Ancient Medicine Modern World

Medicine and culture are as woven together as medicine and language. You don’t get one without the other. They are inseparable as two sides of a coin.

Discussing medicine with Dr. Huang always brings with it a discussion of history. Not surprising, since part of the focus of the way he practices is by using the “classic formulas”, these are formulations of herbs from the later Han dynasty. But, he is not fundamentalist, who believes there is a golden age from which we fallen, or there is a book that contains truth if only we would close our eyes to the rest of life and follow it. No, Doc Huang has the kind of vision that sees something that has withstood the test of time, and applies that within the modern context.

One of the problems with Chinese medicine so say many is that it is not “scientific”. I’m beginning to suspect the problem is that it has been around for too many thousands of years, has developed through wildly different cultural settings. And as of late, has gone through a compression and filtering here on the Mainland. Imagine if you will the tangles and turns of a 2000 year old wisteria. Imagine it pruned by a committee. In some ways, that is the current state of (Chinese) medicine in China. And doctors, like so many of us, don’t particularly like to study history, so we don’t really know our roots, other than through the prevailing filters of culture.

Dr. Huang tells me a story on a field trip we are taking to Menghe, it used to be a flourishing river trade town, and home it an inordinately large number of sharp practitioners.

“In the Song dynasty, there was a real flourishing of culture, commerce and trade. The status of doctors changed from servants to businessmen. This was time when exotic herbs were added, and formulas grew in complexity. Bigger formulas, more money. You tie business and medicine together, these kinds of things happen.”

He goes onto say that medicinal theory also shifted, after all, you need a theory and reason for prescribing 15 herbs when 3 or 4 would also have done the job. It is part of our jobs as modern practitioners of Chinese medicine to distill out what has come down to us over the course of the years, and to be able to apply in a concrete fashion the ancient medicine in our modern world.

There is belief in the modern world that medicine should be based on science. It is not a bad idea. It filters out the superstition and fancy talk from the methods that produce results. But, science is not just what happens in a laboratory, it is also what happens in our daily lives. Petri dishes and people are orders of magnitude in difference. Research doctors rarely see people, clinical practitioners spend way more time with people, than with research studies. Both are ways of understanding. Those who claim Chinese medicine is not scientific are right, it is not laboratory science. But, to dismiss the great wealth of clinical knowledge that been whittled out of centuries of practical clinical work, would be a dire mistake.

Perhaps our own time, especially in the West is not unlike that of the Song Dynasty. It is about business and commerce. Packaging and presentation. Dr. Huang warns that it is very easy to turn medicine into a performance, a show, 表演 they say in Chinese.

One of the things that set the Menghe doctors apart, is that they relied on their clinical experience, their own observations, and the natural science of paying attention to what you do, and then following the process that unfolds.