Chinese Medicine

Chinese medicine is more than just acupuncture, it is a philosophy of health and wellness that enables one to see the connection between the functioning of the body and the mental and emotional state of a person. James was trained in TCM, or traditional Chinese medicine, and he was mentored by expert acupuncturists in CCM or classical Chinese medicine in China and in the US. Both TCM and CCM use acupuncture and herbal medicine to treat the individual diagnosis of a human being.

While classical Chinese medicine is firmly rooted in the classical texts, traditional Chinese medicine, or TCM is a more modern amalgamation and westernization of Chinese medicine. Though there are differences between the two systems, in many ways they overlap and deepen each other.

One of my primary teachers, Nguyen Van Nghi MD used to say “Chinese medicine does not compete with western medicine, it completes it.” This is because where western medicine tends to focus on the material body only, our medicine looks at the state of energy of a person and includes the emotional and mental aspects as well. We call this “the wind and the leaf.” Western medicine focuses on the leaf, or the material form, while eastern medicine focuses on the wind, or the invisible energy coursing through a person. Don’t think energy is real? How is your heart beating right now? Each beat is caused by electro-magnetic energy…exactly what the heart of eastern medicine treats.

I have argued that east Asian medicine is a science in it’s own right, and not an archaic or pre-scientific form of medicine. To learn more about the Science of Chinese Medicine, you can read this longer article I wrote here.