We trace our medicine back to the Nei Jing, but most of our actual practices come from a more modern perspective.

Going back to those roots is not easy. Even for native speakers of Chinese, reading the 文言文 wen yan wen, the classic Chinese is difficult. For those of us in the modern West, these ancient texts are challenging. They require not just language, but a minset that views the world from through a completely different set of lenses and prisms than Cartesian and materialistic science offers to us.

Immersion in this ancient material changes us if we allow it. Gives us hints at seeing how matter and energy interact in ways toward which modern medical science is blind.

In this conversation we listen into how the Nei Jing gives another way of approaching acupuncture, the 脈 mai, channels, and helps us to understand our bodies as fluid based ecosystems.

Head on over to the show notes page for more information about this episode and for links to the resources discussed in the interview. 

Another class is emotional problems, but nudging talks about

emotional problems in a different way.

So we don't separate the mind and the body, of course.

And it's not a psychological model of, of emotional problems.

It's that they compare the emotions to weather patterns.

And they're related to the form of your body.

Michael max here.

Welcome back to qiological.

This is the podcast for practitioners of Chinese and east Asian medicine.

If you've been here before, you know what we're about to get into, if

you're new here, This is a podcast that is focused on Chinese medicine.

This is where practitioners we get deep and geeky into this stuff here.

So if you're just scoping around looking for something about Chinese

medicine, you might want to check out everyday acupuncture, podcasts, and

stat that's for the general public.

This is for us, geeky, Chinese medicine practitioners.

Hey, before we get into it today, I want to again, say thank you to all y'alls out

there that have been sending me pictures of where you listen to the podcast from.

It's great to see the areas where you are and oh my God.

I got to tell you when I get a postcard in the mail, it just totally makes my day.

It's so cool.

Getting old school postcards from all over the world, you guys are awesome.

I'm so glad.

You're my listeners.

Glad you love the podcast.

We're going to get into some good stuff here today.

I've got a few thoughts I want to share with.

And then we're going to jump into the show.

You know, I spent not that much time on the distraction machine, AKA

Facebook, and, you know, I've got conversations I have with practitioner,

other practitioners, friends, and such something that I've noticed about us as

a group of folks, as a group of people, we tend to argue a lot with each other.

And really this is nothing new.

I mean, if you pick up a copy of unfolds, non-judging, you'll see in the

commentaries that practitioners have been arguing and debating over our medicine

for centuries, the distraction machine.

Yeah.

It has enclaves where members of similar thought can gather and

recount the sins of those idiots over there and what they think.

We seem to divide up into camps, schools, and clubs.

I don't think it's our fault.

It appears to be something in human nature.

For some reason, we have an opinion about those who speak with an accent

that's different than our own.

And it's curious to me, because at the same time, we're

arguing, we are all working for.

Basic set of principles that we share.

We agree that the endless permutations of a union young give rise to this

phenomenal world, the residences of the five phases allows us to understand

something of how things generate an arise, create a homeodynamic

balance and also how they decline.

And then there's the six climatic influences.

You know, these are like arc types that help us to orient, to time and space

and understand something of nature is reliable influence on our physiology.

It's so easy to get lost in the 10,000 things, TCM classic Chinese

medicine, five element neuro balance, Joe Bob's magic needles.

We all have ways to draw a distinction between what we do

and what the competition is up to.

But at the end of the day, we really are much more alike than we are different.

We just have different ways of taking a handful of.

And seeing how they play out in our lives and practices.

It's really easy to focus on our differences and get protective

about our point of view.

We're territorial animals.

I suspect it's baked into being an incarnated being, and I suspect that

we have a lot to learn from each other as well, especially when we have

different perspectives on the basics.

Curiously, how something that you think would unite us so often divides us.

One of my impulses behind qiological was to create a space where we have an

opportunity to listen more than debate, create enough time, space and curiosity

to thoughtfully listened to another's point of view, to take more than the small

moments of a sound bite or a distraction machine comment, and to thoughtfully

consider a point of view that comes from the years of practice of one of our kids.

I'm sitting down with a cup of tea.

You have Dr.

Ed Neal on the other end of the microphone today, ed has been trained

as a conventional medical doctor, and then he got interested in accurate.

He's licensed in both.

In addition, he's gone deep into the study of the Chinese language.

He's the director and a senior researcher at the Institute.

Um, check out on the show notes page.

I'll have links for all that stuff over you there for y'all.

So you can check out this stuff.

If old school medicine is your thing, there's also some

information I'll have there from the journal of Chinese medicine.

Ed wrote a three piece article on an aging acupuncture, which was a

great place to start on this stuff if you're not familiar with it.

And actually it's the subject of our talk today, aging acupuncture, old school

medicine, and welcome to qiological.

Thanks.

It's a pleasure to be

with you.

I think I'm always looking forward to the conversations with the people I have.

There's so much interesting stuff in our medicine and.

You know, we talk about the nature.

Everyone talks about the nature thing, but you guys really get into it.

And I want to find out more about that in a moment, but first I'm curious

to know what drew you to Chinese

medicine.

Oh, that's an interesting story.

As, as you mentioned, I was, uh, started life as a physician and my track was

going to be that I was going to study surgical intensive care and be a

surgical, intensive care researcher.

I was all set up to do that, but I decided to take one year off

to be a primary care doctor, just to get a little more experience.

And when I was doing that, I became interested in the question

of why people don't get better.

So the people that were coming into the clinic basically fell into two groups.

One, one was the group that I could help.

And the other was the group that I couldn't help.

And interestingly, What happens is the people that you can help.

They tend to go away and you don't see them anymore.

Well, the people that you can't help tend to come back and see you every week.

So after about six months, you have a big collection of people that you

really don't have much to do for.

That's an interesting thing, isn't

it?

It is.

And it's, uh, so that becomes a physician's practice, um, pretty quickly.

Uh, and so I became interested in that question.

What do we do with people we can help?

And I decided to look in different traditions with the

idea that they may have had ideas.

For things that we didn't, uh, that we didn't know.

And when I started to research that I decided to look at traditions that

either had been in practice for a long time, you know, 2000 years, something

like that, or to look at techniques that were used across different cultures that

were not in relationship to each other.

So for example, cupping is an example of a technique that's used in Africa, in Asia,

in the Pacific area islands and so forth.

