My review of TCM

[bodhitree]

My wife has been working for a chinese medicine doctor (who I've known for a while) and we don't have health insurance, so as a cost effective alternative we have been using chinese medicine.

I think for minor problems TCM can be very effective. I have suffered from (and my father always has also) sinus problems for a long time. We bought pills the doctor recommended and it has helped me to sleep at night. My wife has also bought some medicine for her teenage brother's acne, which has worked rather well.

Where TCM goes wrong: No use of modern equipment. A training partner of mine had some horrible pain in his wrist. He went to the TCM doctor and received accupuncture. It did temporarily relieve the pain. When the chronic pain continued he went to a hospital and it turned out his wrist was broken.

TCM is great as a supplement to western medicine and has a lot of things to improve one's lifestyle. Modern medicine has the best diagnostic technology. It's not about one vs. the other. It's about balancing both and knowing when one is needed and when the other could be more beneficial.

[herb ox]

One thing I've noticed personally is that TCM programs in the past few years have really placed an emphasis on proper use of diagnostic tools (that's not to say the practicioners will actually use them). We're trained to look for 'red flags' that require referral to western practicioners or at least to use modern diagnostic methods. TCM practicioners need to not be lazy and send a patient to the lab or for xrays to better determine what's really going on - especially if the client has medical insurance, if not, it is a bit more complicated. TCM students of old (in America) often don't have that same emphasis or experience in western medicine and diagnosis. At my school, 1/4 of the classes are based on western medicine. It's funny because I've heard from many older (non-Chinese from China) practicioners that students now are receiving a much better education then they did and as a result we'll be better practicioners

In any case, these sort of things do happen - in both Western and Eastern practice. Misdiagnosis on both sides is a lot more common than one would think - even with radiology and lab work.

Your experience is valuable as it reminds me to take every complaint seriously, and give it my full attention. A simple complaint of wrist pain would likely incur a simple treatment without much examination. Some practicioners wouldn't even give much of an interview before placing needles. A thorough interview along with orthopedic examination would likely suggest something more than just a sprain or 'qi blockage'.

However, I must respectfully disagree with your blanket statement of TCM only being good for minor problems - a good praciticoner should be able to spot the major problems and take the appropriate route of action, be it use of modern diagnostic tools or referring out to an allopathic physician. However, I do agree with your closing statement about knowing when to apply one or the other - although western diagnostic tools are quite good, they don't always catch the true problem...

thanks for sharing your experience, bodhitree.

peace

herb ox

[bodhitree]

Keep us posted on your progress too, its interesting to hear about trining involving western medicine. The Doctor my wife works for is a middle aged woman who was trained in Hong Kong. I don't know what that means. I think TCM should be used to supplement western medicine, and I know she has things to fight the fatigue of chemotherapy and so forth, two approaches combined = one way to complete health.

[cjurakpt]

Interesting about the wrist: tells you a few things

1) taking a history is vital: in other words, there must have been some precipitating event that caused the wrist pain - a good hx. would have possibly "red flagged" the relative liklyhood of a wrist fx. and indicated the need for radiographs; I don't know if maybe it was that the hx. was taken from a TCM perspective, but even so, I can't imagine that wouldn't have involved asking if there had been a recent taumatic event...of course, a rip to the orhtopod would have resulted in films being taken pro forma, so even if the hx. was lousy, the films might have shown a fx. (although the latest stat. I heard was that something like 30% of cerical fx. go unnoticed on x-ray...scary)

2) despite the fx., TCM helped, meaning that the acup. was able to help mediate the local inflammatory process and decrease the pain appreciably; consequently, there has been some study on the effects of TCM on fx. management, such as casting in a removeable splint apparatus so that periodic acup. and gentle ROM could be administered while the fx. was healing - if i recall correctly, the sample group did markedly better than the controls

what this indicates overall is that the principles of allopathic and TCM are not mutually exclusive: so e.g., you x-ray the wrist to get the right dx., the you provide some acup. to dec. pain / swelling right before casting, and you can use a bivalve casting technique to allow administration of acup. during healing; of course, I'd like to see some well designed, double blind RCT's to back it all up at some point as well...

