Whats Traditional Chinese Medicine?

We've unraveled the storied tapestry that is Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and its classical roots, delving into a philosophy that views health through the intricate lens of relationships, rather than isolated symptoms. The principles of yin and yang serve as the bedrock of this episode, providing a foundation for understanding how every aspect of our being is interconnected and how this contrasts with the Western medical paradigm.

Together, we navigated the philosophical landscape that sets Eastern and Western medicine philosophies on seemingly divergent courses. By comparing the preventive, balance-restoring focus of Chinese medicine with the symptom-centric approach of Western medicine, we gain a fresh perspective on healthcare. The episode illuminated how Chinese medicine practitioners use organ systems and patterns of dysfunction as their map for treatment, offering insights into achieving whole-body wellness that often escapes the grasp of conventional medicine.

Questions answered: 
What is Chinese medicine?
Hoe does Chinese medicine work?
What are its strengths and weaknesses?
What can be treated by Chinese medicine?
Does it really work? (Listen to the end for an incredible personal story)

By the end of our time together, you might find yourself inspired to explore the holistic benefits of Chinese medicine and consider how its time-tested approaches could enhance your own path to well-being.

Chapters

• 0:04 Exploring Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine
• 10:50 Comparison of Eastern, Western Medicine Philosophies
• 17:32 Acupuncture Meridians and Organ Systems
• 31:17 Understanding Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture
• 46:16 Thank You for Your Time

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

I. I'm your host, our medicine best-selling self-help author, who also happened to spend a few years in the military and Combat Medicine and then, while in the military, got exposed to acupuncture, where I worked with a certified Dio who was a certified acupuncturist for a couple of years before actually attending acupuncture school myself and I wanted to or Chinese medicine school. It's not just acupuncture school they force you to learn herbology as well. So in today's podcast I want to talk about what can acupuncture and Chinese medicine and herbology do for you? We're going to cover the very basics of what is Chinese medicine. How does it work? What does it treat? We're going to answer a lot of the most basic questions for folks. That way, anybody who is interested in looking at Eastern alternative medicine as a way to Make their lives and themselves a little better, a little healthier, this can hopefully answer a few of the questions that you have. Some of the common questions are what even is it? How does it work, what are meridians and Does it actually work? So that's what we're going to talk about today. So acupuncture and herbology we call traditional Chinese medicine, but the first thing to understand is that it is not traditional at all, that traditional Chinese medicine. The actual tradition of it is called classical Chinese medicine. What everyone in the World now is trained in, unless you go to a school that is specifically for Classical Chinese medicine, is TCM. That's what most people are aware of. It's called traditional Chinese medicine, but it is anything but traditional. It is actually Mao Zedong's Chinese medicine. It is a brand new form of Chinese medicine that just showed up a couple of decades ago and a handful of decades ago now, and it has been Well I don't want to say bastardized or whitewashed, but both of those words come to mind and and you'll. You'll see why I say I don't want to say bastardized and whitewashed later. And it's big. It has to do with acupuncture's ability to adapt to its time and its place and the people that it's treating. But classical Chinese medicine has been around officially since about 2600 BC 25 to 2600 BC and the evidence that we have of that is a book called the Ling Shu, and the Su Wen is the first half of this book. The Ling Shu dates back to the Yellow Emperor, that's the 2500 to 2600 BC, and the Ling Shu is a book that is a conversation between the Yellow Emperor, who was an emperor and a mythical deity and the, and a basically a mythical healer as well, named Qibo, and Qibo and the Yellow Emperor had a conversation where the Yellow Emperor asked Qibo questions about Chinese medicine, about the philosophy, about how it all works, and Asked some very pointed questions about like well, we've heard this about and like people lived to well over a hundred years and never really even slowed down. Why do you think that things have happened this way? And they answer them. And so that's the first portion of the Ling Shu is. They're called Su Wen is what it's called those chapters. I think it's the first 24 or 25 chapters, and though it's Su Wen means simple questions, so it dates back to that book for sure. That's what. That's one thing that we know, and that is 4000 years ago. 4000. 4000 years ago.

