7 Ways Acupuncture Can Help You (and Traditional Chinese Medicine)

You know the first time I heard about acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, I thought it was a bunch of hippie BS and that it was all this energy stuff and people were all airy-fairy talking about moving qi. But since then I've realized that Chinese medicine is an incredible clinical science, yes clinical, that is based in a lot of physical facts and physical evidence. But in reality the most impressive benefit is that it can treat things that your doctor would never even guess about. Hey guys I'm Alex Han, current doctoral student in Chinese medicine. Now in today's video I want to share with you seven things that are pretty surprising about acupuncture and about Chinese medicine to me. The very first thing is that acupuncture and Chinese medicine treat you and not your illness. You know the idea of having a foot doctor always kind of seems silly to me. We have, you know, we've got a pain maybe we have gout. We go to the doctor, the doctor's like oh you've got this thing called gout. This is what we're gonna have to do and then do that and then do that and then do that. But in reality what's going on with most illnesses is that there's something going on elsewhere in the body that's producing pain in a different location. For example gout is very often related to diet. So if you send yourself to the foot doctor, can you imagine if the foot doctor was just looking at your big toe and was like hmm this is really, really puzzling and you never went to a doctor that actually knew the link between for example diet and gout. Well one of the principal tenets in Chinese medicine is that you treat the entire person which is why you can often treat something that seems so unrelated and the problem that you're looking to solve will go away. The second thing is that Chinese medicine can treat things your doctor will think you are crazy for. Now my first year of my Chinese medicine schooling I was working crazy hours because I was also working while going to school and I started having problems with my sleep and then heart palpitations and then a lot scarier symptoms despite taking care of myself every day. And so during one of these episodes I went to the local emergency room to try to see if they could catch what was going on. They ran all these tests, took my blood and then basically said we don't know what's going on. We don't have any clue. Well they discharged me and then everything kept happening. All the heart palpitations, all this kind of stuff and I had no clue what was going on. Until I saw a Chinese medicine doctor who said you know this is what's probably going on, we're gonna give you these herbs, let's try it. And within two weeks the heart palpitations stopped and I never had them again. And it began to make me wonder, there's this gap between where something is not yet an illness or a symptom and then it becomes a symptom and a real physical presence in the body. The reality is that conventional biomedicine can measure something when it is a symptom, when it is something in your body, but even many symptoms we can't figure out biomedically and why they're happening and we certainly can't treat them. So the thing with Chinese medicine is that it can often treat things that are not yet showing up on diagnostic imaging for example and that is a really unique benefit. It treats things still in their preclinical phase. The third thing is that Chinese medicine treats everything. It treats your physical body, the emotional and if you want to go there the realm of the spirit. And what I mean by that is that some illnesses are purely physical and some are maybe purely emotional or psychological. But the thing is in conventional medicine we send a person to all these different specialties. I must be all in his head. We send him to a shrink. Oh you just bonked your knee on the wall there. We send you to whoever, a physical therapist. And it's this kind of disjointed philosophy surrounding the medicine that can make it so complicated because there are many more illnesses that are a fusion and a combination of the two especially when they become chronic. And the idea of the body or mind makes no sense because it really is the mind-body. They are one and the same. They're not separate entities that you treat separately. The fact is you change the physical body like exercising, the mental state changes. You change the mental state and you can change pain in the physical body. So what do you treat first? In Chinese medicine you can treat both. The fourth thing really interesting to me is that Chinese medicine can treat trauma incredibly well. So there's this idea called somatic memory which is how the body physically will store trauma. And the first time this ever really occurred to me was how I was getting an acupuncture appointment one day and I started feeling a little bit giggly like I was about to break out laughing. And when I had this sensation I thought it was weird because I just had a bunch of needles in me and nothing was going on that should have made me laugh. I wasn't having any thoughts. And then I started convulsively laughing and then after that it turned into tears and then I just passed out. Like I just fell asleep for 30 minutes and I felt incredibly relaxed. And the whole evening I was wondering where that came from, what it was and how the hell this pins in my body released whatever that emotion was and wherever it was stored. Well this idea of treating trauma with acupuncture is becoming a really fascinating subject and for something that often puzzles biomedical researchers this has been well documented in the Chinese medicine literature. The fifth thing for me is that Chinese medicine has a core tenet of beliefs. For example Chinese medicine is based on longevity. How to live a long healthy life with no major health issues and no major hiccups, right? In conventional medicine where is the philosophy behind how to live like for body, mind and spirit? Where is the philosophy on how to be physically healthy, mentally healthy, spiritually have purpose and meaning in your life? There is none, at least not in modern medicine. That was done away with 1800s 1700s, who knows? But in Chinese medicine all the foundational classical texts are based on living a long healthy life. For modern medicine what do you have the Merck manual? Like hmm patient can't poop, patient is depressed. I don't know I mean stop eating honey nut Cheerios. There is no core philosophy around how to live your life but in Chinese medicine there is. The sixth thing here is this idea of self-cultivation. You know one of the things that most attracted me to Chinese medicine and integrative medicine is that there's a much greater emphasis on this concept of physician heal thyself. That the physician should first and foremost take good care of him or herself. You need to do the health practices to be a person talking about health and treating patients and the reality is that modern medicine unfortunately the system is not even well set up for any physicians to be healthy. Go look at your physician, you see regularly are they overweight by 20 or 30 pounds? Probably something like 60% are. Do they have high blood pressure? A good percentage do like the average population. And I'm not saying that to pick on physicians beyond just knowing all the textbook facts and figures and treating patients. In Chinese medicine practices like qigong, meditation and self-cultivation are one of the foundations of becoming a good clinical physician to treat patients. They are non-negotiables. These are not nice things to have. You were required to do these things and even historically a physician would be doing cave meditation even for years with a doctor or some kind of teacher that would show them certain practices or certain things that they could be doing. So it was a mandatory part of the physician's training. Not a nice to have. And finally the seventh thing is that in Chinese medicine there is just nothing like it on the planet. There is nothing that embodies the physical body, the psycho emotional and even the realm of the spirit. There's nothing that embodies the physician's concept of treat and heal thyself and be the model of the healthy person before you treat people and while you treat people. There's no concept of treating all the layers of a human from the physical body to whatever the non-material body is made up of, whatever you want to call that. Whether it's qi or bioenergy or something else. So you just think it's emotions. There is nothing like that that has existed on this planet besides Chinese medicine and it fills that deeper void that so many people complain of that they cannot get from conventional medicine and from seeing their conventional physician. There's a piece missing and it's a large piece and that piece is probably the soul, the essence of medicine. So those are just a couple things, a little bit of a rant there on how Chinese medicine is different from conventional medicine. Before you go I want you to leave a comment right down there below. Let me know for you what has been the most frustrating part of seeing your doctor. Could be an acupuncturist, could be a conventional physician. Let me know below. Hey guys it's Alex. I hope you liked this video. Now the best way to stay in touch with me is to come over to my site alexhein.com. Grab that free guide on how to add 10 years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. From there click the monk dude to subscribe and check out my last video that just came out and make sure you get my next video coming out soon.