Body Wisdom: Secrets for Achieving Health, Happiness & Longevity

By Gerald Senogles and Katy Cauker

In Oriental Medicine, covering up symptoms with drugs is not good enough. So it is to the Oriental Medical system with its knowledge and understanding we turn to learn why we develop disease conditions and how to treat the root causes so the body can return to the natural state of health to which we are all entitled.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Senogles Inc
• Release date: Sep 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9780578570075

Gerald Senogles

Dr. Gerald Senogles graduated from the New England School of Acupuncture in 1977 and is one of the first 50 graduates in Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine in the United States. He apprenticed with Dr. Cheung Wai Tak in 1977-78. Dr. Senogles was a member of the acupuncture sub-committee of the Oregon Medical Board for six years. In 1988, he received his Doctor of Oriental Medicine Degree from the International Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine Research Institute in Hong Kong. Dr. Senogles has been in private Oriental Medicine practice in the Rogue Valley of Southern Oregon since 1979. To learn more, visit his website at www.medfordacupunctureclinic.com

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Disclaimer

Nothing in this book should be construed as specific medical advice for any particular patient. If someone is suffering from a symptom or malady, it is advised they consult with a medical professional.

Acknowledgments

When one studies a medical system with thousands of years of an unbroken accumulation of knowledge and wisdom, many of the doctors to thank are not only long dead but also completely unknown and unknowable, and yet one must pay homage to these unseen benefactors none the less, and I do.

I acknowledge my principle teacher as well: Dr. Cheung Wai Tak, who not only shared his medical and life wisdom with me, but showed me how caring and generous a doctor can be.

And finally, I thank my friend and co-practitioner Kristopher Kokay, who took over much responsibility at the clinic allowing me time to complete Body Wisdom

Dedication

Body Wisdom is dedicated to my wonderful family:

my son, Sean, and my wife, Katy Cauker.

They are the ground on which I walk.

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Introduction

The Case of Poor Jane

There was no polite way to say it — Jane was a medical disaster! She suffered from insomnia, depression, acid reflux, headaches, low back pain, and terrible menstrual cramping.

Jane consulted six different medical specialists for her six different symptoms: a psychiatrist for depression, an Ob-Gyn for menstrual cramping, a GP for insomnia, a gastroenterologist for acid reflux, a neurologist for headaches, and an orthopedist for back pain. Each one prescribed a different drug, but she still felt lousy, and afraid all those drugs were going to harm her in the long haul, and I certainly had to agree!

Fortunately it was relatively easy for me to solve her problems, and within a few months she was drug free and feeling the way she wanted to feel.

You will meet Jane again later in this book, only by then you will understand how the human body works well enough to know exactly why she had all of her problems and why they proved so easy to fix. (Hint: we only had to fix one thing for all of Jane’s seemingly unrelated symptoms to go away).

Body Wisdom

An alternative working title was How The Human Body Works, and you will see this referred to repeatedly, because helping you understand this important subject is one of the goals of Body Wisdom.

Body Wisdom is written with the knowledge that more and more, people want to be active participants in their own health maintenance and, when necessary, their own healing.

Body Wisdom is for those who don’t think their problems are brought on by not enough drugs and that all they need are more drugs to make them healthy.

It’s for those who believe (as I do) that health, happiness, and enthusiasm are our birthright, and that they are attainable!

Perhaps you feel these statements describe you, and if that is true, Body Wisdom was written for You!

In more than 40 years (as of this writing) of private medical practice, I have seen that the people who do the best and make the wisest decisions for their health are those who understand how their bodies work and therefore, are most likely to follow good sound medical advice. When necessary they ask their doctors the tough questions and even seek a second or third opinion before submitting to the potentially dangerous regimens of drugs or surgery.

Health

How do you feel about health?

Do you want to be well?

Really well?

I’ll say at the outset that of the thousands of patients I treated over the years more than 95% didn’t have good health as their primary goal! Surprising?

It was to me at first, and more than a little discouraging.

I don’t mean to imply they didn’t have a symptom or two they wanted me to fix, but really vibrant good health was not something they were willing to work to attain.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this is because people (and the medical system in which they were raised) are almost exclusively symptom driven. Symptom driven means they only care how they feel Right Now! If they don’t experience their symptoms Right Now, then they think they are healthy. And it doesn’t matter how many drugs they take to achieve this feeling, or how much damage those drugs will do in the long haul, and make no mistake, all drugs do damage in the long haul! It seems we have lost sight of what it means to be truly well and healthy; maybe we have become so discouraged from watching our friends and loved ones suffering from long intractable diseases, we don’t believe anymore that true health is even possible.

A Better Way

Body Wisdom grew out of a series of articles first appearing in the pages of Aikido Today, a magazine of Oriental philosophy and martial arts in which I had a medical column for six years, until it ceased publication in 2005.

For Body Wisdom, I have used many of the original article titles as chapter headers. Many have clever turns-of-phrase, employed to attract the attention of the passing reader. You may find some of the chapter headers a bit whimsical but I can assure you the information contained within is the real meat and potatoes stuff you can use to keep yourself healthier, and to better your understanding of how your body works and how to take better care of it.