So the idea there is, if something is used across different

cultures, it probably has a value.

Or if something has been used for more than 200 years, it probably has a value.

The value might be psychological, but people are.

Uh, pragmatic and they don't tend to use things for a long period of time

that don't work, especially when you're dealing with healthcare and illness,

which has such an immediate need.

So the two medical traditions I was looked at were Ayurvedic or Indian

medicine and Chinese medicine.

And I just had a bent to Asia and, uh, um, China.

And so I went that way.

And at the same time, I was, um, working in a refugee health clinic

and there was a, in Portland, there's the Institute of nutritional medicine

founded by Cipollini Dharma, Nanda.

You may know him.

And so he worked with me to use Chinese herbs for the patients in

the refugee health clinic, uh, who didn't have access to healthcare.

So that's how I got my first foot in the door as it were.

That's

great.

I I'm really struck by your question.

And it's such a simple question.

I think a lot of us can easily overlook it.

Why is it that people aren't getting better?

You know, people asked me, uh, how I got into this.

And my first response is often, I don't understand why more people are not asking

this question because you know, I'm not the only physician with that problem.

And it's a very interesting, um, topic, why people don't look into

nutritional medicine as an option.

So you look at people who have been dealing with the same problems.

We've had malaria, tuberculosis cancer.

It's just as serious and destructive to them.

If you look at the introduction to the Shanghai, Lune and John James talking

about how his family members are dying and the epidemics are wiping people out,

people have the same problems and they need to come up with concrete solutions

and they've thought about it in depth.

So.

Why we don't look at those traditions is very strange in

itself from a Western point of view.

And the answer that I've come to myself is that it has to do with, uh, developmental

phases and the phase of adolescence.

So if you look at, uh, Western science, it came out of the blocks

very quickly, um, in the last century.

And so it was like the young adolescent book can do anything who doesn't need to

listen to their parents, knows everything.

And kind of the hallmark of becoming an adult is you learn that you don't

know everything and you have to get help in other ways and so forth.

So I think this.

Tend to see, not to look in the past from the west is

actually a phase of adolescence.

My hope is actually that soon we're, we're at the point where

it's about to change and I see it more and more that people are.

If you look at the fields of biomimicry, where people are starting to look at

the patterns of nature and things like that, I think it's beginning to change.

But it's an interesting question.

Why we don't look in traditions?

Yeah, well, I, I think too, as practitioners and I'm just

going on my own experience here, I think it takes a certain amount of

experience and maturation to be able to entertain a question like that.

Because certainly when we're beginning, at least when I was beginning, I'm

thinking I got this stuff, I can do this.

I got medicine, that'll handle this.

I can make this work.

And it takes a whole lot of humbling failure to go.

What am I actually doing here?

And why are these people not getting.

It's interesting.

When you look at the phases of the development of a healthcare

practitioner who made, usually you learn something you're full

of confidence in the beginning, everything seems to go right, usually.

And then there's a period where it all starts to go wrong, where people

don't have the same responses.

You start to see the complications.

Um, things like that.

The cases you can't handle in Western medicine, it's more magnified because

when things go wrong, people die Chinese medicine, where they go wrong, you

know, they, it's not nearly as bad.

And then you go through that phase for awhile and then you come out

the other side and then you start to be a mature practitioner.

So it's actually not until, you know how things can go wrong, that you

start to become a good practitioner.

I had an ERB teacher who.

I remember him saying this was a long time ago.

Now I remember him saying, you can say that you understand an or, or you

understand a formula when you've used it and it's worked and you know why,

and you've used it and it hasn't worked.

And you know why, then you can say, you understand it.

I think there's a God in heaven, that's specific to new practitioners

who kind of grants them a, a period of time where things go, right.

But then they re re-send that.

So you actually learn how to be a practice.

Right.

You know, either that, or we have these blinders on and we're not

seeing the complexity of what's there, where we're are, we're overlooking,

you know, what might be there.

I mean, I have people come into my clinic, you know, and they'll say

things like, well, I'm doing better.

And I used to just go, oh, patient doing better.

And I would pat myself on the back.

And some time ago I started going, oh, you're doing better.

Well, how do you know you're doing better?

What's different.

How do you know you're better?

And that's would start dredging up all kinds of stuff, because

sometimes they weren't better.

They were being nice.

Right.

And sometimes it would bring up complexities that I hadn't

seen in earlier visits.

Right.

And it, if you look at patient encounters too, there's many

things that make a patient better.

There's few things that make a patient different.

I can kind of explain that a little more maybe, but let me hear

more about that.

That you've got my attention with that one.

So if you have a health problem there, I used the analogy

of letting steam out of a teapot.

So, uh, there's a lot of things that kind of make the situation better.

You can get a massage, you can go to counseling, you can get kind of a

non-specific acupuncture treatment.

You can take herbs that benefit your energy and so forth like that.

But in an aging and we have this idea of the illness configuration,

which is means that there's something in the three-dimensional

tissue, planes of your body.

That's holding an illness in place.

So we differentiate changing that, which makes you different than

letting pressure off of symptoms.

It makes people feel better.

And you can tell that by the pulse actually.

So say a person comes in, they have a symptom complex and they

have a certain pulse pattern with a winery quality or, or whatever.

Um, and you treat them and their symptoms are better.

I mean, then you say that the winery pulse quality is better.

And so you think they've improved and they are actually better, but the configuration

that's holding the wire equality in the pulse configuration is still there.

We call that the configuration of illness.

It's something that sets up in the three-dimensional matrix of the body.

So when we're treating patients, we're of course trying to make their

symptoms better, really what we're looking at is how to change that

three-dimensional illness configuration.

So we make that differentiation.

All right.

So I've

got a couple of questions about that.

First of all, the first place my mind goes is, oh, well, we're

talking root and branch here.

One, you know, one ways you can help with symptoms.

One of the dangers of helping with symptoms is that you might actually

take the batteries out of a smoke alarm.

Yeah, that

could be, I mean, there's, there's, uh, maybe, maybe not something

to consider, but I hear I'm hearing you talk about three dimensional tissue plane.

Tell us more about that.

Cause when I think about roots, I think about Oregon function may be

Zang Fu quality of the blood, blood stagnation, that kind of thing.

Three-dimensional tissue

planes, right?

