How to Heal People Instead of Just Medicating Them: Dr. Jingduan Yang

do you know how many people died in hospital due to Medical error in United States is over 100, people a year Dr JD Yang is a specialist in Psychiatry and integrative medicine and is a fifth generation practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine a lot of things Chinese medicine emphasize is prevention is a treatments before the problem becomes structurally damaging you should help people with high blood pressure before they develop into stroke he's the CEO of Northern Medical Center and founder of the Yang Institute of Integrative Medicine if you ask a doctor today what do you do every day besides prescribing medicine that didn't do much else so it's a shame this is American thought leaders and I'm Yan [Music] Kell Dr JD young such a pleasure to have you on American thought leaders thank you for having me America is in an unusual situation Americans are very unhealthy at the same time they spend incredible amounts on Healthcare what's really going on well it simply put that in America we really don't have a health care System even though we call everything health insurance health care and this and that but if you look at what we're doing for our patients we really trying to managing their disease and dealing with the crisis so as far as health and nobody really doing much about it for example if you see a primary care doctor they run test that they check on you they say well you look fine they give you clean bill so called and then send you home come back next year what are they waiting for literally they're waiting for you get sick and they can find something they can do surgery or put your on medication until then doctor are not very useful for you but if that's the time and then then you already have lost your health same with health insurance they don't pay anything to promote your health prevent disease but once they begin to pay you trust me you have lost your health so really is very uh misleading and a concept of we have a health care System that's why we're not very healthy as a nation because we allocate all resource trying to deal with a consequences of problems or disease rather than to prevent it and find the root causes that cause those problems so well tell me you have a quite unique approach uh we I've known you for quite some years and you've been actually developing this approach and I've been fascinated watching how these different elements of preventive medicine have come together in your work so tell me about that yeah when I come to this country I heard so many new um definition about different medicine and we start with alternative medicine and complimentary medicine holistic medicine the Mind Body medicine functional medicine regenerative medicine anti- aging medicine and the one I like the best called integrative medicine and but if you ask a 100 doctors what integrated medicine really means they all give you different kinds of answers so I feel like we really need a medical model that is a pro that provides a framework for education for clinical care service and for research also for self-care so people can take that framework easily apply them and like a checklist they can do every day and to take care of themselves so that medicine I called four-dimensional medicine because it address the fundamental four dimensions of human being when I was thinking about it I keep going back to what human being is made of right if you look at it you really see four pillows first of all most superficially we are structural being we have hair skin muscles bones organs nerves you know all this structural parts of it I call an anatomy right at anatomic part of us and second to support that we have a biochemistry now within our body we fundamentally have a majority of body has water you know electrolyte vitamins minerals amino acids you know fatty acids and the proteins and fat and neurotransmitters hormones all this biochemistry running inside us that to make us the second dimension of human being but if I drop that today you have I would have my same structure I might have same biochemistry but I'm that why because I lost energy in Chinese medicine called the chi in modern medicine we declare somebody died because their heart the EKG is flat that means they have no electronic activity in the heart then the brain does not have brain waves that means no energetic activities in the brain so modern medicine does recognize and measure energetic level of human being at the same time as Chinese medicine always called the chi and when we say somebody died we said he has stopped breathing or stopped having Chi right so same concept the third dimension is really the most important Dimension is energetic dimension of human being and without that Dimension we don't have life we don't have activities we don't have feelings thoughts emotions movements okay so all the signs of life is manifestation of the energy but we begin to see it we measure it and we're even trying to intervene energetically for example today we have a cardiac conversion electronic shock therapy the transgranular magnetic stimulation therapy neurobio feedback a lot of physical therapy using leers and this and that so we're doing more than energetic intervention to human body but we don't understand what human energetic is about and what the human energetic physiology psychology and so on so forth because the visual barrier just like air you and I sit here we think there's nothing between us no we're buried in the molecules of oxygens air right but we don't see them the same thing with a lot of energetic things going on in our body we have a visual barrier imagine if we don't have x-ray machine today you know we don't even know what your bon is like but if today if I scan you with x-ray machine I bypass your ties your suits everything I only see your skeletons right so same thing if we have that in technology can see human being at let's say Quantum level and we might be able to visualize all the energetic activities and structures and movements in you and uh that's what Chinese medicine was about somebody at some time had a capacity I don't know how and um was able to visualize that and describe the medicine at a totally energetic Dimensions so that's really the value of ancient or classic Chinese medicine for today's health care because we're not there yet the last Dimension is almost critical is what a human being is really about I like the saying that human being is a spiritual being of having a human experience so what does that mean that means really what lives in US is who we are is our soul is our spirit is our mind or Consciousness whatever you want to call it so the the dimension of the last Dimension but most important Dimension is how do we take care of that because almost that part of the health determine the rest of it human soul and spirit is almost like human driver to a car to our physical body so if we don't take care of that spirit part the soul part and no matter what we do with this body is not going to be enough so therefore the fourth dimension has to be spiritual Dimension you have to put all this four together because they're interrelated interdependent on each other but with this four dimensions it's a very simple easy to conceptualize and easy to organize our Learning Materials education clinical service and the self-care so you really need to check every day what did I do for my you know structural physical health what did I do for my biochemical balance what did I do for my energetic abundance and what did I do for my spiritual enlightenment Dr Young we're going to take a quick break right now and we'll be right back and we're back with JD young CEO of Northern Medical Center tell me a little bit about your background cuz you're not just an acupuncturist you're not just a psychiatrist you really have been looking at medicine from a whole bunch of different Vantage points well I I have to say I'm very lucky I was born to a family that has carried a traditional Chinese medicine practice for many many many generations so all I can count I can recog recognized is a fifth generation so people say I'm a fifth generation of uh