Speaker 1: 4:51

Western medicine, like the way that we think of it now, with its biochemical basis and its pharmaceutical Interventions, the way that we use Western medicine now started a hundred years ago 120, really. That was the pharmaceutical era was 19, was 1890 to 1910. Those 20 years were the pharmaceutical era, or the pharmaceutical decades, because that's when they were first invented by Some of the richest men in the world Carnegie and steel With his steel money and being able to make the machines that made the Pharmaceuticals themselves. I covered all of that in a previous episode called the history of the American medical system, part one, the flex New report. I talked about the beginning of the Western medicine in the Western world. The beginning of Eastern medicine is quite a bit older, so that's where it starts. It's about four thousand years old and if you want to understand acupuncture, I mean you can't understand the thing until you understand the era in which it existed. And the thing is is acupuncture has existed for four thousand years, like existed in a measured written down. We have a very specific philosophy and a theology that instructs us how to Intervene on someone else's behalf to help establish balance in this person. That's pretty impressive. So that's how old Chinese medicine is and kind of where it started.

Speaker 1: 6:37

If you want to understand the language of Chinese medicine, I think this is really really profound and it just just really started hitting me the other day when I was doing some more studying and what I realized is that the way that we describe things in Chinese medicine, everything is about yin and yang. In Chinese medicine, the philosophy of how it works is Is entirely based on relationships, because nothing is yin or is yang. These are ways to describe a thing. There are only adjectives and adverbs. That's all that yin and yang can be. But according to Chinese cosmology, the yin and yang together is the Tao. There was nothing that gave birth to the one. The Tao that gave birth to the three, that gave birth to the ten thousand. And the Tao is that symbol of the yin yang that everybody is used to seeing. We use the yin yang as a basic understanding to Be able to parse out different portions of anything, and that's what's so different and part of what's so difficult for people to wrap their minds around in Chinese medicine is when we talk about things in Chinese medicine, you're talking about a relationship.

Speaker 1: 7:56

You're always talking about a relationship. There's no other way to talk about a thing. When, when you, everything is interconnected. And in the West we have buckets. We have buckets of like. Biology is a big bucket, but within that, within that bucket, you have microbiology and you have biochemistry and you have all of these other little buckets within that. And those buckets are where we specialize and where we stay and and we make it incredible advancements on understanding these minute details in Western allopathic, newtonian, reductionistic medicine. But the problem with it is there is no human being in the world that exists in the vacuum or that ever experiences only one variable shifting and changing. And In Chinese medicine we're trying to under, we're trying to help people. In Western medicine they're trying to help people as well, but Because of the way that science grew over time, the only way that the West was able to study people that we thought was appropriate was through the lens of biochemistry, through laboratory science, whereas Chinese medicine has four thousand years minimum minimum, 400 something years minimum of being around and being written down and of Practitioners who have passed down their secrets from family to family, from generation to generation within families, of healers, not to mention actual training and apprenticeships and all that sort of thing outside of one's own Family and their heritage.

Speaker 1: 9:44

In Chinese medicine you treat a person and we understand in Chinese medicine that a person is a multi-modal, very complex, interdependent system and one of the primary differences between Western medicine and Eastern medicine is that Western medicine is anti, everything about it is anti. We call Western medicine allopathic medicine, and allopath literally means opposite of disease, like we treat with opposites. If you have acid reflux, you get an anti-acid. If you have anxiety, you get anti-anxiety. If you have depression, you get anti-depression. Nothing in Eastern medicine is based on just getting rid of the symptom and saying, oh, you have this, that's wrong with you, so let's fix the symptoms of this thing that's wrong with you.