So this goes to kind of a deeper question of the kind of material we get out of

classical texts or the like the Nanjing texts in particular, where we work and

the information generally falls into two different categories and one is

treatment specific, um, information and the other is system specific.

So for example, treatment specific is there's a certain

herb or a certain acupuncture protocol that's in the classics.

That's good for malaria.

So, um, something like artemisinin and malaria would be an example of that.

You find something very specific and those things are of great value,

but system specific means that we.

Look at the body or, or an illness like cancer, an entirely different

way generated on, uh, a different viewpoint, a different ideas.

So the idea of a three-dimensional matrix is, is related to the second

one, the systems level information.

So that means that we go into the nature thing and we do a

lot of translation research.

We look at characters, there's a whole process.

We go through to evaluate the information.

And then we look at what the story, the, the picture of what they're giving about

what nature is or what the body is.

So for example, the three-dimensional matrix idea comes from the idea and

then aging, that the body is divided into five different tissue planes.

Uh, so for example, we have one for each direction and those.

The fact that nature is a phenomenon of breath.

So it's moving in and out.

Things are changing all the time.

And when that breath consolidates into the body, it expresses

in different tissue planes.

Tell me if this is too complicated, it gets a little sophisticated here.

No, this is no, this is good.

I'm following.

And I suspect our listeners.

I bet they're

following.

Let me start back to the beginning of the universe here and then we'll get to that.

So, uh, so in, in the nature, and the idea is that the world is

basically a phenomenon of motion.

And so if you go way back down into the university's deepest

level, it's a tendency to move where we call it to breathe.

So movement means to move out from a source and return to

the source to back and forth.

It's not just a one-way motion.

It's a cyclical motion.

Call that motion.

So the nature being one of the keys to understanding the nature thing is that

it's entirely a book about space, time, motion, and then how those patterns

affect the practice of medicine.

So you have this tendency of the universe to breathe and it's

moving back and forth, and then it moves through different states.

In some places you see it moving around in circles.

Like if you look out in the, I think galaxies with the Hubble telescope,

or you look up at the stars, At other places, it looks like waves.

Like if you're looking at the ocean in the body, those tendency,

that tendency to move expresses through different tissue planes.

So we have, when we talk about the different tissue planes,

we're talking about the different aspects of a breath in form.

So for example, the Eastern direction, or what we call would is that the tendency

of the breath to move, to start its breath outwards, to inhale, to start

spraying or the morning and so forth.

And each direction has a different quality and they're associated

with different tissue planes.

So for example, if you're looking at the Eastern aspect of a brown.

Consolidated in the body, it looks like a liver, uh, spread

out through the tissue planes.

It looks like connective tissue.

Uh, it opens into the eye and the nails.

And

so these are resonances that we all learned in our first

quarter of acupuncture school.

Right.

Right.

So instead of differentiating, there's a thing, that's a liver and there's a thing.

That's a muscle and there's a thing.

That's an eye.

Uh, what we imagine from that description is a three-dimensional.

Matrix box.

So if you can have this in your eye, um, I'm remembering the board, do you

remember the board from star Trek?

And they came in that big cube, right?

So anyway, I imagined a non nefarious three-dimensional cube like that, or

a three-dimensional matrix structure.

It has, it's basically breath, motion consolidating into

shoes in different ways.

So we don't have distinct organs, but we have this matrix.

And then what the, what the nature thing tells us is that the, the

primary illness of a person is when a freezing of the space-time breath

takes up in that tissue matrix.

So for example, and that's called a bee syndrome by the way in aging.

So that means something happens, uh, that sets up a place where the

tissue matrix is not breathing.

And so then the tissue matrix is trying to breathe, but the place where the beast

syndrome is obstructed, it can't breathe.

And it sends out obstructions into the tissue network.

So that where these syndrome is initially set up is usually clinically silent.

We see, but it causes expression somewhere else.

So for example, you have a bee syndrome, you have that freezing

of the space-time breath one place, but it's actually going to affect

the lungs through, in a distant way.

Does that make sense?

Yes, it ties.

So this is things like, oh, grief can cause asthma,

right.

But also for example, a, a problem you had in your kidney as a child could cause.

So that's now been healed, but at least a trace say they did surgery and there's

a scar there for example, or something.

So you imagine this three-dimensional breathing matrix and it's a

problem way down there, but because of your constitution, it's

causing asthma way over there.

So, uh, we call that the configuration of illness, which means your body's breathing

pattern is stuck in a certain way.

So that's going way back to the very beginning, when we were talking

about what it means to let and to make symptoms a little better versus

changing, making them different.

I I'm sorry.

I can get a little heady pretty quickly with this stuff.

I don't experience this as heady.

I experienced this as slow down.

We're not just trying to fix someone's asthma.

What's happening here.

What happened here?

Well, what's happening first.

Maybe that'll lead us to what happened, what happened earlier?

So the nature thing says that there's depending on how you look at

it, about eight things that caused these problems to make you sick.

And I have to preface this by saying, this is a very different

way of thinking than we're used to.

It usually takes a little bit of time to let this work on you, but kind of

to give you the cliff note version

problem, or we just saw a patient with porphyria, which is a genetic disease.

Everybody has it in her family line.

That's a prenatal cause of DJing a sense.

Um, you can have a problem when your mother is pregnant with you.

So there can be a stress when you're, when you're developing in the wool

and then there's postnatal causes.

The postnatal causes are.

The first one, probably the biggest one is things that are

not of you that are in you.

That goes to the idea of guests and hosts, which is a big

concept in the nature thing.

And for the nature thing, a lot of that was environmental.

So cold is in you.

Dampness is in you, heat is in you.

It's an environmental thing that comes into your body.

It's a physical thing, not a metaphor.

It comes into your body where you're not inhabiting yourself or

not where you're not protected.

So that's a big one, but you can also say now, um, what we're

seeing as an epidemic right now is environmental toxins and people.

So air pollution is like that chemotherapy you get injected

is like that and so forth.

So they're foreign things that are in you that are not of you.

Another class's emotional problems, but talks about emotional

problems in a different way.

So we don't separate the mind in the body, of course.

And it's not, it's not a model of, it's not a psychological

model of, of emotional problems.

It's that they, they compare the emotions to weather patterns.

So for example, and they're related to the form of your body.

So if your liver has a problem, anger is a response because the liver is

the organ of springtime in spring.

