The U.S. Wushu Team is not super well-funded, so if you can please make a donation so that Brenda can go compete at the Wushu World Games in Turkey this fall!
There is a lot of cross-over between the worlds of martial art and Chinese medicine. Both developed from the same philosophical framework of Yin and Yang, the five phases, bagua, and so on. Many famous martial arts masters were also Chinese medicine doctors. Two that come to mind are Wong Fei Hung and Wang Ziping.
Wong Fei Hung has been portrayed extensively in film and television but is most famous in the U.S. from the Once Upon a time in China film series starring Jet Li. The movies are a lot of fun to geek out to if you are a fan of both martial arts and Chinese medicine - Wong is seen doing martial arts heroics and saving lives with acupuncture. There is even a scene where he educates Western doctors in acupuncture.
Wang Ziping (1881-1973) of Cangzhou in Hebei province, and was an expert in several martial arts including bajiquan, piguaquan and xingyiquan. He was also an expert bone-setter and traumatologist. You can learn more about him at this website. His daughter Wang Jurong also became a well-known martial artist, and his granddaughters are also continuing the family tradition.
My martial arts teacher, Dr. Alex Feng, is also a Chinese medicine doctor, and was my original inspiration for going into the Chinese medicine field. Tom Bisio and Frank Butler are both martial artists with successful Chinese medicine practices, and Tom Bisio wrote a popular book on how to treat martial arts and other sports injuries using Chinese medicine. The list goes on and on.
As a practical matter, knowledge of the body and how it moves is essential in both martial arts and medicine. Observation, timing and sensitivity are all skills that are strengthened and reinforced by cross-training in martial arts and Chinese medicine. If you're studying one, consider studying the other as well.
We've posted about Kam Wah Chung before, but this video is much better. It's more detailed and is much better quality. Take a look and learn about Chinese medicine in 1850's Oregon!
Many people have heard of the 1971 New York Times article by James Reston about his experience with acupuncture in his recovery from an emergency appendectomy. Reston was in China at the time, which was quite unusual in the first place. In 1971 China was in the grip of the Cultural Revolution, and very few foreigners were allowed into the country. He had an appendectomy the standard biomedical way, but for post-surgical pain was treated with acupuncture and moxibustion:
However, I was in considerable discomfort if not pain during the second night after the operation, and Li Chang-yuan, doctor of acupuncture at the hospital, with my approval, inserted three long thin needles into the outer part of my right elbow and below my knees and manipulated them in order to stimulate the intestine and relieve the pressure and distension of the stomach.
That sent ripples of pain racing through my limbs and, at least, had the effect of diverting my attention from the distress in my stomach. Meanwhile, Doctor Li lit two pieces of an herb called ai, which looked like the burning stumps of a broken cheap cigar, and held them close to my abdomen while occasionally twirling the needles into action.
All this took about 20 minutes, during which I remember thinking that it was a rather complicated way to get rid of gas in the stomach, but there was noticeable relaxation of the pressure and distension within an hour and no recurrence of the problem thereafter.
Reston's article provoked great interest in acupuncture. In 1976 California became the first state to license acupuncture, where just two years earlier pioneering acupuncturist Miriam Lee was arrested for practicing medicine without a license. My martial arts teacher Dr. Alex Feng was one of the first acupuncturists licensed in California (his license number is 297 - mine is 13299).
You might wonder, what is a botanist doing studying ancient art? Turns out the Mayans created lots of ceramic pieces depicting various plants of the rain forest, many with such accuracy that the genus and species of the plants can be determined. The scientists are trying to identify which plants were of importance to the people, in "hopes [that] the research will unveil secrets known to the Maya that have become lost in time."
What kind of secrets are they looking for? The archaeologist Charles Zadir says:
The Maya have lived and used rainforest plants to heal themselves for thousands of years. We are just beginning to understand some of their secrets.
That's great! Plants are awesome! It's wonderful that there are people out there advocating for the preservation of the rain forest and for research into the importance of plants in our lives.
But wait... keep reading:
This research has already been of interest to pharmaceutical companies that are looking to extract alkaloids from plants that were important to the ancient Maya.
Aw, man! Just when you thought that you could escape the clutches of greed, the truth comes out. In the researchers' defense, they probably had to provide some lucrative justification for the work that they're doing, otherwise they wouldn't get funding. But, it just irks me that there always has to be some kind of monetary motive.
