How old is Chinese Medicine?
Old.
As with a lot of information in China’s history, the exact facts are clouded in metaphor and time. Emerging from and generated by the Tao, Chinese Medicine is no different. There have been centuries upon centuries upon centuries of culture, climate, and though leadership shifts that have shaped and molded the medicine through time.
It is generally said that Acupuncture and Chinese herbal remedies date back at least 2,200 years. The earliest known written record of “Traditional” Chinese Medicine is the Huangdi Neijing (The Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic) from the 3rd century BCE. Thank goodness someone wrote it down!
Of course the use of natural medicines are as old as the humanity itself; and even before humans! Animals knew where to find the remedies throughout the year and there were timeless and countless men and women who knew the plants and the art of healing far before anything was written. I love imagining those people. Long bearded men collecting roots on a craggy mountain. Beautiful grandmas cooking the soups for their daughters wrapping the bellies of their sisters with herbs after births.
Medicine of the Earth is timeless. To learn It requires a concentrated focus on natural law and a reverence/ reciprocity for the treasures that come from it. Now we can pay a bunch of money go to school for four years to learn the points, learn the names of herbs and formulas but to really learn the medicine is a lifelong journey.
All of the practitioners at BAP are on their own individual journey of the art and science of Chinese Medicine. This is why you may observe that when you see different practitioners the treatments look and feel different. Many of us come from a Traditional Chinese medicine background which is basically a very synthesized and sometimes very “westernized” teaching that developed in and after the cultural revolution. As with so many of the collected ancient wisdom traditions of China at that time, the medicine was stripped of much of its power and left us with still very effective but often a devoid of magic kind of approach. I loved my education AND it really only began after I graduated and especially when I started studying the elemental phases and the IChing. A few of us have been lucky to tap into what is considered “Classical Chinese Medicine” which has a bit more depth and complexity rooted in some of the texts and teachings that were saved. There is also the so called “Five Element” tradition that a few of us have delved into that is a fairly new system collected from many of the classic teachings. Then, of course, there is the reality of acupuncture and Chinese medicine coming to the U.S. and morphing once again to fit an entirely different worldview. With this, much of the medicine is being mapped onto more allopathic approaches. No matter what, there has been much lost in translation.
There are many pulse taking and other diagnostic methods and many, many, many different ways of treating. The amazing thing is…they all work! That is the Tao for you :). There are as many ways to treat as there are people treating. This is why I would never in a million years tell someone else how to practice. Even teachers of the medicine can not teach what will be each practitioners unique cultivation. Each person IS their own medicine. At BAP we all teach each other and it has been wonderful to see and hear about how folks are thinking about cases.
Sometimes someone will come in and say how much they loved the treatment they got from so and so last time. I will look at the chart and contemplate but even if I did do the same exact thing, the treatment would be entirely different because it was administered by a different practitioner at a different time to a person who is different in that moment than the last moment. This is a difficult thing for people used to protocol to grasp.
At the same time, you can have ten different people coming in with the same western “diagnosis” like arthritis, diabetes, IBS, insomnia, anxiety, depression, or lower back pain for example; and each case could be treated differently depending the tongue and pulse reading. There are very few protocols in Chinese medicine and that is where the art of the practice lays. The practitioner needs to be acutely aware of the individual persons presentation and underlying patterns to make the right choice for points and herbs. For example (and very simplified) some arthritis can be due to heat and some due to cold. You can imagine how giving cooling herbs to someone who is already suffering from cold trapped in the joints would work out! Unlike western medicine who would generally prescribe a certain medication for a certain ailment, in Chinese medicine we are looking at the entire picture to determine the best way to approach each case.
We are so fortunate at BAP to have practitioners from various schools of the medicine. We are all going for the same result but can take various routs to get there.
If you haven’t already; it is worthwhile to see different practitioners from time to time to explore what a different set of eyes and hands has to offer your journey in health.
In Good Health,
Sarah Natan LAc
Founder/Owner at BAP