The plants have to push the earth away.

Anger is that force of pushing something off you.

And so it's related to form, but we see when people have emotional

problems, as it changes, function and form, it changes blood flow.

So for example, when you grieve, it changes the way the blood runs

to your lungs and your chest.

And, uh, so, so number two would be emotional problems.

Another one would be where you live.

So every place has its own kind of illness.

Another one would be trauma and so forth.

So there's a few of these things and none of them are for example,

cancer, infectious diseases, diabetes.

So it's very much an ecological model of illness where, um, those things

like cancer and infectious diseases, diabetes set up when the breathing

system isn't working, but they're not the primary causes of the illness.

So we have a few causes of illness and then we have a diagnostic

system to find these obstructions in the breathing pattern.

And the challenge for us is that often the obstructions in the

breathing pattern are silent.

They're hidden and they can be small.

Whereas the illness is expressing itself quite

plainly.

It would be easy to follow a red herring.

It's very easy.

And so there's a variety of ways.

We find that syndrome in the body.

One is through the history.

So in the history, we're looking for things that we call inflection points.

And, uh, so usually in a person's life, they'll, there'll be born.

They have a certain constitution and then they turned along, down the

road and then they meet an event.

And then at the event they take a right turn and then there's a series of

things that happen on their path for it.

So for example, something happens and then they get fibromyalgia and then

they get this and then they get that.

And then they, they end up with a lot of medical problems, but

they all start with an event which we call the inflection point.

And the inflection point is usually sometimes it's easy.

Sometimes it's not easy to find, but often it'll be heralded by the

patients saying this one phrase we hear over and over again, which is,

and nothing was ever the same again.

So typically say a person will, here's an example of personal fallout of a

boat when they're six into a really cold lake and they'll have the sense

that they got way too cold for them.

And then they'll start having health problems and then you'll

see them when they're 45.

And when you go back to that place, they'll say I knew something was wrong and

nothing was ever the same after that time.

And I told my doctor that, of course Chris, they said that was crazy.

And of course what was happening, there was a cold invasion was

coming into the body and it threw off the breathing pattern.

And what's so interesting about these, um, these, these syndromes are these

freezings of the space-time breath has that they encapsulate in time.

They're like time capsules.

So if you took that person who was six and saw them when they were 90,

that part in the tissue plane, where the cold was set up will be exactly

the same as when they were six.

And so when you take it out, smells come will come out.

That were there from that day and memories will come out.

It's actually quite extraordinary that way, but the trick for us is to find them.

So then the other way we find him is by using Neijing diagnostic

techniques, such as the pulse system and other things like that.

Um, so we have a whole system now of how to evaluate those things,

but that's the basic setup of this

taking a moment to let this sink in here.

Uh, I would say that, uh, what's so amazing about this is that

the niching model that we've been excavating cause an aging really is

like an archeologic logical site.

It's like a, it's like text archeology.

So we're, we're working in the psych, pulling things out, dusting them off.

I'm trying to understand them.

But that one model of illness is really a revolutionary concept because it's a

unified theory of why people get sick.

And it has, uh, so for example, if I walked into the OHS U, which is our

medical school here, where I was trained, walked down, the hospital corridor, every

patient in every room will have some version of this, according to this idea.

And for every patient that is being, that is seen by the healthcare.

So, if you think of the implications of that, it means that potentially you

can take this very low tech medicine, a box of needles, some herbs, whatever

you're using, you're using them in a different way and go into every hospital

room and make them significantly better.

Even if they have a very serious illness, in some cases just curing them outright.

But even if you're not carrying them out, right.

Making the response to medications, hospital, stay all

those things much, much better

because you're not making them better.

You're making them different.

We're making them different.

And what you're doing is you're moving, why the illness is

being held in its configuration.

So if you think of cancer, for example, people tend to think of cancer as this

really aggressive thing, like a ninja that comes into your house or a nicest

terrorist, and gets you in malicious too.

And malicious and evil.

The nature has an interesting sense.

There's a passage about that, about, uh, do these things.

Do they have malicious intent?

And it's like, no, that's just like the way it basically, uh,

but anyway, you have cancer.

Um, that's the image of it.

What we find is that actually is pretty lazy and your body is

actually an amazing oncologist.

You're making cancer cells all the time.

It deals with them while you're eating breakfast.

No problem.

So when we look back at the history of cancer using this model, we typically

find not always, but typically find that something was set up 25 years ago.

In the holding pattern and that the body's been dealing with that imbalance.

And finally, at a certain point, it just can't do it anymore.

And cancer starts to develop.

So then the person will go to the oncologist and then it's

viewed like this ISIS terrorist.

So then the response is first

or paying attention to that very loud thing and totally

missing that silence, small thing that you were referring to earlier,

right.

And it's frightening and can kill you and, and, and so forth.

And so then the response is to, you know, cut it out.

So now you have a place that's been impaired.

So a tumor grew there and then surgery happens, which impairs it even more.

And then radiation happens and then pairs it even more.

And then hemo comes into the equation and that's a whole different issue.

The whole, the

whole system gets her.

Right.

But the one thing that is holding that, that tissue plane matrix that allowed

the cancer to grow hasn't been changed.

So what we find what's staggering to us is that if you can find that

thing, that's holding everything in place, really serious illnesses

start to reverse themselves relatively rapidly on something.

In some occasions it's really quite startling.

Can

you give us an example, a case study of, uh, of this?

I mean, this is, I mean, I listened to this and I go, that makes sense.

That makes sense.

Given what I've learned and continued to learn about Chinese medicine, that

all fits the thing that I'm so curious about at this moment is that small,

invisible thing, you know, that, that thing that's like in the background, it's

got this cloak of invisibility around.

And yet, I don't know if it's fair to say it's pulling the strings,

but everything's reacting to it.

Yeah, sure.

I can.

You know, I started to translate in the late nineties and I was figuring things

out and early two thousands doing a lot of translation work, trying to figure

out what's going on in here and, um, started using it, trying to understand

how to use it about 2005, 2006, one of the first patients who came to see

me as I was beginning to unravel this.

A woman with, um, I had neck cancer, she'd had, it was pretty advanced.

She'd had one reconstructive surgery of her neck or are they taking the tumor out?

And they were about to do a second one and put in a feeding tube and they thought

her life span was pretty, uh, limited.

