The Science of Chinese Medicine

A major concept of Chinese medicine is Qi, (also chi or ki), pronounced chee. But what is it really? If you ask most acupuncturists or doctors of Oriental medicine, chances are you will receive a wide variety of answers.

Have you ever played the game, where in a large group of people someone whispers a message to the person sitting next to them and the idea is to whisper the exact same message to the next person and so on, until the last person receives the message and in a normal voice tells everyone in the room what the original message was "supposed" to be? Chinese medicine, in many of its major theories and ideas, is very similar to that.

Over the centuries and even thousands of years, early concepts have changed, or more accurately, were mangled, as a result of varying interpretations or translations of the original language and syntax. What this has produced, in our modern culture, is a population of practitioners who have no idea how acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine really work and more importantly, do not know how to intelligently explain the medicine to their patients or inquisitive doctors in other fields (MD's, DO's, DC's, etc.).

Traditional schools of alopathic medicine do an excellent job of preparing doctors. Medical students are extensively taught the hard science of their medicine: organic chemistry, biochemistry, endocrinology, anatomy and physiology. Acupuncture schools do a fairly good job of preparing students to become competent practitioners. Unfortunately, schools of Oriental medicine do a poor job of teaching the hard science of our medicine. This is evident whenever a practitioner of Oriental medicine is asked a technical question and is unable to satisfactorily answer the question. Most likely, this is due to the fact that most Oriental medical school faculties are not trained or have backgrounds rooted in these sciences. When I was in school my classmates and I were taught that Chinese medicine was much different from alopathic medicine and operated under different rules or laws. This is not entirely true. There are universal laws that govern everything in the universe. All matter in the universe must comply with these laws. There are no exceptions. Western medicine and Chinese medicine have unique paradigms, though, the laws that govern both must comply with universal laws. The way for western and eastern medicine to be integrated is through these universal laws.

What's unfortunate is most practitioners do not have a background or education rooted in hard or difficult sciences. In a followup post, I'll discuss the foundational sciences of Chinese medicine and how amazing it is that the ancient doctors of Chinese medicine had extensive knowledge of these sciences and how to apply them to physical, mental and spiritual health.