BTW, let's see how long we can string this thread out and keep it civilized...

that said, I'd be very interested in anyone's perspective on what is really "going on" in terms of why TCM "works"; I certainly have my own perspective, which is that there is nothing that TCM can accomplish that can't be adequately described with the already extant western anat/physiol knowledge that is available, it's just a matter of understanding how the organism functions in an at times non-linear, complex systems based context...

[cjurakpt]

One thing I've noticed personally is that TCM programs in the past few years have really placed an emphasis on proper use of diagnostic tools (that's not to say the practicioners will actually use them). We're trained to look for 'red flags' that require referral to western practicioners or at least to use modern diagnostic methods.

that's it in a nutshell! the drawback of tradidional medicines is that they had limited diagnostic capabilities - so if you train TCM practitioners to "step outside" their paradigm and use contemporary knowledge to ID those "red flags", then you are using best of both worlds; BTW, the reason for the emphasis is that, if you are functioning as a licensed healthcare provider, if you don't deliver an appropriate standard of care, you gonna get yo' a$$ sued and livelyhood dumpd in the toilet; so no surprise schools are focusing on this sort of thing - safety first!

[pilgrimsunwukun]

There's still cancer in the US and flu in China meaning no medicine holds the key or is the right way of healing. Every method has it's strengths and often it is the practitioner that has the weaknesses.

There was a Chinese doc in NYC named John Shen who said something like," Chinese medicine is easy to learn but hard to do , western medicine is hard to learn but easy to do."As a doc I believe he was a Chinese trained MD and Chinese family/ TCM trained practitioner of acupucture , herbs, tui na, etc. He died after having 60 to 70 years of practice. He was partly talking about the hands on skills of a practitioner of Chinese medicine. Talking about western medicine has left the personel touch realm and is more mechanical- which is good for western medicine.

Meaning he had a lot more going for him then the vast majority of American/European trained practioners of TCM, meridian therapy, 5 elements. The majority of us are not medical docters who went to Chinese medicne school.

If a person treats a broken hand , claims to be an acupuncturist, and doesn't diagnose the broken hand..well that's prettty bad. Chinese medicine has excellent methods of diagnosing medical problems. Palpation, like hara diagnosis, pulse taking, can give a load of info. That's the point of the 10 asking questions.

The point is most people just out of TCM school are not at a high level of skill. OF COURSE it's good to work in conjunction with western medicine, get labs, x-rays. It's all useful . Another aspect is to be humble and not think you can do more then you can really do. In acupuncture school you work, possibly , with difficult cases, and always are supervised by a licensed practitioner, most schools want Chinese who are dual docs, to confirm diagnosis, treatment protocols. The point is they have experience, you don't. You're still in school. Then you get out of school, and when the time comes time tells.

Even with 20 years of western medicine, to think you can do acupuncture tui na whatever after taking a 100 hour course is silly. Even a typical acupuncture/herb/tui na school has a year or more of supervised internships.

So, I feel Chinese medicine can stand alone for a lot of medical issues but you have to be honest in your skill in treating the problem. And using info from western medicine is CLEARLY helpful!!!!!!!

Pilgrim Steve

[AJM]

Even with 20 years of western medicine, to think you can do acupuncture tui na whatever after taking a 100 hour course is silly. Even a typical acupuncture/herb/tui na school has a year or more of supervised internships.



Pilgrim Steve[/QUOTE]

I'd add those four month courses in Reiki to this as well. From my experience it takes years to be able to sense and maniputate the chi flow of someone without making the problem worse. I've had to use tui na to relieve migraines on a few people that had stale chi stuck in their head after going to rather unexperienced practitioners.

[lonewolf]

Even with 20 years of western medicine, to think you can do acupuncture tui na whatever after taking a 100 hour course is silly. Even a typical acupuncture/herb/tui na school has a year or more of supervised internships.