Speaker 1: 10:50

In Chinese medicine, the philosophy is, if you were as a provider, if you are treating sick patients, you have already failed, because your patients should never fall sick. A good provider ought to be able to look at you and ask you questions and feel your pulses and look at your tongue and figure out what kind of bent you have, what lifestyle you're leading and what the most likely road for you to go down, at least as far as pathology, like physiological pathology. Figure out what pathology you're going to go down and prevent it before it ever arises. I mean, that's literally the definition of preventative medicine, which is brand new in Western science. It's brand new and you know that's actually pretty okay for me, because we need to talk about what Eastern medicine does well, what Chinese medicine does well and what Western medicine does well, because there's not a whole lot of overlap. What Chinese medicine, if you want to know what Chinese medicine can treat? There's one of these big questions for you what can Chinese medicine treat? The answer is everything. There is nothing that Chinese medicine cannot treat to one level or another. But that doesn't mean that there aren't better ways to treat things than Chinese medicine. It just depends on the thing.

Speaker 1: 12:16

Because Chinese medicine is looking at this intersectionalist type of concept of a human being that is interactive within itself. That is, a whole series of relationships that are meant to work in a specific way, and when they stop working in a specific way, we call those patterns of dysfunction, and that's the closest thing to a diagnosis that we have. We don't say you have this disease, we say you have a pattern of dysfunction, and if we interrupt that pattern, then your body can find homeostasis within itself again, whereas Western medicine says you have this problem and we have the solution and it's anti. There's no concept in the West of helpful. There is no concept of that. It is only a concept of sick or not sick, and if you are not sick, then you can keep going and you're fine and you're great. And when you're sick, then there's a problem and then you treat whatever the most obvious branch of that problem is, and this is why we have the phrase in Chinese medicine, treat the root and not the branch, because in Chinese medicine the root of an issue is the root of the problem, is the pattern, dysfunction, and that's giving rise to a series of symptoms.

Speaker 1: 13:39

And the cool thing about Chinese medicine that blows people's minds is that the symptoms that we're looking at, we can make sense of so many symptoms that have seemingly nothing to do with each other. Because of this beautiful understanding of the intricate interaction of that keeps a human being alive, we put together all kinds of weird stuff like frozen shoulder and stabbing somebody in the leg with a needle like gallbladder 34. It's a great point to get rid of a frozen shoulder. How does that work? Because it does, because people for thousands of years have tried it and wrote it down and somehow it managed to work. We don't know on some of these things. Some of them are really bizarre and that's why, early on in Chinese medicine, in the very first term of school, you have to buy this book called Statements of Fact in Chinese Medicine and you've really got to go through that and read that and just accept that in China, just like we accept in this world, even though we're not trained in the exact same way we actually kind of are. We're just told you don't do this, you don't do that, you don't do this, you don't do that. The world works this way, the world doesn't work that way, and over time we put these pieces together, but through TCM school, what you actually get is a book that says these are the basic premises or philosophies that help us. These are the basic premises and philosophies that guide our thinking in traditional Chinese medicine or classical Chinese medicine, and there are things that seem silly but you need to understand them in order to make sense of Chinese medicine. Things like Qi is the commander of blood and blood is the mother of Qi. That describes a relationship Just like Yin. When you say this is Yin, compared to that, that thing is Yong, you're describing those things as relationships.

Speaker 1: 15:43

When we're looking at organ systems, say, you have some constipation stuff. There's many things that could be causing that, but automatically the first thing that we're going to look at is obviously large intestine stuff, because that's not clearing out right, that's the most obvious constipation. Look to the intestines, the things that don't let poop go or do when they're functioning appropriately, and what we're immediately going to do is we're going to look at Yin-Yang, the very next step is to go okay. Well, large intestine is obviously a culprit because it's constipation. So the first place that we ought to look is probably lung. If you get no other information from the person, right like you can get more. If you get a really good and detailed history, you might not even need to look at lung. But most likely it will be affected because it's the lung's job to take things in and then what we call disperse and descend. It takes Qi in and that allows the Qi to disperse through the entire body and all the Qi in the body to descend down and to calm, which makes sense, because the breath is like the fastest way that we have to affect our sympathetic nervous system and move us more into parasympathetic, because it feeds directly back into the vagus nerve. And that's the association. If you exhale longer than you inhale, you're calming the body down and that allows you to move into rest and digest, which allows your body to digest and poo. So that's an example of Yin and Yang, or what we call external and internal pairs. The internal is the Yin and the external is the Yang, because inside is more Yin to the outside, which is more Yang.

