at the form-above level — at the qi level, the jing level, the shen level — to bring people to the treating-what-is-not-yet-disease state. If imbalance is found at the material plane, the disease is already 70–80% along. The form-above mode TCM upholds —
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