Misunderstandings of Chinese Medicine.

I just to point out that I believe in Chinese Medicine. Not only have I received treatments, but I have also given treatments for Teet Da as a an assistant. I lived with a Kung Fu Sifu as an aprentice for about a decade.

First of all Traditional Chinese Medicine is different than Shamanism. I'm not saying Shamanism is fake. I'm just saying it's different. Especially for teet da there are Bio-Chemical reactions going on between the medicine and your body, that shouldn't be that hard to understand... it's just that no big studies are being done on it that I know of... in this country anyway. On top of that, every Sifu has his own mixture of medicine. The mass produced stuff is different than the homemade stuff. And I'm sure there are some quacks out there. But there's also Western Doctors who may not have your interest in mind when prescribing certain treatments. People are people.


Also old terms like Air, Sand, and wind (hei, sa fung) being used to describe a symptom or something in your body, doesn't mean you should just laugh at it as nonsense or a belief in spirits. That's just lazy.

Now we've studied human body and microscopic organisms and bio-chemical reactions to the point where we have words like oxygen/respiration and fermentation. We know that there are particles in your blood stream called cholesterol and can build up and block your arteries giving you a stroke, and that there are different types of cholesterol. (Throwing around the word Cholesterol doesn't make you smarter than someone throwing around the word sand necessarily. It's just a vague name of something in your blood.)Wind cannot necessarily hurt you by itself, but the germs and pollen carried in that wind can make you sick or cause an allergic reaction, as well as weaken your immune system so that you can become sick from something you already have.

Just in the same way that we know the Earth rotates, instead of the sun traveling around the earth. But that doesn't mean that every time someone says Sunset we start laughing and calling them an idiot. We still use the same terms but we have a better understanding of their causes.



All that being said.



Chinese Medicine isn't magic, in the ancient sense of the word. It cannot perform Miracles, in the ancient sense of the word. In most cases it is important to treat whatever you have from both perspectives and also look at the strengths and weaknesses of both systems. I wouldn't get surgery to put plates on my broken ankle, because I knew my Sifu's treatment could take care of that. I didn't have Faith or Belief. I just knew that the Doctors telling me I needed plates were either sketchy, or they were ignorant. And I was back walking around within a week and a half. It wasn't a miracle. I understood exactly how it worked and I felt it work.

But when a Doctor in high school said, "oh this thing on your ear looks funny maybe you should get it taken off. Or we could just take part of it off and test it."

I said, "take the whole thing off and then test it." that way I don't have to visit twice. It ended up being just a birthmark and not cancerous. But why take the risk?
Now of course that is a small part of my ear. If they wanted to cut my entire ear off, I would need more evidence. Maybe I would try some alternative treatment first. Maybe. But Cancer is a scary thing. It's better to do what the Western Doctor says and then go to the Chinese Medicine Doctor for help in recovery, or lifestyle changes for prevention. And most Doctor's from both systems should agree when it comes to cancer.

Any Chinese Medicine Doctor saying you don't have to listen to a Western Medicine Doctor when they say you need to have a tumor removed is full of shit. Any Western Medicine Doctor who says that lifestyle, diet, herbal supplements and chi gung exercises are not helpful is equally full of shit.

(of course there are Western Doctors now saying that your men's prostate shouldn't always be removed just because it is enlarged or has a tumor on it. Not all tumors are the same and the affect of the surgery might be more bad than good. But a Doctor of Chinese Medicine would not know more than the general public about something like that, and at most would ask the patient to get a second opinion from another Western Doctor.)


Even if someone believes they could heal something, maybe, without a surgery. If surgery is just easier, it is simply not worth the risk of not having a surgery.



Chinese Medicine is traditionally against surgery because look at what type of technology they had to perform it back then? Surgery is risky and it's getting riskier now that there is antibiotic resistant bacteria.

 But sometimes it is just necessary and shouldn't be avoided.