2025 #10: Traditional Chinese Medicine
Real food! At a market in Chiang Dao, northern Thailand
Dear Friend
Today we are changing gears and direction somewhat.
I heard it said the other day, ‘people have a thousand dreams until they lose their health, and then they have just one dream’…
Anybody who is serious about empowering themselves to make transformational changes to their life must start with their own health and wellness. Don’t take your health for granted, only valuing it when you’ve lost it; value it while you still have it. This will mean you take proactive steps and measures to reach your optimal health, and to then work for the rest of your life to maintain such health and wellbeing.
Optimal health sets you up beautifully for an optimal life.
That means doing research, learning things for yourself, and exploring and experimenting what works for you. There are, however, standard understandings and approaches that work for all humans, and you can get a head start from various reliable sources, including these weekly Letters!
Today is just such a head start, and will give you plenty of keywords to start your own research from…
Do not under any circumstances, in this mad modern world where toxins and poisons have infiltrated every facet of our life, think that health and wellbeing will come to you without any effort on your part. Regular readers of these Letters will well know by now that we have to learn for ourselves the important knowledge and then apply it and live by it (the schools block this crucial information from us).
We have to work for our wellness, and it’s a lifelong task we must undertake.
That’s because the level of health and wellbeing you experience at any one time in your life, and as a general default, is much less the result of your genetic heritage you gained at birth, and much more the consequence of your dietary and lifestyle choices. This is the message of the modern, cutting edge biology of epigenetics (pioneered and clearly explained to us all by the great Dr Bruce Lipton), and certainly it’s the message of the ancient systems of Ayurveda from India and Traditional Chinese Medicine.
It is the latter which we will be focusing on this week. I want to share with you the insightful, incisive, and—I think—brilliant opening passage from one of my favourite resource books.
While there are several aspects to life that we must pay attention to if we desire to live with physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing, as we discussed here, I feel the primary starting point always is, and must be, our diet. It is the shocking, anti-health, pro-sickness, corporate-created food system of growth, processing and supply that is laying waste to the flesh and bones of our bodies, the consciousness and wellbeing of our minds, and the soil and earth of our planet.
How can we live a desirable, fulfilling, meaningful life with fuel like this?
Eating a diet based on corporate-made foods (junk foods, processed foods, refined oils, salts, sugars and flours) leads us on a direct pathway towards the need for corporate-made pills and medicines.
With such a diet we are, quite literally, asking for multiple troubles. We will live with sub-optimal health (especially in our mind) until, over time, we have abused our body and mind to the point where disease—such as diabetes, cancer, heart attack, depression, Alzheimers—strikes.
And now life does not look so good at all. Cancel all dreams.
This is the ‘Western way’. And it’s invading the whole world. I began living in Thailand in 1991, and I have watched the shape of a nation’s people get bigger and fatter in just one generation. This began at the end of the century with the advent of American fast foods and convenience stores spreading across the nation. I am old enough to recall a much slimmer and fitter population in Britain, which itself began to go downhill at the outset of the 1980s, if not earlier. If you look at old tv programmes, and footage of rock concerts or festivals from the 1970s, you will be amazed…
By developing a life-supporting relationship with your foods and drinks, your body and mind will begin thanking you almost from the start. In a previous Letter, I suggested for those who think they are addicted to the wrong foods and will find changing their diet too hard, to just give it two weeks. This is enough time to gain sufficient and easily noticeable rewards to maintain your new path, to the point where old self-destructive habits have now acquiesced to new healthier habits.
(This previous Letter on diet will give you plenty of core information to get you started if you haven’t already, and it will act as a great reminder for those on their journey already.)
With your improved diet comes improved health and wellbeing, with one of multiple beneficial consequences being a tremendous gain in understanding both your body and mind. Doctors, pharmacies, pills, medical interventions, hospitals start to disappear like the ‘water’ of a desert mirage as you get closer to it.
But we need solid, reliable knowledge which has stood the test of time to both get us started, and to act as a constant resource we can refer to for reminders and to gain an ever-deeper understanding over time. The two best resources I’ve found—with nothing that comes close to competing in terms of their thoroughness, written record, and ease of understanding for us laymen and laywomen—are Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).
Three core features underwrite them both:
you learn about how your body and mind function
you learn how to prevent ill-health
and you learn how to restore your health from multiple ailments and symptoms.
Both systems of health care are thousands of years old, and have therefore stood the test of time. Let’s learn more.
Our extract for the week
Today’s extract comes from a treasured book of mine called A Handbook of Chinese Healing Herbs, written by Daniel Reid, published in 1995. I know he lived in China for a long time, perhaps still does, and that he is married to his Chinese wife. This book brings to the reader full information for 108 medicinal herbs and 36 healing herbal formulas. It’s one of my two main herb books that I use when the occasion calls for it.
