Believe in your body's ability to heal itself, part 1

We are going to be translating and blogging sections of a book by Dr. Guo de fu that talks about self healing. This is the first section, it is just a fragment. It is the the author's note. TCM is for Traditional Chinese Medicine. This is written in first person, being told from Dr. Guo's point of view.

"TCM has no end, you will never be too old to keep learning it."

In 1960, I started teaching myself TCM, then observed Dr. Fang Ding Ru in his clinic. At the time, Mr. Fang was already 83. He was one of Wenzhou’s famous well-respected elderly TCM doctor. After, I learned from Mr. Hu Tian You and Mr. Gu zheng sheng. Mr. Hu was well-known in Yong Jia. Mr. Gu was a TCM professor at Wenzhou Medical School. When I studied with them I was already 45 years old. All the other students were all young men. They all called me “older brother.” I felt proud.
TCM has been regarded by some as a treasure, while others think it is not based on science. Some think it is awesome, some think it is nothing. We are all Chinese people, all the descendents of Yan and Huang emperors, but the difference in thinking is unbelievable!
I think because less experienced doctors often haven’t seen it all, so they prescribe treatments that are not very effective. This in turn makes TCM not as reliable as it should be.
The study of TCM is vast, so vast that even in your lifetime you could not learn everything. This makes even the most experienced of doctors limited in what they know. After all these years of studying, I am documenting everything I’ve learnt, heard, seen, experienced, for future generations. I am only going to write down the things I know. There is probably much more that I don’t know. I always tell my students that once they start learning TCM, they better be prepared to study it for their whole life as there is so much to it. My point is, TCM is so vast that you must learn until you are old, and even then if you are still learning it is not an embarrassment. The goal of studying medicine is to keep people alive longer, not to make money.
The main ideas that I learned from my teachers are the ways of treating patients and the morals that go with them. These cannot be separated.
If I see one of my students neglecting a patient because they cannot pay, I feel that I have been a bad teacher. In fact, since the beginning of TCM, the goal of being a doctor is to heal the sick and only help the sick, not to make money. The traditional saying about this is that if you don’t have 100 acres of land; don’t even think about becoming a doctor. If you had so much land, you would not care about the money, only about helping people.

Follow up to "how to eat"

Ok, so here's the story behind the saying "have a full breakfast, have an ok lunch, have a small dinner."

Our bodies have a biological clock, as you may know. It's divided up into 12 blocks, with each having one organ/meridian being most active. The reason you want to eat a big breakfast is because from 7-9 am is when your stomach is most active. I guess I could make a comparison and say, eating a big breakfast is like putting wood into a wood shredder on high. Have a look at this chart on About.com. So then it comes to explain the small/early dinner. Your stomach is not most active at that time, your kidneys are. You don't want to fill up your stomach with too much stuff.

Hope this give some more concrete information about that saying.

How should you eat food?

That's an easy answer. Eat whenever you feel like it, right? No. You are so wrong. (if you said eat when you're supposed to, yippee.)

You eat at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That doesn't mean at 9:00 am, 1:00 pm, and 8:00 pm. It means at 7:00 am, 12:00 pm, and at...wait for it... 6:00 pm. Is that dinner time outrageous? Too early? Well, it's not. If you eat at 8:00, it's too late.

Here's the info behind that. There's a Chinese saying: "eat a full breakfast, eat a good lunch, eat a small dinner." It rhymes in Chinese though. What they're saying is, eat whatever at breakfast. Be stuffed. You won't gain weight. Eat an OK lunch, so be almost full. And for dinner, eat a little. Almost like a snack, but enough so that you aren't hungry later the night. The reason you don't want to eat too much at dinner is 'cuz your stomach is not as active. It is still digesting, but not at it's prime time, so if you eat a great big feast for dinner, guess what? When you go to sleep, your stomach is still slowly digesting. This can cause nightmares while you sleep. Also, your stomach may take a break too, at night. You've got some food slowly fermenting in your stomach. EWWWW.