Speaker 1: 17:32

All right, moving on to the meridians, if you have ever seen and many of you probably have the chart or a chart of the acupuncture meridians, it just looks like a human being that a child with crayons got a hold of and just drew lines all over their body. What that is is, when you're looking at that image, each of those lines are a line, with two exceptions. Everything except for the center line, pretty much, is a line that correlates to an organ in the body. What we're saying with those lines, the superficial lines will have. Those are called meridians and they have different points on them. There are a set number of points on each meridian, but over the last 4,000 years those points have expanded and expanded and expanded. There were as little as 112 early on, I think, in the Siu Wen, there was only 112 to 140 or something like that, and now there are over 300 points.

Speaker 1: 18:47

When I say that they're finite, I mean that they're finite because there's a finite number of them, but that number changes over time as people, as people have experimented and found a sure points, which are points of tenderness that, when needled, have a hopefully positive effect. Points can expand in that way. You can add some over time. There's a whole another very, very famous practitioner, dr Tung, who has Tongue Style Acupuncture. Tongue Style Acupuncture is like they use basically a different map. They have points that they call the same points, but they're in different parts of the body, and then they have points that aren't anywhere on those previous meridians, and Tongue Acupuncture is really, really profound. I've seen people treat like all kinds of crazy awesome stuff in a really short order with Tongue Acupuncture, even though it's not kind of traditional. That brings me to a very important piece.

Speaker 1: 19:48

Before I move on, before I go back to the organ systems and how the meridians affect organ systems, I should say that if you talk to an acupuncturist, if I had 100 acupuncturists to ask them these questions here, every single one of these acupuncturists would give a different reason, they would give a different description, they would give different definitions. I learned really on in acupuncture school. I asked the president one time, the student council president. I was like so, because I had come from the military and then I was homeless for a while before I joined acupuncture school. It seems because in the military they're very consistent, at least as far as the rules say this, functionally we do this. That was also the same in acupuncture school. They teach to the test so you can pass the test even though what the test is testing you on is not actually that accurate or useful. Maybe about 20%. They say 15 to 20% of what you actually learn in acupuncture school and test on is usable clinical stuff. The other 80% you have to figure out on your own over time, from doing the practice, from engaging with the medicine.

Speaker 1: 21:05

It is that engagement with the medicine that gives each acupuncturist their own unique perspective because again, they're not talking about a physicality-based system. In the West they are materialists, and I don't mean that in insulting materialistic you want fancy cars and whatnot, although that's true too. I mean that at the base of everything in our understanding of Western medicine there is a physical thing that needs to be physically removed or modified and it's all material. That way it's physical and material. In the East everything is energetic-based and it's all about the relationships and the energies within the relationships. And as you practice you develop a relationship with the medicine itself and that's why everybody's going to give you a slightly different answer.

Speaker 1: 22:04

Because I told the student council president I was like so it seems like everybody disagrees and that's okay. And he was like, yeah, yeah, I'd say that's about right. And I was like, okay, that's fine, I can work with that. I just needed to know. I just needed to know that everyone contradicts everybody else and that seems to be fine. And that goes down to this incredible, incredible personal relationship that each practitioner has with the medicine and that is part of how Chinese medicine has worked for 4,000 years and has unique practices to Korea, and there are unique practices to Japan. There's even acupuncture and unique practices in Greece. Believe it or not, they actually have their entire own meridian system, which is mind boggling to me. I really wanna get over there. And there's a friend of a friend with acupuncture without borders who has a farm in Greece and runs an acupuncture practice, and I really wanna go pick his brain about the, because he knows Greek acupuncture too. Anyway, getting off subject the, that's why everybody associated with Chinese medicine is going to give a slightly different answer to these questions. Every provider and every professor I ever had definitely did so. If you get slightly different answers from one provider to another, that's why you are probably always going to get a slightly different answer, because our understanding of the relationships that guide Chinese medicine is unique to each of us.

