Hacking Chinese Medicine - Course 5

Total CPDs: 1

NCCAOM (1), IVAS (1), Standard Certificate (1)

Access Period: Lifetime

Course Notes: There are no notes provided with this course.

In ancient times, Chinese medical terms were often words about the weather. They were used literally and metaphorically. Words like Damp, Wind, Heat, Cold, Sun, were often used to explain how someone’s illness came about through over­exposure to some climatic situation. If a problem was not, in fact, due to the weather, the climate words were used anyway. In these cases, the words were metaphors and euphemisms. In these cases, they don’t actually help with our understanding of what’s going on. These words are great for putting together a pattern diagnosis and choosing a treatment out of the pattern-code box, but they often do not help us understand what’s really going wrong, they don’t help us know what’s happening with the channel Qi, and they very, very often do NOT lead us to effective treatment. Today, very few of our patients are suffering from health problems associated with climatic excess. However, we still use the same old weather based words to codify the treatment patterns. Very often, this makes our diagnoses and treatment names misleading, not useful, or even stupid and ludicrous. This talk will explain how to work around the limitations and misunderstandings that come about through using these old terms, and suggesting some better ways to communicate with patients about the underlying causes of their problems.