Good day,
Today I want to continue from a couple of posts earlier. We were talking about Ayurvedic medicine and how it worked. We also mentioned how it was similar to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).
TCM dates back about 3000 years. Its founding father was the Yellow Emperor. In TCM, illness is a sign of imbalance in our system. Healing always means restoring the balance and harmony to the body, allowing it to heal itself. Herbs are central to Chinese medicine along with acupuncture and massage.
There are three categories of of Chinese medicine: superior, middle, and inferior. In western medicine it would be the "inferior" medicines that are considered the most valuable. These are drugs that only address a single complaint, issue or disease. Middle medicines strengthen the broad body systems and functions. Superior medicines are believed to work for anything, strengthening all body systems.
The idea of yin and yang comes from TCM and is the philosophy that everything in the universe is balanced and has an exact opposite. Yin (dark and cold) is female and Yang (light and hot) is its male opposite. Many illnesses can be explained be the the imbalance of yin and yang.
There are five elements in TCM: Fire, earth, metal, water and wood with each one being related to two body organs. TCM practitioners look at the related elements to determine origins of illnesses.
Herbs in the TCM world are considered either heating or cooling and will be used to treat illness in the body. When Chinese herbs are described they always include taste, temperature, and affected organs.
Qi (pronounced "chee") is the energy that runs through our bodies and is the foundation for all of the TCM healing practices. This energy needs to flow freely through the body. Acupuncture is often used to move this energy through "blocked" meridians. Meridians are pathways in the body that the Qi travels through and if blocked results in various illnesses.
Unlike the Western medical system which only treats the symptoms of any sickness. TCM uses herbs, acupuncture and massage get to the root cause of any ailment by "re-balancing" the bodies energies.
It would be fantastic if western doctors took a more open minded approach to treating patients and invetigate the posbililty of TCM style of treatments. Currently many western doctors look at Ayurvedic and TCM as an inferior form of medicine but in reality both have been used successfully for 1000's of years and are continued to be used around the world.
Cheers,
Bouncelife
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