Ancient Medicine Modern World

My first clue came in Taiwan when I was teaching English.

I’d approach the grammar portion of the lesson with fear and trepidation. Give myself a glancing review of subordinate clauses, predicate adjectives and past perfect participles.  Relying as much on my students inability to understand English, as my own well honed skills in extemporaneous speaking and sleigh of hand in changing the subject.

The only thing that really qualified me to teach English in Asia was my American accent and white skin. That and the willingness to trade the sounds of English for the local currency. Most of my students would never go deeply into English grammar. For them, it was enough just to open and their mouths and attempt to string together a few words, or learn a bit of slang, figure out how to hold their own in a job interview, or simply please the parents who were paying for their lessons.

I never learned grammar, the same way I never learned English. It was just the soup in which I swam. So long as I could communicate and write well enough I figured I was on solid ground.

Then I started translating “The Ten Major Formula Families in Chinese Medicine.” That is when I found that that commas and periods go inside of the quote marks, that there are rules and agreements of grammar that may not be casually ignored. For the first time grammar, and the proper use thereof, became important. And it was way way too late to return my high school English class and bone up on the nuts and bolts of how to parse the English language.

As they like to say in Chinese 失敗是成功之母, defeat is the mother of success. Luckily a writer friend of mine recently confided her own struggles with truly understanding how we structure our language. So it was off to Barnes and Noble. For her, a 5th grammar workbook and for me, The Mountain Man’s Field Guide to Grammar.

That darned book actually makes the rules of grammar both frisky and fun.

We all have had this experience. It may come suddenly as we step between downtown buildings, or as we push up over a mountain ridge, or as a blast that heralds a storm. Formless yet powerful, it hits not with a strength, but as a force. That gust which suddenly changes the directional lean of our steps, or throws an irritation of dust into our eyes, or causes us to refocus our movement .
Wind has a scattering disorienting feel about it doesn’t it?

We know this from our experience of it.

And we know it in our bodies as well. Dizziness, itching and irritability, eyes that water and itch, sneezing and headaches that rove around like a breeze blows a tree full of leaves. These too, are wind. Notice how it has a nature that comes and goes. How it tends to disorient like an interrupted conversation. Wind, it has immediacy like the twig snapped borderline between placidity and anger. Wind does not flare like fire, it is more like an encompassing rush that leaves your feet solid on the ground, while from the waist up there is a tilt off center.

Wind blows through all the cracks of life, carrying dirt and grime and disease. Ever notice that a few days after a particularly strong windstorm lots of people have colds? Water may seek the lowest level, but wind slips through the cracks.

Watch for anything that has a scattering come and go nature, and you will notice the influence of wind.

Unless we have been involved in some accident, we don’t get to our current state of health overnight. It often a journey of years of slow accumulative action. Days slide into weeks, slide into months, then we wonder where the years went. Along with our agility, digestion, flexibility or mental clarity. It is a not short to journey to our lives as they unfold right now.

Being better likewise is a journey. There are herbs that can help, and acupuncture with its unique ability to call a balancing and healing response out of the body is of tremendous value. Ask anyone who has used it to aid in a transition between stages of life.

And due to acupuncture’s ability to heal and help us feel better, we often stop treatment just as we have gained a certain momentum.

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There is a difference between feeling better and being better.

And generally speaking, feeling better comes sooner, but to actually be better it sometimes takes a little bit more treatment to consolidate the changes.

If you have been to see a practitioner of Chinese medicine then you already know that most diagnoses sound more like weather reports than an explanation of a medical condition. Seemingly more poetic than prognostic it can lead to a sense that Chinese medicine is more art than science. Oddly Asian, we either accept it as mysterious, or reject as lacking in rigor.

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Truth be told, it is science.
Chinese science.

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Old science that is consistent within its frame, but unlike Western science includes a flexible frame.

Everyday Acupuncture is a new occasional series that will appear here on “Ancient Medicine Modern World.” It is an attempt to translate Chinese thought not just into English, but into experience. Check in from time to time to get a better idea of what your acupuncturist is talking about, and if you have questions, but all means, add them to the comments.

Remember what it felt like on September 12th?

The sense of shock and loss?

The way the mind refused to wrap itself around so many deaths?
The way numbers would numb the imagination?

The Chinese Sichuan earthquake is 17 American 9/11’s.

Seventeen.

OK is not good enough.

I’m not talking here about the nitpicking endless knot of perfectionism. Nor, about a careless disregard for what does indeed require our attention and concern. The problem with OK is that it has no teeth. It is comfortable enough to allow years to slid into oblivion because it lacks the spark and agitation to demand that life be more than our compromised dreams.

OK holds things together when disintegration and change is called for. It keeps us moving along in the comfortable groove that we misread as life rewarding us for good behavior. OK keeps the wild wind from our door, and allows us a peaceful sleep when daringly dreams are our true bread.