And, uh, but they were going to do this for palliation, do some

grafting, take out the tumor so she could eat and so forth like that.

And she wanted to have a treatment to prepare for the surgery.

And so we started to work and I was starting to use these

new techniques and ideas.

And, uh, we, I think I saw her for maybe six weeks, maybe eight

weeks, something like that.

But I kept looking at the tuber.

We, we looked at it together.

You could see it in her mouth.

And we kept saying, you know, it's getting, it's getting smaller and,

um, it's getting smaller and smaller.

And then.

She went into, um, well, she had a, she had a living wake at this time.

She thought she was going to live about a two months, maybe.

So she didn't want to

miss her own week.

No.

So she had a living wage for instance, where you can have all your friends,

they come and I was invited to this.

So I went to, and everybody went around and said what they thought, you

know, now they're going to miss her.

And then I got up and said, you know, it seems to be, you're

getting better, not worse.

I don't think you're going to die.

And then sat up.

That was my contribution to living awake.

People were kind of shocked by that.

And, uh, I just had a feeling because it looked like it was getting better.

And then when they did the surgery, what they found, where the tumor was,

was inflammatory tissue and not tumor.

So that's something we've seen that was previously not thought

to be possible, which is that a tumor regresses to normal tissue.

That's just not thought to be possible.

Right.

That would be impossible.

That would be impossible, but it, but we do see that and it goes back through

the stages of granulation tissue tissue, which is the tissue that you see after

surgery and turns into flammatory tissue.

And then it turns back into normal tissue.

So then the surgeon was quite shocked by that.

And she went home and I just got a birthday card from her that was about,

uh, I guess 11 years ago for wow.

And I didn't even do follow-up because of logistics.

So no follow-up and I think they're looking at a suspicious area in her

mouth was her last, um, message.

But I that's without any follow-up treatment after 11 years.

So now I have to say also that it's, sometimes it's hard.

Sometimes we're successful.

Sometimes we're not, we're still in the learning process.

There's an art to it and so forth.

So it's not just a magical cure for things, but the fact that you can do that.

Number one, if you could make it a cancer, go back to normal

tissue, that's an amazing thing.

And that the fact that you can do that with a box of needles that costs $5

and can be used anywhere in the world.

That's an amazing thing.

So I'll give you an analogy.

If tomorrow in the New York times, it said a pill has been discovered

that treats the cause of a factor that's present in all illnesses.

And it costs $5 and has very little side effects that it can

be used anywhere in the world.

That's kind of what we're looking at.

Um, so the, the implications of this are really huge.

That's

not a small statement.

Yes.

So that's when I started to see that, that's why I quit my job.

And in 2011 and founded the ShaoYin Institute.

And, you know, our mission is to study traditional texts, to look for solutions

for current global health problems.

But it's really, that was the background to why I left to do that.

Because if you look at the implications for that, they're just huge.

So also, if you take another example, like malaria tuberculosis, and in the

nature thing, we have this idea of the disease equilibrium, which means that

if you look at an illness like cancer, malaria, Ebola, whatever, you don't

have to kill all the cancer cells.

You don't have to kill all the Ebola viruses, diseases exist on an equilibrium

either, and they're either getting worse or they're getting better.

So for example, if you have a cancer, you don't have to kill the cancer cells.

If it's getting 10% worse every month, you just have to shift the equilibrium back.

So there's getting five or 10% better every month and

you're going backwards on it.

Um, so if you take that idea of that disease equilibrium, And you take a

disease like tuberculosis, which has currently a real problem around the world.

About a quarter of the people in the world have tuberculosis.

A lot of it's resistant.

A lot of people are living in tuberculosis, hospitals around the world.

You take that same model and the ecological model or

the disease configuration model of we're talking about.

It means all you have to do for those people is to shift them five or

10%, the other way, by changing the configuration, that's allowing the

infection to set up and grow with.

And then you see things going backwards.

So you're talking about changing the

trajectory.

Right.

And then, so if you extrapolate that out, the implications of this are, are huge.

Yeah.

I want to bring something in and see if this fits.

Yeah.

So, you know, in preparation for our conversation today, I like

to look at people's websites.

I'll often pull down an article that they've got and read through it.

And I was looking through one of yours from the journal of Chinese medicine.

I think it was number two.

And you had the character Lee in there.

Which I, I think you, uh, translate is ontological patterning.

I often think of Lee as this kind of coherence that runs through things, right?

I mean, if you, if you look in some of the dictionaries, they'll say

it's the grain in a piece of wood, it's the pattern in a piece of Jade.

I sometimes think of it as the texture of how a fabric is woven together.

There's this, it's not really a structure, but it's it, but it

shows the structure so to speak.

And I'm wondering how Lee might fit in with these, um, you know, more

Xing, you know, form sorts of things that you're, that we're talking about

here.

So, yeah, Lee is that it's a critical idea in Chinese medicine,

like you're saying, and important character in the nature thing.

So the basic idea and the nature thing is, um, You have this

breadth motion in the universe.

We are deep in space.

It's moving through different states and so forth.

Most of it's tangible, excuse me, intangible.

And sometimes it's tangible.

So for example, just to take a side track here, if we look at the, kind

of the debate between energy and form, we make that dichotomy in our

minds, what's energy, what's formed.

That's a big stumbling block for us.

Of course, that doesn't really exist.

What we have is patterns of motion that are sometimes intangible are mostly

intangible and sometimes tangible.

And they're constantly going back and forth between each other like that.

So the model of the nature thing is that out in space,

mostly it's intangible motion.

So they described it as a kind of music, a vibration, but as it comes down into the

earth, it starts to become more tangible.

The patterning is called the image or the shaoyang it's the character shaoyang

it means a pattern of energetic motion.

As it starts to come into the biosphere, it starts to become

semi tangible as climate.

So you see clouds and wind and you feel things that are semi tangible.

And then it comes down into the planet and becomes tangible things like a body

or tree or rock or sand or whatever.

One of the important ideas in the Nanjing is that nature patterns, its forms to

maximize the efficiency of the energy, circulations that move through them.

That's kind of a, another deep concept there, but it means that if you, if,

if a plant's growing in a situation where the energy is rising and falling

every day in relationship to the sun, That it will form passageways for

that energy to move through the plant or the tree as easily as possible.

