Acupuncture is one of the most popular and effective contemporary healing techniques, practised in almost every country on the globe
Medical Advice – Yang Sheng
Yang Sheng – Nourishing Life
Also known as Lifestyle Advice, Medical Advice forms a crucial part of TCM treatment.
It concentrates on eliminating factors in the patient’s lifestyle or daily living activities that contribute to the cause or prolongation of a health complaint.
Alternatively, the client can be instructed upon how to positively promote active health and increase wellbeing by suitably modifying the way they live.
This type of specifically TCM instruction has no equivalent in conventional, western, medicine.
Why do people get ill?
To maintain health, we need to achieve a balance within ourselves, harmony with our physical environment, and integration with our interpersonal or social environment.
Problems with any one fo these levels can give rise to consequent sickness.
Medical problems deriving from ‘lifestyle’ can be complex and ongoing, and involve the patient’s diet, work pattern, sleep pattern, personal relationships, sex life, living environment or a number of other factors in their daily living that is making them ill.
Personal Integration
A person is a complex entity combined of various matrixes: their current self, their history and their future prospects. Their physical, psychological and spiritual aspects. Their wishes and their fears. Their position on the journey that is life.
TCM examines the vital components in this complex, integrated system of the individual and attempts to put right what has gone wrong, and ensure things don’t go wrong again.
Environmental Integration
Physical living conditions can have great impact on a person’s health: not all conditions are suitable for all people and different conditions are harmful to different people.
A person’s constitution or acquired conditions may make them unsuitable for certain environments, which then will perpetually trigger and aggravate the problem and make any prospect of better health impossible.
Social Integration
Relationships have the power to make us well, and the power to make us ill. To integrate harmoniously with others is not always easy.
Conflict can arise within the family, the workplace, neighbourhood, or society as a whole and be brought on by differing habits, opinions, wishes and outlooks of individuals as well as issues pertaining to race, gender, sexual orientation, occupation, social status and the like.
Huang Di asks Qi Po: “Oh, Qi Po, why is it that in the past we could treat serious illnesses only with chanting and Qigong exercises. Why is it that nowadays we have to resort to using needles and poisonous medicine?”
Qi Po replies: “Oh, we have to do that now, because now life is so complicated, people are getting stressed out by the complicated lives they lead. We have to resort now to acupuncture and herbal medicine.”
Huang Di Nei Jing (Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine), ca. 2000BC