Oriental Medicine

Traditional Oriental Medicine (OM) is one of the most knowledgeable and effective medical systems on earth and has been the medical system of choice for a quarter of the world’s population for well over 3,000 years. It treats the full range of human medical problems, from the common cold to cancer. It is also the fastest growing alternative medical system in the United States, with millions of patient visits to OM practitioners every year. It’s growing because it works! And it works because it understands how the human body functions!

When I first started medical practice full time in 1979, patients asked if I treated some particular condition or another (asthma, colitis, arthritis, etc.) and, being a new practitioner, I thought I would do well to learn more about these conditions than I had learned in Oriental medical school. My strategy, at first, was to look them up in The Merck Manual, the so-called Bible of Western medical thought and treatment. Diseases are couched in Western medical terminology and put into Western diagnostic categories, so I thought I could learn something more by seeing what Western medical science knew about the causes and treatment of these diseases. But as I looked up one condition after another I was given the same answer (or non-answer, as the case may be), to wit: We don’t know what causes this condition and we don’t know how to cure it. I had never asked a question of my OM teachers without being given a concise answer to help solve my patients’ problems. It was in Oriental Medicine where I would really understand where disease and pain come from, and how to truly solve medical problems.

A medical system can have a lot of facts and/or data, but if it doesn’t have a theoretical framework, provided by an understanding of how the body truly works to plug those facts into, then you cannot use that system to solve the root cause of a patient’s medical difficulties. In Oriental Medicine, covering up symptoms with drugs is not good enough.

So it is to the Oriental Medical system with its knowledge and understanding we shall turn to learn why we develop disease conditions and how to treat the root causes of those conditions so the body can return to the natural state of health to which we are all entitled.

Section One of Body Wisdom covers the basics of how your body works: the parts of your body that run your body, and for the most part, determine your current state of health. We will look at some symptoms that can arise if there are malfunctions in these basic components.

Section Two looks at some particular diseases or conditions common and important enough to warrant their own chapters, plus some other issues that can impact your health and happiness. This is a more fun and freewheeling section that includes chapters on everything from back pain to menopause; from bone strength to diet and nutrition; from arthritis to sinusitis; from the common cold to cancer; and many points in between.

Even though the chapters in Section Two deal with a broad range of subjects, they consistently refer back to the information given in Section One. In this sense these two sections (and all of Body Wisdom) are of a single fabric and as you read the chapters in Section Two, your understanding of the basic workings of your body, as presented in Section One, will grow!

Part of my purpose in writing Body Wisdom is to demystify the workings of the human body, to make it understandable to the average person in plain simple English. It is my firm belief that you don’t have to memorize 2,000 Latin words in order to understand how the body works, as some might have you believe.

Good News

All of the medical conditions discussed in Body Wisdom are potentially fixable using safe natural methods. In fact, many of them are relatively easy to resolve with the exception of cancer, which all medical systems consider a challenge to control, to say the least. This is why Chapter 15 – The Big C is so heavily weighted toward things you can do right now to significantly reduce your chances of developing this potentially deadly disease in the first place.

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Section One: The Basis of Health

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Chapter 1 - The Ways of Energy: What Is it and What Does It Do for You?

The Case of Tired Tom

Tom came to the clinic complaining of low energy. Using diagnostic procedures particular to Oriental Medicine, his body was found to have plenty of energy. So, what can possibly account for this disparity?

Energy is like money. If you make $10,000 a week (wow!) but your bills are $11,000 a week, you would say you are broke, meaning you don’t have any discretionary money to spend on the things you want.

This is equivalent to what was happening to Tom. Even though his body possessed enough energy, too much of it was tied up in destructive and contradictory processes (he had many medical problems, and any one serious medical issue can cause you to lose energy). Because Tom didn’t have enough discretionary energy to spend, he felt exhausted all the time. It just required solving his medical problems to free up his abundant energy!

Energy

Webster’s Dictionary defines energy as the unifying concept of all physical sciences that associates with any system a capacity for work…

Energy exists throughout the entire universe. It causes the earth to spin around on its axis and to orbit around the sun. It is responsible for the sun’s light and heat and is the motive force behind the universe’s expansion.

It is also essential to life. In fact it is so essential to life that we even have a name for a body that doesn’t have any; we call it a corpse.

Energy serves several major functions in your body: most notably it keeps you warm, holds things up, moves things around, is responsible for the functioning of organs and glands (plus the nervous and circulatory systems), performs trillions of metabolic functions every second, and also gives you the ability to do the things you want to do.

Your Source of Energy

Your basic energy comes from something called Cellular Metabolism. Cellular Metabolism is a complex process, but for the purpose of this work we can define it as the burning of fuel (provided by the digestive system) in the presence of oxygen (O2) provided by the lungs.

Trillions of microscopic living organisms (cells) make up your physical body, doing all the things that living organisms do, like being born, taking in nutrients, eliminating waste products, reproducing, and dying. In the process they are generating minute amounts of energy (and heat). It is the sum total of these energy/heat units added together that keeps your body 98.6° Fahrenheit regardless of the ambient temperature in which you happen to find yourself. In fact, one of the ways to tell if a body has been vacated by energy (has died!) is that it becomes cold (assumes room temperature — usually about 70 degrees Fahrenheit).

The amount of metabolically generated energy, over and above that which is needed to heat your body, is the energy available to your system to perform its myriad functions; any energy left over after these needs are met is the amount you have to spend