Those passageways are called.

And that's why you have the idea of graining patterns.

So that's also how we have a channel system.

So the wisdom of the, of the nature scientists, when they were writing,

this was that they looked at the forms of nature and they said the forms of

nature, not, they're not that important in and of themselves, but they're

important because they tell us about the patterns that made the forms.

And so you can reverse engineer, or you can look at a form and work backwards

to understand the pattern that made it.

If you understand this principle that forms are made to maximize

the ease of the circulation patterns that move through them.

So that circulation moves through those graining patterns.

So for example, in the body, we have fascial reining patterns,

which we call channels and blood and nerves runs through those patterns.

So in the nature thing, um, a grain of a fascia is called a gene or a channel.

And if there's blood running through it, it's called nudging my, or a

blood river, but they all are in these graining patterns, which are called Lea.

So, um, Lee has that.

The basic idea of Lee is how the, the patterns of motions are imprinted on

the forms of nature in their quest to make things as efficient as possible.

So the form shows us something of the li it's, the Lee made

visible.

So for example, if you cut a tree down and you see all the rings and you see

where a tree scientists, there'd also be these passageways, that asylum, the

flat under kind of there's passageways to take things down and there's passage

ways on the inside that take things up, just like getting young passageways.

So there's their openings in the tree.

For those cyclical patterns to move, say the up and down

motion related to the sun cycle.

So they make openings in the tree for the, for that circulation to move.

And those openings are called Lee or our grains.

And then the body is imprinted on the same pattern.

It's actually an aging it's compared very much to a tree.

Um, so we have up and down patterns in our body that are formed

because we live in this world with sun cycles, moving up and down.

So our body makes space for those patterns that are moving through us.

And those are graining patterns in our fascia.

If they're up and down patterns, we call them DJing patterns.

If they're radial patterns that go out to the surface, we call them low patterns.

So would the law patterns be.

I'm trying to put this together in my mind here, these things, I go radio, they go,

I'm sorry.

You know, the problem with this topic is it gets pretty heady pretty

quick that, uh, you know, it's a, we call it, we say it's, uh, and a

lot of these are ideas are different than the way we think in the west.

So they have to work on you for awhile.

Well, and

they're even different than how we think if we're Chinese medicine

practitioners and, and, and we've received the standard Chinese medicine

education, I don't want to come down on that and say, it's good, or it's bad.

It's.

You know, it, it, it's a piece of tradition.

It's what we all need to do to get a license.

So we can start to actually learn a thing or two.

Right.

You know, one of the things that really surprised me when I started

digging into the niching was what, how different the narrative was

than what I'd ever heard before.

So that was really clear.

How has

studying the nature thing in this way changed your

thinking about medicine in general?

Oh, I have to say study the data has changed my

opinion on just about everything.

Um, because first and foremost, it's not, it's not a text about medicine.

It's a texts about how the universe operates and answering basic questions.

Like what is the meaning of life and what is religion and, uh,

what happens to you after you die?

They're all kind of in these ideas and they all, but they all go

back to a central idea and it's a unified theory of the cosmic.

And then they're using that, those basic ideas to talk about medicine.

But first it's actually a book about how the cosmos operates.

So it's first and foremost, a book of cosmology,

right?

And the key to unlocking the aging is to understand that everything

you're talking about is, uh, related to space, time, motion, patterns.

It's about how it's basically how the universe operates.

And it's a unified theory of the cosmos.

And it all goes back to this very basic idea that if you kind of go way, way

back into the cosmos at its origin, its most essential quality again is

this is this tendency to move or to breathe, to move out, to move back.

And we call that meaning young.

So what happens is if you start with the correct assumption that

everything you see, whether it's politics or economics or your marriage

or medicine is all an expression of.

Then all sorts of research doors fly open for you.

So also what it means to be human.

For example, you change your idea of that.

So I can say that these ideas have changed just about everything.

I think about everything and, but it's taken a while.

So.

We have the idea of circular learning when we teach.

And it's also a study classical texts.

You don't kind of run through them and then move on to the next book.

You read a passage and then you read it over again, and then you

read it over again and it keeps working on you in a different way.

But as you do that, if you pay that intention, if you have

that intention to dialogue with it, it'll start to work on you.

And so that over time w you'll be a, you become a much different person.

Yeah.

So this isn't, this, isn't the kind of thing where I'm

going to go to a weekend workshop.

I'm going to learn some things that are going to help me on Monday

morning, help people feel better.

No, actually we have, we can work shops and we teach things and

on Monday they go and they see the body in a different way and it helps

them.

Can you give me an example of, of what some of those are?

Yeah.

Uh, so for example, it's, uh, the aging system has things that are,

would be correlated to acupuncture points, but it's not primarily an

acupuncture point based system.

It's, uh, it's, it's better.

It's more accurate to think of it as a type of external

surgery, ecological surgeries.

What is the term I use, which means it's describing the body as an

ecology full of rivers and mountains and streams and oceans, and, and

your job is to make those rivers.

Flow.

Well, basically.

And so in a weekend workshop, we show people how to look at the body and

see where rivers go and evaluate.

Once you get that in your head, that you're looking at an ecology, all sorts

of clinical findings, jump out of you out to you on your palpation and visual

examination that weren't there before.

You say things that if you understand the river system, then often the clinical

findings become really obvious to you.

And that actually comes pretty quickly.

There's techniques you can learn that are very strong.

You can use pretty quickly, but if you want to use the system

as it is, that's not a weekend.

You know, if you want to be a proficient Neijing physician or the higher level

of physician, as they spoke about that's where you're on a path and you have to.

Work with the text and let it inform you and change.

You have to come back to it, study it over time.

So usually in our classes, um, you know, that's, um, people will come and

you will get a historical understanding of the text and you will learn things

that you can use in your clinic.

But if you want to take this path to understanding things in a deeper way,

it, it, that is a life path to, I would say, just like any, any good practice.

So there's a way that us as practitioners, we focus differently.

We can learn to shift our perception.

We're not so much looking at channels and points in the function of the points.

We're looking at an ecosystem.

I mean, we often use the metaphor of our kind of medicine is like

manna is like tending to regard.

I mean, we often say that maybe we don't often do that.

It sounds like you're, you're helping people garden differently.

Yes.

It's that.

And if you think of an average practitioner, a lot of time

is spent in their head.

