(Article submitted to the Acupuncturist, the
newsletter of the British Acupuncture Council)
We are used to thinking of
the transmission of traditional Chinese medicine as being a form of one-way
traffic passing from East to West, but somewhat to my initial surprise, I have
become a key factor in its journey in the opposite direction, from West to
East. Specifically, it has become my
task to take the first steps in helping five element acupuncture build a bridge
back to its land of birth, China.
Over the years China has made many
different, often contradictory attempts to try to integrate its traditional
form of medicine within the framework of Western medicine or to find ways of
making Western medicine fit within it. It has never been quite clear whether it
should view it as a powerful indigenous medical system on a par with, or even
superior to, Western medicine, or as a more primitive branch of medicine which
Western medicine had in many ways superseded.
This uncertainty has hovered over China’s
at times almost schizophrenic approach to its traditional medicine, and is one
of the reasons for the confusion which this still causes, not only in China but to
practitioners of Chinese medicine round the world. In other words, can Chinese traditional
medicine be viewed as a stand-alone, intellectually coherent form of medicine
based on more than 2000 years of continuous practice, or has the appearance of
Western medicine in the past 100 years or so demoted it to an inferior,
ancillary role?
It will be obvious from my
writings and my teachings that I am utterly convinced of the former, but sadly
I am not sure how far my view is shared by many of its practitioners either in China or the
rest of the world.
Through a series of what
could seem to have been coincidences, but I regard now as clearly defined steps
along a path which has guided me throughout my long association with
acupuncture, I was led to meet Professor Liu Lihong at
the Rothenburg conference in Germany a few years ago, together with his very
good friend and translator, Heiner Fruehauf. Liu Lihong is
described as being “arguably the most
important Chinese medicine scholar of the younger generation in present-day China. His controversial book Sikao zhongyi
(Contemplating Chinese Medicine) became an instant bestseller when it was first
published in 2003. Since then, it has
attracted a larger and wider circle of readers than any other Chinese medicine
book in modern times. His book
represents the first treatise written in the People’s Republic of China that dares to openly discuss the
shortcomings of the government-sponsored system of TCM education in China, which
informed the evolution of TCM around the globe.”
I was then invited by him to
give a seminar on five element acupuncture to acupuncturists at his research
institute in Nanning in South
China in November 2011, the first of five seminars I have given
there to a growing number of acupuncturists.
At my last visit in April, Professor Liu, who is himself a scholar of
the classics, when introducing me to the class of 70 acupuncturists, said, “The seed of five element acupuncture is a very
pure seed. I think it originates directly
from our original classic Lingshu, “Rooted in Spirit” (Chapter 8 of Lingshu),
or “Discourse on the law of needling” (Chapter 72 of Suwen). That is to say it
fits easily within the Neijing. It is therefore not created from nothing. It has its origin in the far-distant past and
has a long history. The seed which
underlies its practice is very pure. For
many good reasons, this seed has now returned to its homeland and started to
germinate. In Nora’s words, its roots
have started to penetrate downwards.”
I have been invited to give a
keynote lecture on “Returning the spirit to
acupuncture in China” at the BAcC conference on 26 September 2014, when I
will be describing in greater detail the process by which the roots of five
element acupuncture are being encouraged to grow steadily stronger in China.
I have just spent a happy few days in Berlin with two very dedicated German five
element acupuncturists, Christian and Thomas.
This was very stimulating, both culturally, because I saw more of Berlin on this, my
second visit, and from an acupuncture point of view, as it always is.
It was during a day spent looking at patients together that
I was made aware once more of the importance of the question of the spacing of
treatments as representing an essential, but often overlooked, aspect of how we
help our patients.
I don’t think that we pay enough attention to this in the
normal course of events. At the start of
a patient’s treatment I expect we all tend to give them a number of weekly
treatments, normally something like six or so, and then we tend to space
treatments more widely from once every 2-3 weeks to monthly and eventually to
once a season and less. It is what happens as we
move further on in treatment that problems can arise. I was made aware of this again by one of the
questions I was asked. How was the
practitioner to deal with a patient who, he said, “insisted” on weekly
treatments whilst also maintaining that treatment was not helping him in any
way.
We have various ways of assessing the effect of
treatment. There are our own
observations as to whether we notice any changes or not, and then there are the
patient’s own assessments of how treatment is going. Usually these two sets of observations will
coincide. Problems only start when the
two differ, as for example if the practitioner notices how much better the
patient looks, or the changes he/she is making to their life, and yet the
patient him/herself says that there has been no change at all. We cannot try to persuade the patient by
saying things like, “but you seem to be walking better” or, “you have not been
talking about your family problems as much”, because that is denying the
patient the right to make their own assessment of what they consider constitutes
improvement. On the other hand, we may
be concerned that the patient is choosing not to acknowledge that there have
been changes for other reasons. These
may include such things as a fear that we are “giving up” on them, or, more
subtly, as part of some kind of a hidden power struggle between the patient and
us. Some people can be unconsciously
reluctant to accept the help of others.