Pilgrim Steve

I'd add those four month courses in Reiki to this as well. From my experience it takes years to be able to sense and maniputate the chi flow of someone without making the problem worse. I've had to use tui na to relieve migraines on a few people that had stale chi stuck in their head after going to rather unexperienced practitioners.[/QUOTE]

while i totally have to disagree with the first statement i do agree with the second half. first i would check out the midwest college of TCM in chicago and wisconsin. there program is 4-6 years and is full time. doing acupuncture after a 100 hours is bull.
as for the reiki classes i have run into people that do free reiki sessions at churches and such for donations. these people learn it at some seminar for a day and then go around trying to work on people. they get away with it classifing it as massage and people don't know any better. my wife is a certified massage therapist and went to school for two years to get her degree and to one of the best schools in the country KCHA. the idea of just anybody doing reiki or massage of any kind it crap and people should be worried about it.

[pilgrimsunwukun]

Exactly my point wolf. MD's have a course that gives them the ability to be an acupuncture mechanic-1oo hours or so of training over several weekends. They clearly know a and p, etc. But what such programs lack are the hours of clinical experience with a licensed acupuncturist such as what happens in acupuncture schools. Such is apparent since there is a trend for MD's to enroll into TCM schools.


Or Dr. Wei Liu's advanced needling ceu class - he's up there is Wisconsin,possible the windy city too; if you never had those techniques before, think you have them after a weekend seminar? No you don't. Think you can take Tom Bisio's tui na classes, with only being a licensed massage therapist, and think you have those skills down? No, it's a start.

Even with graduating from acupuncture school, do you think you're good? Well maybe pretty good but ask anyone who's done the dipl. ac., master's programs, and ask if they haven't become way better with years of practice.

That's the point, just because you have a license.....it's like a black belt.....it just means you're ready for more schooling. In Asian cultures, beginners apprentice 5, 10 15, years before they get to school.

I remember Dr. Ma , a man with 50 years of practice saying he was unsure about a particular case since he had only treated the condition 200 times or so. That's what I'm talking about, trained , humble, still learning.

Steve a la pilgrim/pilgrimsuwukung

[PlumDragon]

there is nothing that TCM can accomplish that can't be adequately described with the already extant western anat/physiol knowledge that is available, it's just a matter of understanding how the organism functions in an at times non-linear, complex systems based context...

Non-linear systems and complex adaptive systems are subjects of considerable interest in research circles today, and in my experience, a study of significant mathematical, chemical, and sometimes counter-intuitive principles. While there is much thrust in research in these areas (not just with human landscape but with other living organisms, and even in non-related areas such as control system engineering), much like AI, these fields are in fact still in their infancy, IMO.

I agree though, but only to a degree. While its reasonable to say there is *no* topic that cant be adequately described either now or at some point in the future, the low-level details are where we fall short. We still have a great deal to learn...

[qiphlow]

2) despite the fx., TCM helped, meaning that the acup. was able to help mediate the local inflammatory process and decrease the pain appreciably; consequently, there has been some study on the effects of TCM on fx. management, such as casting in a removeable splint apparatus so that periodic acup. and gentle ROM could be administered while the fx. was healing - if i recall correctly, the sample group did markedly better than the controls

hey, this is interesting--if you can, please PM me as to where i can find more info on this. i'm an ortho tech by trade.

and on another note: i think that TCM has a much better system for diagnosis and treatment in that TCM takes a holistic approach to diagnosis and treatment. of course, individual practitioner skill will vary (as with anything), but from a strictly theoretical standpoint, TCM has a very good system in place. Western medicine is moving toward this holistic approach, albeit very slowly...
i think we have problems because of not very many "reputable" studies being done as to the efficacy of TCM for the big diseases like cancer, diabetes, etc. also qi is hard to quantify for the purposes of "objective" research.