Sometimes we're in our head thinking, you know, what point

combinations or what herbs, or what am I going to add in this system?

It's much more looking at where, what the body feels like, what it

looks like and trying to image.

We use images of technology.

So imagining the most beautiful river you could see there and

then look at that river where it goes, and what's the difference.

And if there's a difference there, what do you need to do to fix it?

Okay.

So could we try this out for a moment?

Sure.

Okay.

I had a patient yesterday who who's actually a real

conundrum to me at the moment.

Okay.

And so, so maybe I can get a little consultation on the air here and

demonstrate my ignorance of that.

Because I want to see if I can get a different, when you talk about

imaging and being able to, you know, to look differently, I want to see if

I can play with my perception here.

Okay.

And, uh, maybe we can all learn a little thing or two from this.

So, uh, first patient, first time I saw him, he's 65.

He has a horse farm.

He moves all the time.

He's got a pulse, like an athlete set, slow Lopi, kind of pulse.

He's lean, he's muscular and lean, but he's got a little bit of a DEMA below

the knees and the left leg and a lot of a DEMA below the knee and the right leg.

It's puffy.

And it's hard when you press on it and let your fingers up.

It turns white to Tozer all a demic as well.

And his tongue is pale.

It completely covered with a whitish coat, but it also has a, you

know, very notable kind of Greazy white pasty newness to it as well.

And he denies any digestive issues.

And I look at this and my first thought is, okay, is this a kidney issue?

It's in the lower body?

The, the, uh, the, the fluids are pulling here.

Is it a, is it a middle burner?

Not transforming the fluids?

Uh, you know, cause I look at that tongue and I go, wow, that looks good.

I just have issue.

But he completely denies digestive issues.

Um, or is it an upper burner lung issue somehow?

Not, not dealing with the fluid.

And his pulse is this it's kind of big and full and it's very stair-step.

So it's weaker in the kidney position starts to come up more in the Guan and

then you get up into the soil and it's, it's actually kind of big and floating.

So I look at this and you've just heard me describe what I've seen.

I honestly don't know where to begin with this cat.

So, uh, what was his concern when he came in?

Was it the swelling?

It's, it's the swelling and the edema in his legs.

Oh, and let me add, he's been through all the Western tests as hard as good.

His kidney.

Function's fine.

Yeah, it goes

without saying every patient we see is like that.

Right.

He's I mean, he's, he checks out.

Just find no venous insufficiency.

What I would say is, um, that we're going to look much more at the

physicality of the leg than the, the DIA.

So imagine you're, you're like a, you're a farmer in colleges.

So now you go down to the leg, it's worse on the right than the left, you said.

Right.

Okay.

And it's below.

Yep.

And it's the whole leg, um, from the neon down.

So it's not on one channel system.

It's the whole, whole egg.

Okay.

So what we're going to look at there is we're going to image the river

systems that run through the lower leg.

Those are problem, primarily the, the lower young meaning the stomach what's

now called the stomach channel, used to be called the stomach, my river.

It was a blood vessel.

Um, the Taiyang my river, which is a blood vessel runs through your calf is

showing in all the kidney, my rivers that runs up across the bottom of your foot.

Those are all blood vessels systems.

They're all running in that acts in that axial pattern up and down.

And I was talking about before, when we were talking about.

And then they, they spread out into yen patterns too.

So they spread out into collateral beds and so collateral beds.

So here's a, there's a lot of terminology issues where terminology has been changed.

So now we have this idea of low as a point or something that kind of divides

off the main channel, but in the nature of the low meant the radial patterns,

like on a tree, you have the trunk and then you have all the branches

and leaves that come off to the side.

Those are low patterns.

So that the trunk is the DJing pattern.

Those are in a union balance.

So the first thing you're saying is that there's congestion

in the low collateral beds.

So in the leg, so everything's congested there.

It's not in the main river, it's all in the tissue under the skin.

So we're going to say that there's a congestion there.

The congestion can be blood, or it can be fluid.

It sounds like in this case, it's wow.

I

think it's a, it's primarily fluid,

right?

So one of the first things we're going to look at is what's the quality of the flow

of the main rivers through there because the collateral beds and the main rivers

are connected in a union relationship.

So if the main rivers, the Yangming river or the kidney river are not flowing

automatically, they cause congestion in the collateral beds because they

have they're in a union balance.

So the first thing is we're going to look at the flow through those river systems

to see if they're working, because if they're not working, it'll automatically

cause congestion in the collateral beds.

Does that make sense?

It makes sense.

I follow that.

So we're going to look at those river systems from their

origins to the terminations.

So for, for example, we're looking at the lower Yangming river system.

This is called running around.

Near ecologists.

You're going to start at the beginning, try and find all the problems on it.

So you're starting way up on the bridge of the nose, where the Yangming river

starts looking at the face down through the throat, looking at its different

branches that go through there.

The main body where they come meet down in the groin and split up.

There's different pathways, also in the aging too.

And we're going to identify problems on that river ecology.

So it could be that we're going to find something up in the groin

where the two branches meet, where the femoral artery is.

That's not working, or it may be something in the back of the knee.

We'll do that for the Taiyang river system, the, the

bottle river to kidney river.

So we're doing an ecological assessment of river flow.

Okay.

And how is it that you're looking?

I mean, do you, haven't like stripped down to their underwear and your you're

actually got your eyeballs on them.

Are you doing this patient?

So every patient, yes.

So this is a huge issue for us in Chinese medicine that we're pulse focused.

Uh, but really every patient needs to be in a gown salmon from head to toe.

Yes.

So we're palpating, we're looking, we're feeling skin quality.

We're looking for box.

We're feeling the quality of tissue, whether it has an adhesion or not.

We're looking at the small blood vessels, whether they're congested at sinew system,

whether it's blocked, it's basically being like an ecological consultant.

What's wrong with this river.

Now the lower leg also it's part of a system that are

called the water shoe regions.

So the aging talks about places where water collects.

When the, when the water functioning is not working well on the body

and that's related to your kidney system, and that sounds like it's

coming up in the pulse and so forth.

So it also may be a collection of water in the water, two regions,

the place where water collects and stagnates when that system and

the water system is not working.

So we would also look at the kidney system and start to, um, assess that issue and

see whether that's pro problem, too.