The passage I want to share comes from the opening paragraphs in the Introduction. I think it contains the core understanding on health and wellness matters that we all need to discern for ourselves, and then, crucially, apply to our life practically.
See what you think of it!
A Handbook of Chinese Healing Herbs
Pre-Reading Task
Have a think before reading the extract:
What do you know about Traditional Chinese medicine?
How does it differ from Western medicine?
“Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is like an ancient tree of knowledge that has survived the storms of history and continues to grow and bear fruit today. Deeply rooted in the Great Principle of Yin and Yang, the Five Elemental Energies, and other primordial principles of the Tao, it spreads its healing branches far and wide to cover “everything under heaven” in the broad field of human health care. Among the many branches that have sprouted from the venerable old tree, herbal medicine constitutes the biggest and most important one. It's also the most ancient: the Chinese credit the legendary emperor Shen Nung with discovering herbal medicine over five millennia ago. “Shen Nung tasted the myriad herbs”, wrote the great Han dynasty historian Ssu-ma Chien two thousand years ago, “and so the art of medicine was born.”
Chinese herbal medicine first evolved high up in the misty mountains of ancient China, as a by-product of Taoist hermits’ perpetual search for the Elusive Elixir of Life purported to confer physical immortality to humans. After thousands of years of trial-and-error experimentation with virtually every plant, animal, and mineral in nature’s domain, the old Taoist sages finally learned that the only true “elixir” is an invisible force that lies hidden deep within the human system and that the only “immortality” any human can achieve is purely spiritual, not physical. But in the course of their search, the mountain hermits discovered that the plants they'd been fiddling with for so long did in fact have all sorts of practical therapeutic benefits for the physical, albeit mortal, human body, and that when correctly combined and properly prepared, they could confer health and long life to all human beings.
Modern Western medicine subscribes to the “single agent” theory of disease, whereby every disease is blamed on a specific external pathogen that invades the body from outside. Disease is thus attacked with knives, radiation, and powerful chemical agents designed to “kill” the alleged invader, and in the process these weapons often lay waste to the internal organs, impair immune response, and deplete vital energies, thereby sowing the seeds of even more severe ailments later.
Traditional Chinese medicine takes a different approach. It traces the root cause of all disease to critical imbalances and deficiencies among the various internal energies that govern and regulate the whole body. Whenever such states of imbalance or deficiency are left unchecked for too long, they eventually give rise to serious malfunctions in the body’s biochemistry and internal organ systems, and that in turn impairs immunity, lowers resistance, and creates the conditions of vulnerability which permit germs, toxins, parasites, and other pathogens to gain a foothold in the body. By the time the obvious symptoms recognised by modern medicine appear, the disease has already reached a critical stage and is very difficult to cure. Moreover, symptoms of disease often manifest themselves in parts of the body far removed from the root cause, a phenomenon well known to traditional healers but usually lost on modern “specialists” trained to deal with only one part of the human body.
While modern Western medicine views disease as a malevolent external invasion by an enemy that must be killed, traditional Chinese medicine sees it more as a matter of “letting down your guard” and giving entry to the malevolent agents and energies that caused disease. Rather than treating the disease, as modern medicine does, the traditional Chinese physician treats the patient by correcting the critical imbalances in his or her energy system that opened the door to disease in the first place. “To restore equilibrium when energies are in excess or deficiency is the main object of the physician’s endeavors”, states a two-thousand-year-old Chinese medical text. This is known as “curing the root cause rather than treating the superficial symptoms.” By virtue of their “natural affinity” (gui jing) for the specific organs and energies targeted by the physician, medicinal herbs re-establish optimum energy balance and restore organic harmony within the whole human system, thereby closing the windows of vulnerability (usually flung by our own negligence), which allow elements to enter and develop inside. States the yellow Emperor classic of internal medicine, a two-thousand-year-old text that remains standard reading in TCM training today, “lf it's too hot, call it down; if it's too cold, warm it up; if it's too full, empty it; if it's too empty, fill it.” It refers to the particular human energy system whose imbalance is responsible for the problem.
“A stitch in time saves nine” has always been a fundamental tenet of traditional medicine, which regards the onset of any disease as a front-line failure in preventive healthcare, a view which places primary responsibility for health and disease on the patient’s own personal lifestyle. Today, people tend to eat, drink, and behave in whatever manner pleases them, then run to the doctor for a “quick fix” whenever something goes wrong, as though their bodies were machines rather than living organisms. The net result of such mass negligence towards the basic facts of life is a global health crisis that is rapidly spinning out of control, and modern medicine has clearly failed to cope with this catastrophe.