Speaker 1: 23:54

Now back to the organ systems and how do we diagnose? I said that we don't have diagnoses. We have pattern dysfunctions. Through those pattern dysfunctions we say, okay, there is a pattern dysfunction here and sometimes things can just be musculoskeletal. Right, an acupuncturist can treat a musculoskeletal problem by just dealing with the muscles and the bones and not worry too much about the elemental energetics. Or you can treat somebody with psychoemotional stuff, with anxiety or depression, and focus only on the elemental stuff.

Speaker 1: 24:36

But the way that you're actually treating is by putting needles in those meridians that I was talking about. You've seen, with the map on the human body, there are points on there and the idea is that these superficial meridians are lines in the body of energy that somehow correlate with the organs in the body and they correlate through blood supply and through nervous system tissue and through just locality and that sort of thing. But those meridians are essentially ways that an acupuncturist can modulate the organ that it's on. So if there are points being needled on the lung meridian, then you're affecting the lungs. If you're needling the stomach meridian, you're affecting the stomach and the kidneys and the gallbladder and all of that. So that's the philosophy behind the meridians.

Speaker 1: 25:39

They put needles in your body on a specific meridian to be able to make a specific change on that meridian. You're on that organ system and the type of change that they want to make depends on your pattern of dysfunction. And that means and they're going to choose a point on that meridian that the character or personality of that point does what your body needs in order to rebalance and find homeostasis again. So for a person who is coughing up tons and tons and tons of phlegm, the point that they will get needled is going to be different than and it won't be just one point usually but the points that they will get needled are a different prescription or a different cocktail of points than somebody who is coughing up nothing. They're coughing and coughing, but it's a dry cough, nonproductive. Those are gonna be different points.

Speaker 1: 26:48

Also, if a person is super constipated and are really chi deficient and they're not breathing much, say they're old and that lack of breathing and lack of chi reduces the function of the lungs, which is to descend and disperse. And if somebody is constipated with the large intestine stuff, they'll probably get large intestine stuff needled and they'll also likely get some kind of lung point needled just to activate the descending and the dispersing function of the lungs. Activate that a little extra and you get more of this downbearing to the energy in the body and then suddenly you're not constipated no more. So acupuncture can treat just about anything. Now what it does really well is basically anything preventative. It does pre-care and post-care really really really well.

Speaker 1: 27:42

You can prevent any kind of illness with acupuncture. You can treat basically any kind of illness with acupuncture and herbology. But the thing is acupuncture is really good at modulating a system. So if a person is really deficient, the fastest way to make them better is often not acupuncture but more often is herbology and herbology. In the East, in China, you are either an acupuncturist or an herbologist, because you can treat anything, any kind of dysfunction, with acupuncture or with herbology. But each has its own strength and herbology is really good at helping people get more moist and get develop more yin and get out of a blood deficiency and feel less anemic and that sort of thing, whereas acupuncture is really good at modulating the chi that we already have and the things that's there.

Speaker 1: 28:43

And if you're having a flare up of something, acupuncture the needles themselves are really good at pulling out excess, so any kind of excess or system modulation for, like the pattern dysfunction. If there is a system modulation, that needs to happen because your liver is constantly overacting on stomach. So every time you get stressed that you can't eat and then you lose weight and then your menses get scarce and all that sort of thing. There's a whole downward cycle that happens there. With that you can do some acupuncture to kind of get the liver to stop overacting on the stomach quite as much. There are also herbs that you could use, but you might just jump straight to acupuncture and try to use a needle to separate those things a little bit and kind of get the liver to chill out In the same way.

