Chinese medicine has had a long and difficult history. As early as the 6th century BC, Ye He was making diagnoses based on yin, yang, wind, rain, night, and day. It’s incredible that a methodology and practice that has healed for thousands of years is not more widely used and accepted today. What’s not as surprising is that it is perhaps politics and greed that have given Chinese Medicine a second class seat in the way they hinder many good things in life.
The arrival of western medicine in China gave doctors and patients a seemingly easier system to cure illness: purchase antibiotics, give or receive a shot, and fell better. To make things worse for a tradition already falling behind, Chinese medicine was banned by the Nationalist government in 1928. Since then, Western medicine has been at the forefront in China, while Chinese medicine is seen as something extra or additional.
Even so, in China, Western and Eastern traditions are more often used together to treat a patient. Hospitals may arrange themselves with entire floors alternating: odd numbers for West, even for East. And in China, an Acupuncturist is likely to prescribe many consecutive days of acupuncture treatment to encourage healing, the way a Western doctor might prescribe medication. How many people in the United States ever see an acupuncturist more than once or twice a month? People here seem to treat acupuncture like manicures. And yet, moving qi into balance within the body, what an acupuncturist works to do, is not something that one visit can accomplish. Many of us have no problem popping pills when we want to heal, or even just dull a few symptoms. What if we were more willing to take on the Chinese way of using Chinese Medicine and acupuncture as frequently as needed to actually treat the root of an illness and allow the body to heal itself?
Like anything else that keeps the body healthy, exercise and diet for instance, Chinese medicine requires attention and repetition. It’s wonderful that Yoga has become accepted, loved, and even obsessed about by Western culture. Whether used solely to get harder abs or for relaxation and meditation, Yoga is a practice. Results are only seen through patience and repetition. What if Western culture opened its heart to the practice of preventative Chinese medicine the way it has to the practice of Yoga? Perhaps its arduous journey through history would end, and it would continue on in Earth’s story as a hero, allowing us to feel our energetic potential, that feeling we reach for in the yoga studio when we spread our fingers and toes, reaching to become warriors.
Read about Root Whole Body’s own acupuncturist here.