[qiphlow]

and i might also add that there's alot of dissatisfaction with the medical "industry" these days--pills, pills, and more pills, but your main problem never goes away...
patients expect that the doctor will know how to cure them, but alot of doctors will just focus on getting rid of symptoms or blow the patient off entirely if nothing abnormal shows up on diagnostic tests. this is caused in part by the drug companies and the fda only approving certain drugs or other treatments, and partly by the patients for not taking enough interest in their own healthcare (perhaps so they have someone to sue if their expectations aren't met), and partly by the perception in the west that only your doctor knows what's good for you.
we may need to change our methodology for conducting research if we're to prove to ourselves that TCM "works" (and qigong, taiji, reiki, etc. for that matter).
again, alot of these eastern methods for treating problems produce subjective results, and we want objective results that we can quantify before we believe it's real. how do we do it?

[cjurakpt]

Non-linear systems and complex adaptive systems are subjects of considerable interest in research circles today, and in my experience, a study of significant mathematical, chemical, and sometimes counter-intuitive principles. While there is much thrust in research in these areas (not just with human landscape but with other living organisms, and even in non-related areas such as control system engineering), much like AI, these fields are in fact still in their infancy, IMO.

I agree though, but only to a degree. While its reasonable to say there is *no* topic that cant be adequately described either now or at some point in the future, the low-level details are where we fall short. We still have a great deal to learn...

good points

in terms of the body, the behavior of the connective tissue matrix in context of tensegrity principles (continuous tension / discontinuous compression) is a great place to start evaluating how the organism responds to stress (kinetic as well as non-physical) in a non-linear fasion; for example, how inserting acupuncture needles in different areas can create changes in pelvic bone alignment (described by Flaws in one of his old Dit Da books) - changes in both neuromuscular tone and fascial tension allow the organism can "self-correct" bsed on some intrinsic programed drive towards homeostasis

that said, I agree that the field is relatively new; however, its roots go back to texts such as "Growth & Form" by English mathematician D'Arcy Thompson (1917) and is developed further by others such as Theodor Schwenk in "Sensitive Chaos" (both looking at patterns of complexity and chaos in deiiferent ways); Thompson, for example, states that:
"we rise from the conception of form to an understanding of the forces which gave rise to it; and in the representation of form and in the comparison of kindred forms, we see in the one case a diagram of forces in equilibrium, and in the other case we discern the magnitude and the direction of the forces which have sufficed to convert the one form into the other." (p.270)
point is that he is trying to understand how the complex interractions of biological forces combine to create different end-forms - in essence, chaos / complexity looks at "simple" forms, static or dynamic, and attempts to understand what underlies them; in reagrds to TCM, for example, the practitioner looks at "form" in order to understand "function" and sees how the latter operates to impact the former; of course, we also know this as yin (form) and yang (function);

so there's some exciting stuff going on out there...

[cjurakpt]

Even with 20 years of western medicine, to think you can do acupuncture tui na whatever after taking a 100 hour course is silly. Even a typical acupuncture/herb/tui na school has a year or more of supervised internships

true on one level - which is that it is impossible to use acupuncture in context of TCM theory and practice; however, these courses typically are a aundry list of recepie's of needling patterns to address specific "diagnoses" from a western perspective ("ok, if you have apt. w/ulcerative collitis, do this"); of course, this is NOT TCM at all - and it's ot taking into account unique nature of each person;

MD's have a course that gives them the ability to be an acupuncture mechanic-1oo hours or so of training over several weekends. They clearly know a and p, etc. But what such programs lack are the hours of clinical experience with a licensed acupuncturist such as what happens in acupuncture schools. Such is apparent since there is a trend for MD's to enroll into TCM schools.

Harvard Med School recently started offereing a year-long weekly intensive training for MD's in TCM (a lot of correspondence, weekly on site); it's actually run in part by a PM&R doc I knew when I was a PT student at Columbia, very nice guy, studied taijiquan etc.