Speaker 1: 29:38

I think that's how we ought to think of Eastern medicine versus Western medicine, because if you just got in a car wreck and you have an open femur fracture, a fracture of your upper leg that's shot through your, that's shot through the meat and is sticking out, you need to go to the hospital. If, like, you have a stroke, if you have heart attack, if you have any kind of motor vehicle accident or any kind of major thing like that crisis things, western medicine's really good. Western medicine is amazing at surgeries, at these kind of things that are really intense and intensely physical. It's really good at that. So don't think that I am just shit talking Western medicine because I'm not. I'm actually a big fan of Western medicine. I was Western medicine before I got into Eastern medicine and I think that it is a wonderful, wonderful thing that ought to be kept in its place. And its place is crisis care, which is why Western medicine is not healthcare, it's sick care, because it is only about being sick and being in crisis. That's the only thing it's good at, because the only lens that Western medicine or allopathic medicine has is biochemistry. For them, everything is biochemistry based. So every solution because it's anti every solution needs to be chemistry based. They just get like you have a problem, here's a pill to make you not have that one problem.

Speaker 1: 31:17

There is no concept of treating the root of a dysfunction. They believe that the root of the dysfunction is this materialistic symptom. Now we've covered Yin and Yang. I didn't cover the five elements yet, but the five elements are basically an extension of this organ system thing, in the same way that we think of everything as Yin or Yang. The next step beyond that is the five elements metal, water, wood, fire, earth. Metal, water, wood, fire and earth are the five elements in Chinese medicine. You'll notice that there is no air and the earth that we have in the west is kind of broken up into earth and wood. The other ones, like water and fire, match up kind of, but not exactly, because in the east there are five of them and in the west we have four and the way that we conceptualize them in western medicine.

Speaker 1: 32:22

We have organs. We know this, that we have kidneys and hearts and lungs and gallbladders and livers and crap, and those organs have physiological functions. We're all okay with that. We get that. We're all on the same page. Where Chinese medicine is different is that Chinese medicine also believes that there are very powerful associations between and I say associations in the same way that we're like it's a correlation, not a causation, but there is a correlation or an association between each organ and an emotion, a time of year and a thought style or a mentality, if that makes any sense.

Speaker 1: 33:08

So we talked about lung and large intestine. Lung and large intestine are metal and the emotion of metal is grief. There's even a sound associated, like in somebody's voice. It is very much. And within that lung and large intestine. You have lung and this one's a little bit weird but you have lung, which take things in, and large intestine which lets them go. The large intestine is hollow and the lungs we think of as hollow, but they're not. They're a giant sponge. The lungs are yin and the large intestine is yang, even though they're both metal. So large intestine is the yang aspect of metal and lung is the yin aspect of metal. Each of these are going to have, lung is going to have a slightly different relationship with, say, the heart than the large intestine does with the heart, even though they're both metal. And that's why it's important to break things down into yin and yang, because, again, we're all talking about relationships, because then you can talk about wood overacting on earth and we can see the exact same thing I said earlier about the liver overacting on stomach and a person feeling a certain way or in their chin, not traveling smoothly in their body and that causes them to feel stuck or to feel anxious, and then they don't eat. That is liver overacting on stomach or wood overacting on earth, because liver is wood and earth is stomach.

Speaker 1: 34:48

There's multiple ways to talk about this and that's what's so confusing about it, and a friend of mine, flowers, nailed it years ago and said do you think that the reason people don't take Chinese medicine seriously is because it's too poetic? And man, it hit me like a ton of bricks because, yes, I think that's exactly why. There are other reasons, but that's probably the biggest because the language that we use to describe phenomenon in Chinese medicine is flowery and beautiful and poetic. Because life is flowery and beautiful and poetic. That's the way it goes, these people being Chinese medicine practitioners. 3,000 and 4,000 years ago they weren't allowed to cut open bodies. Under Confucianism they were not allowed to do that. It was a horrible, horrible thing, and so they had to just figure this stuff out and write it down and, through thousands of years of empirical evidence, they put together this incredible system that can literally treat absolutely anything.