How do we as acupuncturists get over this difficulty? If the relationship between our patient and
us has been well-grounded from the start, there should be no problem, as the
patient’s strengthened energies give them sufficient support gradually to do
without our help. But if something in
this relationship has tilted it towards over-dependence on us or otherwise distorted
it, it may become more difficult to hand control back to the patient. We may, for example, allow our patients to contact
us too often between treatments by phone or now increasingly by email,
something I was guilty of in the early days of my practice, because I felt I
always had to be there to help my patients whenever they needed me. This can
make it all too easy to blur the necessary lines of separation between patient
and practitioner which make a healthy relationship possible.
We must never forget that our aim must always be to reach a
point where we step back and treatment is no longer needed, the point where
patients are now able to maintain balance by themselves. If we are having difficulties with working
out how gradually to space out treatments for patients we can see require less
treatment, we should examine our relationship with them to see if we have
encouraged on over-reliance on us, and, if so, start gently to take steps to
encourage the patient to greater independence.
Of course, as with everything
relating to our patients, our approach to each one will be different, and must
be adapted to their individual needs.
With one patient treatments may remain weekly for much longer than with
another. At each stage we have to assess
whether our relationship to our patient is adapting flexibly to that patient’s
needs, and not depend upon a fixed formula for the spacing of appointments.
Today’s newspaper yielded yet another interesting
snippet. An article from the New York
Times International Weekly had the intriguing title “Chinese unwind with a hug
and a song”. Apparently the Chinese are “finally
learning to hug each other” - although, from my own experience in China, they
already know how to hug with great enjoyment.
Or perhaps it is just that I have met those who have spent
time looking at the elements, and have had their interest in emotional responses
stimulated by being told to observe what each element offers. Most Chinese, this article appears to
indicate, “have been slow to embrace the embrace”. Liu Lihong told
the class I was teaching that “we need more Fire here”. In the case of hugs, it is probably more
Earth that is needed, since I think hugging is much more a response to one of
the Earth element’s needs, which is to draw people close to them.
The article said that “recently it seems like everyone is
hugging. Friends are hugging. Family
members are hugging…. The tables are turning….. Schools are now conducting
classes in emotional intelligence. For
homework, children have been assigned to hug their parents.”
This trend towards learning to be unafraid to show emotions
may be part of the reason why my Chinese five-element students are so keen to
learn all about the emotional manifestations of the elements, and enjoy doing
exercises which help train them in learning to detect emotions both in
themselves and in their patients.
We all know the dangers caused by the over-use of
antibiotics, and the resistance to them which encourages the spread of
disease. There is an article in today’s Observer newspaper which epitomizes for
me how far our modern treatment of illness has divorced us from the natural
world. It starts with the strong
statement: “Wards in British hospitals need to be redesigned to provide defences
against the spread of deadly, antibiotic-resistant superbugs. That is the stark
warning of scientists, who said last week that the danger now posed by
drug-resistant infections had reached crisis level.”
So what are the proposals these same scientists put forward
to help our hospitals do this? Among
these, believe it or not, is one that hospital wards should have “large,
openable windows”. …”We are talking
about returning hospital wards to the type we had 100 years ago.”….
This sent me back to look at a chapter in my book Keepers of the Soul in which I discuss
what I call “the medicalized society” we now live in. And I wrote, with rare prescience,.”…we show
as little regard for the environment in which all these terrifying interventions
take place, the frightening machines, the lack of natural air, even the ban on
plants and flowers in the hospital wards of the most sick, as if such harmless,
natural and beautiful things bring with them a greater chance of disease than
dealing with the high incidence of hospital-induced infections.”
Let us hope that the design of new hospitals will now
include windows which open to allow nature inside to help patients’ lungs
breathe and bugs to escape.
Over the years I have become used to patients telling me
things after treatment such as “now I feel more myself again”, or “I know now who
I am”. Yesterday I had another
heart-warming example of five element acupuncture’s ability to reach to the
very heart of our needs as human beings when a five element acupuncturist
colleague of min, Audley Burnett, told me how moved he had been when a patient described the effect of
treatment in these words: “I feel as if I’ve come into
myself.
I think that is such a lovely way of saying what we would
all want to feel: that we have “come
into ourselves”. And how moving that
what five element acupuncture can do is help our patients achieve that. In so doing it also helps its practitioners
achieve much the same thing, but by a different route, that of the
therapist. When I feel a treatment I
have given has helped my patient, I feel more fully myself.