You can tell somewhat also by looking at his lower back, which is

another place where water stagnates, just above the buttock crease.

That's also part of the water she region.

Um, so those would be the two, two main places we'd start.

Probably it sounds like though you have left and right.

And also it's below the knees.

So my we're also always looking for these things called demarcation places.

And that's where one thing turns into another.

So if above the knee, everything's fine.

And below the knee, everything's not fine.

We're going to look at the knee also very closely to see if there's a

blockage in there with the sinews or something that's causing the problem.

Does that help?

Well, yeah, it does.

I mean, I'm going to have to strip this dude down and, uh, and really take a look.

Yeah.

It's a lot of, there's a lot of palpation and

tissue assessment in our work.

It's like being a farmer or ecologist or we're looking for,

we've got to get your hands

dirty.

Put your boots on.

You gotta get your hands.

Boots and gloves.

Got your home.

Let's just say that I discover from the neon down

congestion from the neon up.

No problem.

And then I'd be looking at some kind of blockage and then

he, so in the knee work on the

knees.

Okay.

It goes back to the idea that the, well, the Acupac, the nature does

have these ideas of acupuncture, caverns, or what we now call points.

Really.

Wasn't a point based system so much, it was a form of external surgery.

So if you look at the nine needles, which were the ancient needle set,

they relate to any doctors are going to tell you that's a surgery.

Really just like what, you'd find an operating room, different

tools for different jobs.

If you look at the techniques, they're not about point activation,

they're about tissue surgery.

So for example, if a, if a problem is in a CGU at the work connects to

a bone, there's a certain needle.

There's a certain technique.

If it's in the middle of the sinew, it's another, so what we're going to

do is go to the knee and then assess which tissue plane is involved.

What, what kind of surgery do we need to do?

Is it in the fat as it in the skin?

Is it a skin be, is it in the organ?

Is it in the bones?

If it's in a sinew as it, where attaches to the bone or other places and so forth.

And so we're going to make a tissue based surgical diagnosis and then choose

needles and techniques for that problem.

So it looks much more like surgery than, um, point at point based acupuncture.

And the beauty of it is if you get it right.

You often see immediate results, which is nice.

If you, if you made the right diagnosis, then you watch and see

the change right in front of you.

So it's not, you put the needle in and then hope next week they come back better.

You'll see something shift quickly.

If it doesn't shift, then we reevaluate because it really, we

want to see things filling up with blood circulate fluid, going down.

It may not all go away, but we want to see it starting to get better.

Okay.

Well that gives me some things to think about until

look for when I see him next week.

And you live in, you live in Missouri St.

Louis, Missouri.

So almost if he works outside almost, uh, you know, very high likelihood.

He has external cold in there somewhere too.

I'm sorry.

He's got one.

Uh, external cold, somewhere in his feet from working outside all the time.

So then there are surgical techniques for how do you take cold out of tissue,

depending on how deep it is and where it's located, but anybody who's worked outside.

And that can be a major issue too.

Okay.

This might be the key actually, because he talked about in December noticing

that his toes felt kind of numb and then later the, uh, the edema showed up.

So maybe his feet got really cold in December and we just

have some cold stagnation

here.

Yeah.

And if he's been working outside all his life, probably,

well, not as whole life.

Yeah.

Actually he used to be, uh, an indoor kind of guy, but he's retired.

He's an outdoor

kind of guy.

So that definitely could be it.

And the trick there.

Is to know the cold is actually, it's a thing.

It's not a concept.

It's not, it's an actual thing.

It has a measurement.

It has a depth.

And the trick with cold is, is that it usually feels like heat when

you feel it in tissue, depending on how much junky the person has.

So if, if you, if coal comes into your body, the first thing

is it does is obstruct flow and obstructing flow brings counterflow.

Another name for that is inflammation or heat.

So the way she that's trying to move through there gets blocked up and

you feel heat on the surface, or you may feel cold depending on how

much energy is pushing against it.

Not much energies there, it feels like coal, but it might feel like.

Hmm.

So that's just a

clinical trial.

I'll watch for that.

And as far as cold being a real thing, I've seen this so often

with cupping, I put a cup on somebody, it turns kind of blue.

It doesn't turn black.

It turns more blue.

You pull the cup off.

It's like opening the door to the refrigerator.

No, absolutely.

And you, you know, we, we see it every day in the clinic.

If you're looking for it and you're treating feel it come out like

a cold wind sometimes, you know, 10, 12 inches off the table, you

can feel it blowing on your hand.

It's kind of incredible.

Yeah, it really is.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, that's, that's helpful.

I, I enjoy the I'm musing meditation.

Aspect of our conversation today.

It's, it's lovely to, to take a deep breath and go all the way

through the universe and in it.

And to note it present here in the body, in, in the ways that we work,

that's a lovely piece of our medicine.

Also very frustrating because it's like, well, how did he grab ahold of that?

Well, you kind of live into it.

I suspect,

I would say one thing else, which is right now, our

practices are somewhat fragmented.

So a per person will be with a certain school or a certain teacher.

And one of the teachings of the Nanjing, I think, is that for the PR the profession

to move forward, it will be helpful to think more in historical terms.

So that means it's not about which one is right.

Is it the old books for the new books or this, that, or the other thing it's

that we understand things historically where it started, what the ideas were,

how they transformed, where it came later, when you add that aspect in a

lot of these problems with different schools or ideas, tend to evaporate.

And so I think that's really critical that we just start to cultivate a better

historical understanding of where we come

from.

We might find some unity where before we seen fragmentation, huh?

Hopefully.

And this has been absolutely delightful.

Uh, anything else that you'd like to add or share before

we, uh, say goodbye for, to.

Uh, no, I would just say that in my experience with students,

this really speaks to some of them.

It confuses others and others just don't want to have much to do with it.

The people who it really does speak to can feel somewhat isolated.

They can be living out in Kansas or wherever, and they

don't have anybody to talk to.

Um, so if they are interested, we do have people who are

studying them with the medicine.

They're welcome to come and take a class and see how it works.

But, um, it can be pretty isolating to be out in the middle of

nowhere and not have that desire.

Not know how to follow up on it.

Well,

conveniently we have the internet these days, which as,

as divisive as it can be, it can also be phenomenally connected.

Yes, that's true.

Great ed, thank you so much for taking the time today.

Thanks for