Speaker 1: 35:57

Now there are some things that doesn't treat quite as well. Like I said, if you have a compound fracture or you just went into a motor vehicle accident or you're in the middle of a heart attack or a stroke, yeah, go do Western medicine. That's really important and really awesome for that. But if you are interested in finding other ways to treat yourself, find yourself an acupuncturist and hopefully this gave you a few answers to questions that you might have of how does it work, what can it treat? Oh, one I forgot to answer was what is it best at treating? So this is, I think, really useful for folks If you want to know what is really good at treating. It's best at treating menstrual problems, infertility, nonspecific low back pain, anxiety and depression and all kinds of mental health stuff. It is phenomenal at those things. It's also really good at lots of other stuff, but those are the ones that have been studied the most. Oh and migraines. Those are the ones that have been studied the most, where we just have awesome, awesome feedback.

Speaker 1: 37:11

Also, frozen shoulder, like I was saying with Galbaater 34. Frozen shoulder is another one that you get, frozen shoulder and in one treatment it's very common for a person to go from like I can't move my shoulder, I haven't been able to move my shoulder above my like my elbow above my shoulder in a year and one treatment and suddenly they have full range of their shoulder again. It's really bizarre. So, frozen shoulder, anxiety, depression, any kind of mental health stuff and basically anything that the Western medicine can't figure out. Chinese medicine's pretty good at figuring out. But low back pain, musculoskeletal stuff, it's really good for Mental stuff, it's really really good for Migraines, it's really really good for Infertility, these really complex issues that Western medicine really struggles with. Those are the places where acupuncture does best. So I hope this answered some questions for you. I hope this was informative and I hope that you find yourself a Chinese medicine practitioner somewhere near you, because the medicine is truly, truly awe inspiring.

Speaker 1: 38:21

What I have seen happen through acupuncture and herbology is nothing short of miraculous, nothing short at all. I actually, when I was in acupuncture school, standing rock happened and the school made sure it was okay, the dean there made sure it was okay, looked at all the laws and stuff and I was able to move all of my finals up like three weeks, slap all of my finals together and then disappear out to North Dakota to standing rock to help do treatments while there and that's what I wanted to do I felt like I had been in the military for six years and then I was homeless for a while and it was an acupuncture school and I never deployed when I was in the military. When I was in the Air Force, I was non-deployable. I had some very weird jobs. I mostly buried people for my first four years and then I crossed trains and then went into medicine for the rest of my career and I loved it.

Speaker 1: 39:23

I fell in love with medicine, but it was a weird path for me. I realized I needed to self-deploy against my own government, which was mad, and it was crazy that one of my instructors was a well was a retired. She was my instructor and is a retired Marine Corps Colonel a female, by the way, who is incredible. Like, oh my God, this woman is incredible. And she told me the one thing that everybody else in the military told me, everybody that I respected in the military told me, which was I need to learn how to pick my battles. And I thought I had. I really thought I had by the time I got into acupuncture school, but it turned out I didn't. Maybe I was better, but I wasn't good enough yet.

Speaker 1: 40:10

Anyway, I just got a gas mask donated to me because it was that serious and it was my last day and she was my last class before I was going to start driving, and she, after class, took me out in the hallway and we talked and she just asked me straight to my face what is your mission, and I hadn't really thought about it. And in that moment, I knew, though, and I said my mission is to help as many people as possible for as long as possible. And she said good, you can't do that if you're dead or in jail. And I said yes, ma'am, I can't remember. I feel like, yeah, she gave me a hug, I give her a hug. I said thank you, and I drove away and I went to Standing Rock.