The key to human health and longevity is and always has been preventive care, particularly the enhancement and maintenance of immune response. In today's polluted world and denatured habitats, preventive healthcare is even more important than it was in traditional times. As the American herbalist Dr Daniel B Mowrey points out in his book The Scientific Validation of Herbal Medicine, “We can only eliminate cancer and heart disease in this age by paying more attention to the health of the body and less to treating diseases; by devoting more effort to preventing, less to curing.”
Post-Reading Task
1. Sum up as briefly as you can the differences between TCM and Western medicine in i) their understandings of sickness and disease, and ii) their approaches in dealing with sickness and disease.
2. “A stitch in time saves nine”… “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”… we innately know this makes perfect common sense, so why in our modern age do we collectively ignore this wisdom when it comes to our health and wellbeing? Whatever your answer might be, explore it more, asking yourself why it is the way it is.
3. Daniel says, “Today, people tend to eat, drink, and behave in whatever manner pleases them.” Bearing in mind he is writing that 30 years ago, what are the consequences of this approach to life?
4. Daniel says that Traditional Chinese medicine “traces the root cause of all disease to critical imbalances and deficiencies among the various internal energies that govern and regulate the whole body.” Why do you think Western medicine fails to do this? Can you see any links between our own ‘whole body’ and the ‘body of our planet’?
My commentary
The message from Daniel can be metaphorically summed up thus: the Western approach to health is akin to flinging open the stable doors and then trying to round up the horses to put them back in the stable, and should they manage this, they will then fling open the doors once again, until such time as no more horses can be rounded up; all horses are now lost.
It is we who are making ourselves sick - and this means a sick body, a stressed mind, and suppressed soul. Yes, there are things outside our control, but there are so many things within our control.
The thing I love most about both Ayurveda and TCM is that they teach us how our body and mind work, they teach us the link between ourselves and the whole web of life on our planet, and they teach us how to prevent ill-health. What they also teach us is to reflect upon any symptoms that do arise, and ask ourselves, “Why have I got these symptoms, what am I doing that is stressing my body or mind?” By dealing with symptoms early on, by taking the opportunity to reflect and learn what we are doing wrong in terms of living an intelligent, healthy life, and then taking intelligent action, we own the keys to our own health, wellbeing and longevity.
And, I’m sure you’ll agree with me, when we feel in robust rude health, we have the energy, vitality, clarity and motivation to get things done, to be creative, to live with purpose and passion, and so on. Health truly is “the elixir of life”!
I mentioned earlier that in this book the author gives us 108 herbs… and each comes with information on what actions they take on our body and/or mind, and what symptoms they specifically address, and which organs they work on, thereby fixing a local ailment while simultaneously working on our whole body. Here are some of the well-known that you are likely to have heard of, but perhaps not in relation to bringing you increased health and lifespan!
Ginger, licorice, aloe vera, black pepper, burdock, cardamom, cinnamon, dandelion, garlic, gotu kola, ginseng, mint, nutmeg, raspberry (leaves).
By the way, if you get licorice powder, not only is it a great health tonic that you can use simply to boost your immune system, it is sweeter than sugar, so if you add, say, half a teaspoon when making a fruit shake you make it sweeter and healthier!
Healing With Whole Foods: Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition by Paul Pitchford is my number one resource for information about the body, health and sickness, and for learning how everything works. It leans heavily on understandings gleaned from TCM, but also from Ayurveda. It is a magnificent treasure trove of information and insight, and has many recipes in the final section. I will be bringing you some extracts from it in the coming weeks. It was one of the first books I got early on in my journey on researching nutrition, health, sickness and so on.
One of my very favourite websites is www.earthclinic.com because it has an A-Z of ailments and an A-Z of remedies, and there are thousands of anecdotes from people all around the world who write in to say what works for them. They also have a section for pets.
It’s all about natural healing, and then natural living. I’m not saying to never use pills from doctors and hospitals; I recall reading in one of my Dr Weil books (he combines western medicine with natural healing) that he is cautious about prescribing pills, and will always recommend a natural route if he thinks this is better, but that sometimes taking pills judiciously can help quickly fix a problem, and boost the immune system back into its optimal state.
But the key thing is that we understand what is causing our ill-health so we can take steps to avoid constantly falling ill with the same thing. Think liver, bloodstream, lungs, kidneys, and learn how they work and how to support their work in taking care of you, rather than attacking them.
Have a wonderful weekend and week, and remember, it’s your job to rebuild this world into one that we all want for all of humanity, by rebuilding your own body and mind into its natural, optimal state.
All the best
Philip
