Chinese Medicine

By Tom Williams

Chinese medicine is growing ever more popular in the West. Increasing numbers of us know that acupuncture and herbal remedies can help us – yet we do not understand how they work or why. Tom Williams’ timely introduction shows how Chinese medicine interprets the human body, and how Qi, Jing and Shen (the three treasures – energy, essence and mind/spirit) and the other basic body substances interact to bring bodily harmony.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Jan 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781911163039

Tom Williams

Tom Williams is a football writer and broadcaster who lives in London. Specialising in French and English football, he has had writing published by The Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The Athletic. He is the resident Premier League expert on the flagship French football programme Canal Football Club and a regular guest on the UK's leading football podcast, The Totally Football Show. He is the author of Do You Speak Football?. @tomwfootball

Book preview

An Introduction to Chinese Medicine

CHINESE MEDICINE IS a system of diagnosis and health-care approaches that have evolved over the last 3000 years. The Chinese approach to understanding the human body is unique and is based on the holistic understanding of the universe as outlined in the spiritual insights of Daoism. This understanding has produced a highly sophisticated set of practices designed to cure illness and to maintain health and well-being. These practices, including acupuncture, herbal remedies, diet, meditation and both static and moving exercises, appear very different in approach yet they all share the same underlying sets of assumptions and insights into the nature of the human body and its place in the universe.

The last twenty years or so have seen a dramatic increase in the popularity of a whole range of therapies that have their origins well outside the accepted boundaries of Western scientific thought. The derivatives of Chinese medicine – particularly acupuncture, herbal remedies and Qigong exercises – have been among the most notable and they now enjoy a growing respect not only from patients who have experienced their benefits at first hand but also from an initially sceptical Western medical fraternity.

However, regardless of the therapeutic benefits, it is likely that patients will, at some point in the process, ask themselves the question ‘How is this working?’ On face value, it is only common sense to wonder why the insertion of fine needles into a variety of points on the body – more often than not bearing no obvious relationship to the presenting problem – can have such a dramatic effect. Any patient wrestling with the problem of trying to consume a herbal mixture that would do justice to the witches in Macbeth must, at times, question what is going on.

Many hundreds of practitioners who experience for themselves the benefits of Chinese ‘Soft Exercises’ – Taiqi, Qigong and so on – find themselves wondering how these therapies differ from traditional aerobic Western-oriented exercise. Yet, in all cases, the proof is there in terms of symptomatic relief, improved health and well-being and, often, a more balanced view of life in general.

This book will seek to try and provide answers to some of these questions.

•   What is this body of knowledge that has remained hidden in China for almost 3000 years and that is now having such an impact throughout the Western world?

•   How does the Chinese system differ from the systems we are so used to in the West?

•   How would a practitioner use this body of knowledge in a systematic manner in order to understand a patient’s problem and to plan an appropriate course of treatment?

•   What lessons does this Chinese system have for the way in which medicine is practised in the West as we move towards the end of the millennium?

A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

It is worth spending a short time looking at the growth and development of Chinese medicine over the centuries in order to provide a contextual backdrop for the discussions in this book.

There is evidence dating back to the Shang Dynasty (c.1000BC) that there was already a relatively sophisticated approach to medical problems. Archaeological diggings have unearthed early types of acupuncture needle and the discussion of medical conditions has been found inscribed on bones dating back to this time.

In keeping with the Chinese emphasis on the balancing and governing forces of nature, it seems likely that such practices developed through the observation of the natural world. Many of the graceful postures in Taiqi and Qigong relate to the observation of animal behaviour. For example, the various movements of wild geese form the basis for Dayan Qigong, which relates the movements in human terms to the acupuncture points and the energy body. There is clear evidence of a Shamanic culture existing in early Asian civilization and many Shamanic practices are believed to be at the foundation of Chinese medicine. By the sixth century BC, the link between the Shaman and the medical practitioner was clear. Confucius is quoted as saying that ‘a man without persistence will never make a good shaman or a good physician’.1

Both acupuncture and massage practices developed in an empirical manner through the observation of the effects they produced on certain parts of the body and on specific internal ailments. Early acupuncture was carried out using sharpened bone fragments prior to the development of other tools.

By the first century AD the first and most important classic text of Chinese medicine had been completed. This work, probably compiled over several centuries by various authors, takes the form of a dialogue between the legendary Yellow Emperor and his minister Qi Bo, on the topic of medicine. This book – known as the Inner Classic – discusses the theory and philosophy of Chinese medicine in one section (Basic Questions) and goes on to expand on the therapeutic benefits of acupuncture, herbs, diet and exercise in the second section (Miraculous Pivot).2 Over the following centuries, these basic classics were expanded and specific works emerged on acupuncture, for example The Systematic Classic of Acupuncture & Moxabustion3 – and on herbal remedies, for example The Divine Husbandman’s Classic of the Materia Medica.4 Right into the twentieth century much of the practice of Chinese medicine reflected the traditions that had developed over the preceding 3000 years.

However, Western culture was also making an impact in China, driven by the colonial expansionism of the previous few centuries. The initial response, however, was for the more traditional ancient theories based on Yin and Yang and Five Elements to withdraw under the weight of Western scientific determinism. By the time the communists took power in China in 1949, there was a real dilemma regarding how best to deal with the apparent dichotomy between Western-based medical practices and those of the traditional practitioners.

By 1954, the government officially recognized traditional practitioners as representing a ‘medical legacy of the motherland’ and thus began what became an ostensibly dual-track process of developing Western medical practices in parallel with Chinese medical practices.

A process was set in motion that brought together the diverse practices of the centuries into a recognizable modern curriculum of Chinese medicine. While much of this process became muddied with the ideology and dogma of the cultural revolution, nonetheless, a coherent body of knowledge has appeared under the generic descriptor of traditional Chinese medicine. In order to avoid debates on what constitutes traditional and what doesn’t, we will work with the general understanding that what is being described is simply – Chinese medicine.

As these texts from the major teaching centres in China have been translated and made available in the West, there has been a parallel process that has sought to make the ideas, principles and practices more accessible to the Western reader. Many Western practitioners have written invaluable teaching texts aimed at the Western student of Chinese medicine, while some other writers have sought to bring the ideas to a more general audience. This short book hopefully continues this trend, by seeking to make the ideas, principles and practices accessible to the interested lay reader in a manner that will allow a greater understanding and appreciation of the rich knowledge base that guides the practitioner of Chinese medicine in today’s eclectic and cosmopolitan society.

CHINESE MEDICINE IN THE FUTURE

Clearly it is necessary to step back into the past to understand where Chinese medicine has come from and to understand how it links with ancient philosophical thinking, but this book is about helping people to understand Chinese medicine in today’s Western industrialized society and to suggest the place that it can rightly occupy in the developing medicine and health care of the twenty-first century.

Patients will more and more come to expect that when they put themselves in the hands of professional health-care workers, whether it is a Western-trained doctor or a practitioner of Chinese medicine, they will be offered an explanation about what is being done and why. This is as it should be and this book aims to equip patients with enough basic understanding so that they will not feel confused when talking with their Chinese medical practitioner.

This is a fascinating and enthralling journey. You will be asked to view your world from a very different perspective, but once you get used to the new landscape the view can be breathtaking and the rewards, in terms of your health, second to none.

Read on and enjoy!

1

The Basic Principles Behind Chinese Medicine

WHEN WE THINK of medical practices in the West we make the valid assumption that the skills of the doctor are founded on well-researched science regarding how the body works and what mechanisms can go wrong in the course of illness. Thus, the practice of medicine as the patient experiences it is based on a firm foundation of scientific principle.

However, it is equally important to understand that the subtlety and complexities of Chinese medicine are based on firm philosophies and principles, which while differing dramatically from those in the West, are nonetheless rigorous and valid for that. In beginning to understand what Chinese medicine is all about it is important firstly to explore this different frame of reference. Without this, the system the Chinese use to understand the body’s harmonies and disharmonies will seem like ad hoc mumbo jumbo designed to confuse rather than to enlighten.

YIN AND YANG

The concept behind Yin and Yang is beyond question the most important and the most fundamental with regard to understanding Chinese medicine. The ideas behind Yin and Yang developed from observing all aspects of the physical world. It was observed that nature appears to group into pairs of mutually dependent opposites. Thus, for example, the concept of ‘night’ has no meaning without the concept of ‘day’, the concept of ‘up’ has no meaning without a concept of ‘down’ and so on. The implications of this apparently straightforward observation leads us in a direction quite at odds with the Aristotelian logic that underpins Western scientific thought. To take a simple example. In Western thought a circle is a circle and it is not a square. Measurement and properties define it as a circle. However, from the Chinese perspective of Yin and Yang, a circle contains within it the potential of a square and vice versa and thus dichotomies would be avoided.

Figure 1. The Yin/Yang symbol – the Taiji

Yin and Yang are represented by the universally recognized, yet rarely understood symbol (see Figure 1).

In keeping with the Chinese emphasis on process rather than structure – a topic that will be revisited time and again in the course of our discussions – it is important to understand the concept that Yin and Yang are essentially descriptors of the dynamic interactions that underpin all aspects of the universe. Thus, Yin and Yang should not be seen as ‘things’ in the true Western sense of the term, but as a system of thinking about the world.

The Chinese characters give a sense of this (see Figures 2 and 3). The character for Yin translates literally as the ‘dark side of the mountain’ and represents such qualities as cold, stillness, passive, dark, within, potential and so on. The character for Yang translates literally as the ‘bright side of the mountain’ and represents such qualities as warmth, activity, light, outside, expression and so on.

This way of thinking about the world leads to certain underlying principles relating to Yin and Yang. In the following descriptions of each, we will see how these can be shown to relate to the Chinese view of the human body and its functioning.

Figure 2. The character for Yin

Figure 3. The character for Yang

All Things in the Universe Contain Yin and Yang Aspects

It would be true to say that according to the Chinese view, everything has existence in the physical exactly because everything manifests both Yin and Yang qualities. The relative emphasis of Yin and Yang will vary, but both aspects are always present. For example, in viewing the organs of the body, the Chinese system emphasizes the two qualities. The Liver is generally considered a Yin organ as it is quite solid, but it also has the function of promoting Qi flow (see Chapter 2), so to that extent it has a Yang quality. The stomach on the other hand is hollow and moves food through it, so is thus considered Yang. However, it also has a storing aspect that will represent the Yin function. All these aspects of Yin and Yang are fundamentally interdependent.

Within Yin and Yang, Further Aspects of Yin and Yang Can Be Identified

In theory all Yin and Yang can be infinitely subdivided into aspects that are themselves Yin and Yang. Steam, for example, would be considered a Yang quality of water, whereas ice would