Don't make yourself a fermenting vat. Eat an earlier/smaller dinner, and you could even lose extra weight!

For those of you who just can't let go of that annoying 15 pounds, and you are skipping meals, skip dinner. Don't skip breakfast.

No, this isn't a weight loss blog, but just so you know.

Back to eating food. When you eat, I say, eat. Don't watch tv. Don't read a book. Focus on your food and eat. If you multitask, your eating experience will not be as good, and you probably won't be paying attention to what you eat. Think, eating chips in front of the TV.

Next thing: eat when you're supposed to. Don't snack. Snacking is the devil. You think, "oh, I only ate some crackers for breakfast, so I suppose I can have this candy bar. And I only had chips and gatorade at lunch, so I'll have 2 cheese wedges with crackers when I get home. I think these tortilla chips look good, I'll have some queso. I only had rice for dinner, I'll get some popcorn at the movies."

You see what I mean? You're eating all this junk food, and you are still hungry. So eat at your meals.

Maybe Ye Family will tell you about cancer prevention today.

A checkup at the doctor

Ah, the checkup. At the regular Western doctor, your well being is determined by machines and tests. You could be feeling fine, sleeping well, have a good appetite, and, pardon, pooing every day, but you have high cholesteral, according to your doctor. What the??? Now you gotta take medicine.

If you went to a TCM doctor for a checkup, since you've never been to one before, he'll say:

• do you have an appetite when you're supposed to?
• sleeping well?
• have energy when you need it?
• happy?
• no pain anywhere?
• have normal bodily functions?(bowel movement every day?)

If you said yes to everything, you're healthy! Woopee! You don't need another checkup. You only need to go to the doctor if you don't feel well. How easy was that? You're healthy if you think you are, basically.

If you are the skeptical one, you're probably thinking, "well then how do you know if you have high blood pressure? high cholesteral? at risk for a clot? have cancer? etc..." Most of these other facts are not really important. If you have high blood pressure/cholesteral, you won't die. If you feel fine, you won't have a clot. And now for the last thing...(dramatic halloween music) CANCER.

"Um, madam, we have bad news from your mammogram."
"..."
"You have a malignant tumor in your left breast, that is stage three and blah blah..."
"AAHHH!! *starts sobbing*"
"You have 6 months to live without treatment."
"oh no!"
"But we could help!"
(dun duhduuuun)(that was supposed to be like, "suuupermaaaan")

Yeah. Nowadays, having cancer is like, a death sentence. You're so worried about it, you probably die from that. Or maybe the treatment killed you (oops). I'm not saying its a funny matter. It's serious, just not as bad as it looks. It can be cured, but why go through the trouble when you can just prevent it? Why try to "defeat" the cancer? If you were a king, why would you kill your messenger informing you of an enemy attack?

Prevention tips tommorow! To be continued...

Are doctors to be trusted?

So have you been losing faith in your doctor? You probably should. In these days of "advanced" medicine, it's not advanced. It's new. Untested. Inexperienced. "Innovative." Just like that shredded wheat cereal advertisement. New is probably bad. Old definitely means it is good enough to stay. What I'm saying is, Western medicine doesn't make sense. Those doctors, sometimes, don't know what their doing. All their stuff is recent. They're tossing traditional beliefs for newer ones. They making "discoveries," which have been known forever.

We're advocating Chinese Medicine. No, it's not mumbo jumbo herbal medicine. It's not painful acupuncture. We don't have "nonsensical TCM theories," as Quackwatch.com says. Yeah, it's from quackwatch, but they just don't understand. If these theories were nonsensical, they'd be long forgotten. This is 5000 year old stuff. It may be old, but certainly not outdated. It is simply good enough to still be practiced.

This blog is going to explain how to be healthy, live happy, and NOT spend a fortune on medicines, vitamins, checkups, etc. Stay with us and be enlightened!