Chinese medicine practitioner and the teacher and I started learning about when I was 13 years old that's um and then but when I had opportunity to go to medical school in China my father in who taught me Chinese medicine insisted I should go to medical school to learn the modern medicine because he believed at that time that combination of it should be the most powerful one so I want to learn all the modern medicine of course that's where the confusion starts because for example Chinese medicine say the kidney is the where determine the blood Productions and the modern medicine says no it's a bone marrow that produce uh the uh the the blood and so until later I discovered it was hormone coming from the kidney that stimulate stimulated the bone marrow and that produce the blood fascinating that hormone is called asop potin today is become a medicine for people uh after chemotherapy because their bone marrow get inhibited they get anemic so they have to take this esto protein to stimulate the production of the red blood cell MH but you can see the two parallel of the two medicine and I always thought okay well that was Discovery was in 1970 80s and if people knew what Chinese medicine been saying for Thousand Years and took that seriously and studi that kidney probably they discovered this hormone probably 50 years sooner earlier again I'm just saying so that's why I recognize maybe when we do research we should not using modern medicine methodology to test the whether Chinese medicine is work or not is the opposite we should use Chinese medicine Theory as a hypothesis to design modern medical research in this way we probably will get groundbreaking discovery every day not other way WR does it make sense one of the things you hear a lot today especially among people who are in this Maha make America healthy again movement they'll say aha well there probably isn't a lot of money in those sorts of studies you can't patent that right and that's the reason it's not being studied there's there's a lot of suspicion that that the large amount of money being made in the big pharmaceutical companies actually prevents um cheap and preventative therapies from actually being the norm what what's your take on that well there's truth to that definitely people go into where they can generat profit go where they can put their hands head on because if you think about modern medicine they start from what Anatomy dissect the dead body so everything has to be visible touchable right so that's way so everything start from there but Health doesn't start from some invisible Health start from something Life starts from something invisible start from Soul right then you have energy then you have a chemistry then you have a body okay and so therefore it's hard so people do not get on the health part is because health is difficult and nobody can nobody really knows how to take care of Health if they're getting information from from ticals from the private sectors they educate that every disease has a drug for it and all you need to ask your doctor to give you medicine that's it nobody get educated about how to eat how to make choices in the food how to sleep how to exercise and how to manage a stress how to recognize stress and uh how to keep your energy flows you know if you doctor on paid only to prescribe medicine only to talk to patients for 15 minutes and only paid for doing surgeries and they're not motivated to do anything else healthwise and today is really bad as you mentioned I give you some specifics MH so we think people sick should be hospitalized okay great but do you know how many people died in hospital due to Medical error medical error means it's just by accident somebody made a mistake that person died that called medical error and in United States it's over 100,000 people a year 100,000 people a year is a fourth leading death of cause of death almost equivalent but if you combine that with the infections in the hospital cont contaminations and other side effects of treatments on top of that there's called a adversary reaction of medication you know and that's another thing another 100,000 you know people would die from that that means patients didn't do wrong things they take the medicine as prescribed doctor didn't do anything wrong they prescribed the medication according to the guidelines it's just a out of bad luck there are three milon emergency visits are caused by adversary drug reactions among them 100,000 people would die the current a model of medicine heavily dependent on pharmaceutical products and surgical interventions is really not contributing too much to the health of the population which really means they don't get into the this point they need this kind of intervention or need this kind of medication so we have to Define what really health is you know without that we can't really transform our system from disease care to a health care you know something that strikes me as we're talking here again it all comes down to this uh the preventative or Community medicine or preventative medicine oh there's this whole sort of Dimension and there there seems to be an interest in changing that in this new Administration um that's coming in what do you think they should be doing we really need to allocate funding to study health so that's one thing doesn't mean you have to spend more money it just means you have a better ideas better focus and a better organization utilization of existing infrastructure and talents in integrated medicine we can do very vigorous research and produce the strong evidence and to support that on the other hand in the medical side we need to establish a exemplary medical centers in patient all patients and everything between to show how Integrative Health and Medicine are practiced applied to them as example not also as a training centers or teaching facilities so that will be I think we need that yes we need to change everything else but can we just build something set of prototype you know show it works show the outcomes and show how it save money for the government and for patients how it give access to everyone and how it actually generate Better Health outcomes so United States is not at the bottom when we compare with the health status of other Advanced countries developed countries I would strongly recommend to restrict or design different incentive system that make the surgeon to operate less make the use of expand of Imaging system less and so that people can really utilize that wi is absolutely needed and particularly not you use it as a primary tool of diagnosing patients but assistant tool the primary tool should be doctor and that will save a lot of money and we should insurance we should have a health real Health Care insurance that reimburse Health Care Providers like nutritionist the ugard teachers acupuncturist the herbalists and lifestyle counselors and Stress Management specialist we should really pay them to help the patients to stay healthy and the primary care doctors should be paid to prevent the patient from getting sick not just check them and treat them when they're sick SI and I think we should really limit Pharmaceuticals to advertise directly to the general public we shouldn't limit restrict their access to the governments and to save money on the lobbies and they should not allow to fund research to the public institutions or universities and uh they can do all the research in their own Labs or something like that there should be more regulation on that everybody you don't we don't need to increase our health care spending we already overspend than any other countries we just need to reallocate them so that patients can become the benefits and become healthier otherwise the current system is patients in the way become a consumer of a medical system or whatever you call it or establishment and at the cost of their health that's really bad system well Dr JD young it's such a pleasure to have you on well thank you for having me I'm glad to have opportunity to communicate with you and your audience about uh four dimensional medicine thank you all for for joining Dr JD young and me on this episode of American thought leaders I'm your host Yan Kellick [Music]