I'd add those four month courses in Reiki to this as well.

as for the reiki classes i have run into people that do free reiki sessions at churches and such for donations. these people learn it at some seminar for a day and then go around trying to work on people. they get away with it classifing it as massage and people don't know any better. my wife is a certified massage therapist and went to school for two years to get her degree and to one of the best schools in the country KCHA. the idea of just anybody doing reiki or massage of any kind it crap and people should be worried about it.

don't get me stated on Reiki - when someone tells me they are a Reiki master, the joke is "oh, so you stayed for the WHOLE weekend, huh?"; point is, regardless of the modality itself, there's a place for "intuitive" stuff - and it's not with clinical population, unless it's combined with solid training in a licensed healthcare profession; otherwise, stick to playing with your friends and relatives; BTW, in NY they would be in hot water if they called it massage, since that's a regulated term - they use bodywork or energy work to get around that - again, if they want to be hobyists, it's fine; as soon as you treat the general public and aren't licesensed, i have a huge issue with that...

From my experience it takes years to be able to sense and maniputate the chi flow of someone without making the problem worse. I've had to use tui na to relieve migraines on a few people that had stale chi stuck in their head after going to rather unexperienced practitioners.

agreed: I've seen similar situations with people who've had "light touch" cranialsacral or other energy work, who get "stuck", and need some good old fasioned manipulation / deep fascial relaese work to "wring out" the stuck stuff (porbably congested lymphatics and a confused as hell autonomic nervous system which got all irritated by the light touch that it wasn't able to interpret / process appropriately); for the migraines, I would say that they might have had some reflexive maladpatations of the sub-occipitals, which regulate the postural and occular systems to a significant degree, and often get "stuck" in a hypertensive adaptation when you "irritate" the system - so the tuina makes senses that it would resolve that (either applied locally or elsewhere), since it give th body a very firm, solid reference / fulcrum off of which to re-organize itself autonomically and posturally

[PlumDragon]

that said, I agree that the field is relatively new; however, its roots go back to texts such as "Growth & Form" by English mathematician D'Arcy Thompson (1917) and is developed further by others such as Theodor Schwenk in "Sensitive Chaos" (both looking at patterns of complexity and chaos in deiiferent ways); Thompson, for example, states that:
"we rise from the conception of form to an understanding of the forces which gave rise to it; and in the representation of form and in the comparison of kindred forms, we see in the one case a diagram of forces in equilibrium, and in the other case we discern the magnitude and the direction of the forces which have sufficed to convert the one form into the other." (p.270)
point is that he is trying to understand how the complex interractions of biological forces combine to create different end-forms - in essence, chaos / complexity looks at "simple" forms, static or dynamic, and attempts to understand what underlies them; in reagrds to TCM, for example, the practitioner looks at "form" in order to understand "function" and sees how the latter operates to impact the former; of course, we also know this as yin (form) and yang (function);

so there's some exciting stuff going on out there...

Good post cjurakpt. The roots do go back a long time. However, AI, modern medicinal research, etc etc are infantile compared to the likes of fields such as Calculus, Physics, etc. It seems that much of the infancy of a field is shrouded in philosophy. As we make leaps forward, my guess is that things will become much more concrete in terms of the details and nuances of why this takles place--talking at the atomic level even, such as the calcium electrical gradients, etc... Were making great leaps however, and its an exciting time.

One thing Id like to point out though is that a great deal of these types of things are actually linear in nature. A great great deal of the Universe can be adequately explained using linear time invariant methodolgies. For example, in terms of chaos models, many if not all of the models which are studied in a graduate setting are based on linear differential equations and their corresponding bifurcation diagrams are often times somewhat intuitive if you study the math of it and are familiar with the context of the setting.

The problem with non-linear complex systems is that, naturally they operate and fail in complex ways; ways that can be very counter-intuitive. One of my graduate professors was at the frontier of working with non-linear time varying control systems. It was rather interesting to note that he was looking for PhD students to write dissertations so that he could continue trying to solve the big problems with our gaps in understanding here...A historical time in science right now...

At any rate, while it is beyond the scope of this forum, if you are interested in seeing what starts as a simple example of how wacky non-linear time varying systems can be, Id be happy to go over with you an example from my graduate work. It would take a considerable investment in time, but it is an open invitation.

At any rate, Id love to write more but need to get to work...But Id like to leave you with one of my favorite quotes, which I feel si pertinent:

"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldnt."