Well, if I still have any readers, I’m back! It’s been a long time, and all I have is crummy excuses. I went to Portland, OR last summer for the first annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Classical Acupuncture. I enjoyed the communion with other Chinese medicine practitioners who are trying … Continue reading “Exploring the Channel Systems”
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- Re-framing Health Care for Society
- The Art of Acupuncture (and CM)
- The Spirit of the Neijing
- The Theory and Practice of Disease Reversion (Accumulation Theory)
After more than a year of discussions and widespread contention, we appear on the cusp of health insurance reform. Our society may benefit from such reforms, or as others fear, they may undermine the virtues of our current health care system and damage our economy. Interesting and compelling as that debate may appear, it is … Continue reading “Will We Get True Health Care Reform?”
Contemporary practitioners and students of Chinese medicine face an enormous educational challenge, which has shifted somewhat over the past few decades. When I began my studies of Chinese medicine nearly three decades ago, it was difficult to find adequate information in English. Now there is A LOT of information available, and a quickly increasing number … Continue reading “Drowning in a Sea of Information”
People develop progressive and degenerative diseases from stagnations that accumulate within the embodied spirit. We can tolerate those accumulations for some time, but eventually they impede or obstruct “normal” physiological process. Each embodied spirit is provided with an amazingly effective collection of “storage reservoirs” that allow them to adapt and adjust to pathogenic stagnations. (Technically, … Continue reading “The Archeology of Disease”
Stagnant blood is the somatic version of unresolved emotional conflicts. Who doesn’t have any of those? No attachment to having your way? Don’t think your way is the right way? Well, I don’t believe contemporary people come close to that stringent standard of spiritual liberation. We have too much apparent (temporal) power, and generally fail … Continue reading “Some Treatments Are Plain as Day”
I ran into an old friend at the grocery store a couple days ago. We greeted each other warmly, after not seeing each other for several years. Matt is a medical doctor, specifically a radiologist, who was one of few medical professionals in our small rural California town to accept my efforts practicing Chinese medicine … Continue reading “Is Health Care Against Society?”
A few weeks ago, I taught a weekend continuing education seminar for acupuncturists on the channel divergences, which have central importance for both understanding and reversing progressive and degenerative disease. Early in that seminar, I posed the following question, which I believe lay deep in the soul of many health care practitioners: Do you want … Continue reading “Practicing Health Care”
The Problem with Health Care is the Pervasive Fantasy that We Can Treat It as a Consumer Good! Health and healing are not consumer goods. Why would one think we could treat health care as one? If consuming health care actually made people healthier, there could never be enough. Our society would have to ration … Continue reading “Health Care: NOT Just a Funding Challenge”
Each person is an embodied spirit (jīngshén (精神)), who lives through interacting with the world. Those interactions are polar, as individuals take in various influences from the world and release byproducts of their life process back out to the world. Breathing is one such interaction; it provides the source of being. Each individual’s quest for … Continue reading “Human Life: It’s NOT Just Physical”
The conceptual model of physical “reality” articulated by modern scientific medicine is powerful and compelling. It appeals to our naïve experience of living in, and learning to manipulate, a mechanistic physical world that submits to our control according to fixed “laws of nature.” The ideas of scientific medicine are deeply satisfying to many, especially relative … Continue reading “Is it a Fairy Tale?”