OK is the enemy of daringly alive. It is good enough, and that is the problem!

Sometimes it is referred to as the “women’s ginseng.” A panacea for the health concerns that include monthly cycles and changes of life. In western vocabulary it is called Angelica. It has a sweet aromatic fragrance with an affinity for nourishing the blood and improving its circulation. While there is no such thing as a miracle herb, Dang Gui comes pretty close in that it is safe as food, and has such a powerful effect on feminine cycles.

While it is not advised to use herbs to treat serious conditions without proper medical advise, Dang Gui can be used quite safely for minor problems with the menstrual cycle, blood loss from injury, or anemic conditions.

It actually makes a nice soup base for either a chicken or vegetable soup, especially when combined with other blood nourishing herbs like Gou Qi Zi, or qi boosting medicinals like Shan Yao.

In places like Taiwan, they sell little bottles of single dose Dang Gui based soups in all the 7/11’s and grocery stores. Women there drink it after their period like we drink lattes in America.

Want to know more? Talk to your local Chinese herbalist!

Xinyi Road is a forest of drills, cranes and mushroom like ventilation towers. Taipei’s already excellent subway system sprouts new lines like clematis tendrils climb a trellis. This one will connect the financial nerve center and the world’s tallest building “Taipei 101” to the main train station and the highspeed bullet line that now renders most Taipei to Kaoshiong flights obsolete.

I remember the sense of audacity when first arriving in Taiwan in the spring of 2001, that they would dare such a tall financial monument in one of the earth’s most seismic activate zones. I chalked it up then to a senseless bravado. That was before I understood the Taiwanese to be the optimistic and hardworking people they are. In the seven years I’ve known Taipei, I’ve watched her go from amazing to incredible. I’ve been privileged to live in and visit a city that mixes modern and traditional living in a way that only a well written science fiction story could tell.

The symposium on the International Globalization of Chinese Medicine was by and large an opportunity for the Taiwanese to continue a trend that emerged in during the Republican Era after the fall of the Qing dynasty. Namely, that Chinese medicine must be verified and rubber stamped by Western science. I sat through a number of lectures that gave us scientific proof of the properties of medicinals that the Chinese of the Han dynasty has already figured out. Like their brothers and sisters on the mainland, they are reluctant to toss out Chinese medicine for not being “scientific”, and at the same want to force Chinese science to fit the mold and form of the West.

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Clinical and laboratory medicine may have a common root, but the world views that support each are like children of a family that grow into people that could not be more different.

While laboratory findings that confirm what practiced clinicians already know are interesting. What stood out most to me in the two days was the lecture on the health insurance of Taiwan.

Taiwan has universal health care. A middle class self employed person such as myself would pay USD$42 a month for my health insurance. That’s full coverage. Everything from acupuncture to open heart surgery, from granulated Chinese herbs to kidney dialysis, from twist ankles to car wrecks. In the USA I pay more than 4x that amount for hit by truck catastrophic care with a deductible that would wipe out my savings.

What is more interesting yet…..
The costs of administering the program are 1.5% of monies taken in. It is efficient, computerized, universally accessible, there are no waiting periods, nor gatekeeping doctors practicing insurance, instead of medicine. Wasteful? Perhaps, certainly that criticism has been leveled at the system. People that don’t need to see a specialist, but decide on their own they want to, and do. They can. They just have to pay a premium out of their pocket.

As in any system, if you have money, you can get what money buys, and that usually translate as more access to whatever you want. But, the amazing strength of the system here in Taiwan is that of basic health care. The kind of health that most of us need most of the time, it is as available here as a Big Mac is in the USA.

I’m a professional acupuncturist, not a politician, but if I were. I’d be looking into how the Taiwanese have managed put together such a stellar system for taking care of their citizens. But then, these are the people that would dare to build the world’s tallest building in an earthquake zone. Perhaps they see the world in a fundamentally different way.

There is something of a cat meow in the way Taiwanese girls say 歡迎光臨, it is as irresistible to the ears as ice cream on a soft breeze summer night. It seeps into the ears like spilled honey, the audio equivalent of the fragrance of lily.

Flocks of scooters that roar a turbulent surf.

The emotional tags of oh’s ah’s and ug’s tacked onto the end of sentences.

The jet engine blast that fires night market woks.

Taiwan’s rich commotion of sound paints aural pictures as deliciously round and thick and rich as a brimming bowl of beef noodle soup.

I’ve been through terminal one of the Taoyuan International Airport enough times to know which way to turn out of customs to catch the bus that is a nap away from Taipei main train station.

Down two flights of escalator, a short flight of stairs and into the slipstream of Taipei subway rush hour. You could not crowd this many Americans into one space, let alone have them move with the particular Brownian motion that feels like breathing a school of fish.

The Taiwanese excel at finding the spaces in-between. Joining the flow which sweeps me down to the Danshui line, there is again that distinctly familiar feeling of having returned home.