Today we bring you the story of Ing Hay, an herbal doctor from China who lived in Oregon in the late 1800's. He established an excellent reputation as a doctor despite the violent racism of the time.
He was the most famous Herbalist between San Francisco and Seattle in his day. He was a master of pulse diagnosis. Doc Hay could tell his patients what was wrong with them just by feeling the pulse in their arm. Then he would prepare an herbal mixture from local plants and herbs from China. Doc Hay was blind. When he shut the building up in 1948 to go to the nursing home, Doc Hay left behind over 500 different herbs, many that have never been identified.
What's interesting to me is that Doc Hay used both "local plants and herbs from China." An important part of Chinese medicine is to use an appropriate treatment according to your geographic location. For instance, what happens when your grandma who's lived in Queens all her life retires? She moves to Florida! Because the winters are too harsh in New York. Florida is much warmer and easier on the joints. All living things are a part of their environment and respond to their environment in different ways.
Doc Hay didn't only use Chinese herbs, he educated himself about the local herbs in his environment. In this way he was a naturalist as well as an herbalist. In southern California we have many native healing plants, sage being one of the most well-known.
Stonehenge has long been thought of as a burial site, where cremated remains and bodies have been found that date as far back as 3000 BCE. But the history of the land on which it rests dates back even farther: there were post holes for large wooden poles found in that location dated back to 8000 BCE. It seems as though this point on Earth has always held a certain significance, drawing different people and cultures to it throughout time. It should be no wonder then that as time passed, the purpose of the place could have changed in significance to those who visited it.
In the most recent excavation of the site - the first one in 44 years - two archaeologists have theorized that Stonehenge could have actually been used as a place of pilgrimage for those who were sick and dying, a veritable health spa of sorts.
There are bluestones placed in the inner ring of Stonehenge that were determined to have come from Preseli Mountains in Southwest Wales, 140 miles from Stonehenge. To give you an idea of how significant that is, the larger rocks of the more recognizably Stonehenge structure came from only 20 miles north of the site. Whoever was building Stonehenge at the time made it a point to bring those big bluestones in there.
Bluestones, named for the bluish color that appears when the stones get wet or cut, are recorded as having healing properties:
The stones are great; And magic power they have; Men that are sick; Fare to that stone; And they wash that stone; And with that water bathe away their sickness.
The archaeologists also found that natural springheads, where water comes up from the ground, had been enhanced by the erection of small walls to dam the water that came up, creating little pools they proposed the sick would be able to sit in. Some of the springheads were "adorned with pre-historic art."
Bodies buried nearby that are contemporary to the time the bluestones were in place also support their theory. The remains of the buried show injuries that were possible causes of death, suggesting that these people had come to the site in hopes of being healed.
He is worshiped as a guardian god to some, god of brotherhood and loyalty to others, and sometimes as one who protects the money of the upright from the crooked. He was also a real person: a general during the late Eastern Han Dynasty.
During one of his battles, Guan Yu was struck by a poison arrow in his arm, and although the arrow was immediately removed, the poison had seeped into his bone. His subjects sent away for a physician, and none other than Hua Tuo came to the rescue.
When Hua Tuo arrived on the scene, Guan Yu was busy playing Go with one of his men. Hua Tuo examined his wound, and said that surgery would have to be performed immediately to save his arm. He suggested that Guan Yu put is arm through a ring that was fixed to a post - to keep him from flailing around while Hua Tuo scraped at his bone (without anesthesia) - and to put on a blindfold.
Guan Yu was like, "No way dude! Do what you need to, I'm going to keep playing this game of Go." Supposedly, he didn't want to affect the morale of his men, and talked and drank without flinching while Hua Tou scraped at the bone in his arm.
Minutes later, Hua Tou put medicine (presumably herbs) into the wound and sewed it up. Guan Yu no longer felt any pain in his arm, and Hua Tou left without accepting rewards for his work.
Do you know who Li Shi Zhen is? Well, you should. He's pretty awesome. During the Ming Dynasty, he compiled the book known as the Ben Cao Gang Mu 本草纲目, or the "Grand Materia Medica." He spent all of his life studying herbs, 27 years of which was spent writing this one book. It has 1,892 individual herbs listed, 374 of which were not previously listed in any other herbal manual. He also went through all other available texts for comparison and corrected errors he found. He is basically the biggest herb nerd in the history of the world... and my idol.