Speaker 1: 40:55

It was incredible, it was a lot, it was so much in so many ways, but so there was a veteran there who had been there for a while when I got there and stayed there for a little while, left before I did, but she pushed herself around in a wheelchair during blizzards, like in between blizzards really not during them, but in between blizzards, like just all over this place. She was wheelchair bound, she got hit. She was in an MBA or motor vehicle accident four years prior, and the VA did the stuff and dissented all of her things and then paid for physical therapy for a very short amount of time, and then they stopped, the insurance stopped and they said you're done, that's all the physical therapy that you get, and she was wheelchair bound, she couldn't move her legs and she came to me because her body really really hurt and she heard I was the bone guy because I do osteopathy, and I was like, yeah sure, I'll help you, but hey, this is probably weird. I want to try something on you because I had just gone through a training program at the school, a weekend seminar on neuro-regenerative acupuncture, and I used this neuro-regenerative acupuncture at Standing Rock where, while I was still in school and luckily Greg Lane made sure it was all safe and legal, being a student and everything and it turns out acupuncture is not even regulated in the Dakotas, or at least not North Dakota.

Speaker 1: 42:29

Anyway, I was able to convince her that I wanted to try this weird acupuncture treatment where I stab her in the head with a bunch of needles in the head and then we do these exercises that we call dowelian exercises, that are basically like step-downs and to getting you from where you are to where you want to be in whatever skill that we're working on that needs neurological help. So for her we were grabbing our knees and pulling them up to her chest and when we started she couldn't move her left leg at all and her right leg she could lift about in half an inch or so off of her chair and so I put it, left her in her chair and did the needles and it was about a two-hour treatment because it's a very long, focused thing and at the end of this two-hour treatment this person was able to move their knees to their chest like all the way up without the assistance of their hands. That was like they went from no movement on the left and half an inch of lift on the right to being able to bring one knee or being each knee to her chest on her own unassisted. And I was so happy, I was ecstatic, I couldn't believe it and neither could she. Well, about an hour after that, we had a wonderful helper. We called them gophers because they would go get us stuff, and I really feel bad. I don't remember their name, but they came back in and said hey, just so you know, we'll call her Heather, just so you know, heather is outside standing up smoking a cigarette right now.

Speaker 1: 44:10

I was like what? So I asked another acupuncturist to watch my patients that I have on the table. They're just cooking and I go outside to help and just go see, and I put my coat on, I walk outside and I go and right there she is, she's standing up outside. She's been wheelchair bound. And I come up behind her and I say well, congratulations. And I give her a hug. And she just stood there with watery eyes and said to me I walked from the inside of the warming tent out here on my own. That is the furthest I've walked in four years. The longest before that was 13 steps with a walker in physical therapy four years ago. Wow, that's how incredible acupuncture can be. It's amazing. It's absolutely astounding.

Speaker 1: 45:16

So I hope that you will give it a chance. I hope that this answers some questions about what is Chinese medicine? What can it treat? How is it different? What does all these weird things mean? And obviously it's way too much to try to give you a deep or even a basic understanding in one episode, but I hope that this answers a few of your basic questions. I hope that I've piqued your curiosity and I hope that you give it a chance, because dealing with illnesses before they come up is so much easier on our bodies and on our minds. We are happier, we are healthier, we are more balanced and we haven't dug into those deep resources to heal, so we increase our longevity just by preventing our own sicknesses. So give it a try.

Speaker 1: 46:16

Thank you for hanging out with me. If you appreciate and got value out of today's episode, consider donating and buy me a coffee. If you really enjoyed this episode, then please leave a comment. I'd love to hear from you. Thank you very much for spending your time with me today. I know there's a lot of things that you could be doing right now and you chose to come here, and I think that that's really cool, because you chose to learn something, to expand yourself, to grow and become more than what you were yesterday. I think that is commendable. Thank you very much for your time, for your attention, and remember stay curious and stay uncomfortable. Applause, baby, baby, do it, sadie, sadie.