(Sun Si Miao is still the love of my life though... sorry, Li Shi Zhen)
The Ben Cao Gang Mu has an expansive variety of herbs listed, far more than any other herbal book in English or Chinese. Lucky for us, as of 2004, you can get the very first complete English translation of the Ben Cao Gang Mu in a six-volume set. I want it.
By the way, the video is of Jay Chou, that guy from that movie Curse of the Golden Flower. He's a big-time pop star in Taiwan and China, and he's singing his song called Ben Cao Gang Mu. Read the lyrics! I got a good chuckle out of it.
This is an intro video from the founders of Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). EFT is a relatively modern way of accessing the meridian system of acupuncture. In the video it's described as "acupuncture without needles", and that's a pretty good description, except that you may get much quicker results with EFT than with acupuncture.
How is that possible? First, understand that there are as many different styles of acupuncture as there are of cooking. To say that you practice acupuncture is the same thing as saying that you cook "Chinese food" - there really isn't any such thing. Yes, all acupuncture uses needles, but that's like saying all Chinese cooking uses heat. What is the theory behind where you put the needles? How big are the needles you use? Do you even break the skin at all? (Some styles don't.) What names do you have for the points? Do you needle symmetrically or asymmetrically? Every day or once a week? And on and on and on.
The style of acupuncture most people learn in Chinese medicine school in the U.S. is a kind of "herbal acupuncture" - the points themselves get stuck with specific functions that are always the same. But this is not how the points work. It was an herb teacher who told me that acupuncture is actually much more complex and harder to master than herbology, even though there are a limited number of points (about 400) and virtually limitless numbers of herbs (300-500 used in daily practice, but hundreds of thousands of natural substances - animal, vegetable, mineral - have documented medicinal effects in Chinese medicine). Once you learn what each specific herb does and how it combines with other herbs, you can rely on it to have more or less the same action every time you use it, adjusting for individual constitutional types.
Acupuncture points are much more mysterious. What happens when you put a needle into a person's body is influenced more than anything by the state of health of the acupuncturist - and secondarily by the meridian it is located on, how skillfully you locate it, how skillfully you manipulate it, if you get the qi, what you do with it once you get it, the time of day, the weather, geography, the doctor-patient relationship, and on and on. Acupuncture points don't necessarily do the same thing every time, and to pretend that they do is a little silly.
There are other schools or styles of acupuncture that have many followers. For instance, there is the Tung style, about which this website says:
Tung Style Acupuncture uses points different from those found in most present-day TCM acupuncture texts. While many of the Tung points are found on the twelve regular channels they are, however, in distinct locations from the 360+ points presented in the aforementioned TCM acupuncture texts. They are also largely distinct from the miscellaneous 'extra' or 'non-channel' points described in most contemporary TCM acupuncture texts.
The Tung Style Acupuncture points chosen for the treatment of any given malady are located mostly on the extremities and at a distance from the site of the lesion or pathology. Furthermore, the number of points required to successfully ameliorate any given ailment is fewer than that required in most current TCM acupuncture texts to treat the same malady.
The best acupuncturists, in my experience, are those that have a good "eye" for "seeing" blockages in various meridians. Information about blockages can be gathered in many ways - taking the pulse and palpating various body structures is one of the most reliable. When they find a blockage, they unblock it. That's it. Sometimes a diagnosis is not even necessary. Look for blockages, unblock them. Patient gets better.
EFT is a way for people to very quickly assess where the blockages are in their body. Through some admittedly funny-looking techniques (tapping yourself with your fingertips on the face being one of them) you can find blockages and release them.
If you read yesterday's post, you know that blockages can be caused by three things: the weather (traditionally called the six evil qi - wind, heat, cold, dryness, dampness, and something called summerheat), excessive emotion (that's your internal weather - anger, fear, joy, grief, worry, shock, melancholy) and external trauma caused by snake bite or kung fu battling.
With EFT, the cause of the blockage doesn't matter. With the help of an experienced EFT practitioner, you can find and eliminate the blockage very quickly.
Yosan alum Yang-chu Higgins is an EFT practitioner and is leading a workshop this Wednesday in Los Angeles called Enhancing Self-worth with Tapping. For more information, call 310-397-8523.
For more information on non-mainstream acupuncture, see these books:
