MBH - Huwe Acupuncture

Magic Wands, Silver Bullets, Hacks, and Chinese Medicine

An old black-and-white photo shows a traveling snake oil salesman marketing his elixir as a miracle drug for any ailment.

Listen instead:

Ever wonder what people are wondering? I sure do. In answer to that question, I sometimes have a little fun with search engines. I type in an intro query without actually completing the search term. I want to see what suggestions pop up based on what other people have previously searched.

Photo Infographic: Magic Wands, Silver Bullets, Hacks, and Chinese Medicine

In general, what I find is that we want the search engine oracle to pronounce something good or bad, forever and ever, amen. This applies to all manner of things, and is especially true when it comes to health. We’re obsessed with placing value judgments on every health tactic, routine, and/or food under the sun. We want the magic wand, the silver bullet, the health hack, the shortcut, the easy way, the trapdoor, the smoke, the mirrors, the abracadabra of it all.

Today I’d like to make a case for not hacking up our lives in quest of magic bullets. And how (it probably goes without saying) that relates to Chinese medicine.

The Compounding Difficulty of Aggravated Evasion

Sometimes, running away is 100% a safe, sober, and sane move. But other times, running from something is just running toward it in another aspect of life. Let’s suss these out.

When it comes to predatory behavior, deals with the devil, and imitation vanilla extract, just get yourself away! In these cases, it’s often best to depart forthwith! Doing so may be called “running away,” but it’s the self-preservation type of running. Setting healthy boundaries, declaring no admittance to deal-breaking shenanigans and relationships is not avoidance. It is assertive assurance that you won’t have those things in your life, or at least that you’ll have them a lot less.

So when is running from something the quickest way to get more of that exact thing? When we quit a situation that’s not good for us without dealing with it. Avoiding dealing with deal-breaking shenanigans risks repeating that same pattern.

Infographic: Magic Wands, Silver Bullets, Hacks, and Chinese Medicine

I’ve made up a term for this type of sustained avoidance; I call it generalized avoidance or aggravated evasion.¹ If we go through life solely operating on shortcuts and evasive maneuvers meant to avoid for avoidance’s sake, we lose resiliency, adaptability, and humanity. The more we avoid discomfort, the more uncomfortable it will be, and the more terrifying and derailing discomfort becomes.

The running from/avoidance spectrum shows up all over life, and it cannot be solved by a shower of magic bullets. Chinese medicine talks about such spectra as feedback loops — a dynamic interaction of interdependence. When we allow ourselves to experience life fully without trying to reduce it into tidy silos, we get a lot more out of it, and we’re far less fragile. What can I say? This is just science. You gotta feel it to heal it.

You Gotta Feel It to Heal It

Seeking “magic bullets” as an evasion tactic complicates things for us because following each new trend splits our understanding and learning capacity. IS coffee good? ARE blueberries good? IS weight-bearing exercise good? These questions reveal an assumption that an absolute value of goodness exists. Thinking in such terms is one of the ways we trip ourselves up. Those questions also beg another question: Good for what?

Around 20 years (or so) ago, I attended a small-town solo concert of a now famous musician who was playing his as-yet-unknown-to-the-world originals. When introducing one song, he said something that stuck firmly in my mind. It went along these lines, “This song’s about busted-up friendships: one of those things that’s good for songwriting, and bad for — well — just about everything else.”

Exactly! Good for one thing, bad for another.

If that musician had avoided or buried the discomfort of busted-up friendships — a pain we all experience at some point — he wouldn’t have written that song. Instead, he wrote about it, which not only processed his discomfort, but also turned it into art.² That’s how art is a healing process: It shows us the stuff of life.

Quote Card: Magic Wands, Silver Bullets, Hacks, and Chinese Medicine

Conclusion

The truth is, the stuff of life is nuanced, influenced by context, and more multi-faceted than many of us would like to believe.

Chinese medicine, however, revels in facets. As such, it excels at treating the individual who shows up in real time. And while health history is important, illuminating, and a strong contributor to any health picture, it’s not a complete predictor of where a person is, or where they’re heading. Aggravated evasiveness, or the absence of it, is a far greater predictor.

Regardless, though, what’s good or bad for any individual is going to vary, depending on lots of things.

Let’s take this back to the coffee question: Coffee might be good for concentration, but bad for the adrenals. The extent to which that matters depends highly upon the individual context. Part of being human is to use our intelligence, awareness, experiences, and relationships to help us discern the context of our lives. There are no true short-cuts or arrivals; the journey is always under our feet.

by Mary Beth Huwe

These writings are an exploration of what it means to be human – to be sick, to be well, and to heal – viewed through the lens of classical Chinese medicine. My words aren’t medical advice, and these essays don’t constitute a practitioner-client relationship. They also aren’t meant to be the final word on… well, anything. Rather, I hope they are the beginning of a conversation you have with someone in your life. Thanks for reading!

Footnotes:

I have no idea if generalized avoidance is already a recognized term in psychology, but it should be. Goin’ with it. Added aggravated evasion because it has a nice ring to it, and because it demonstrates the dogged premeditated intent of evasion that governs this kind of approach. ↩︎
Fifteen or so years later, he co-wrote his third number-one hit, a song about the importance of “cry[ing] when it hurts and laugh[ing] when it’s funny.” Pretty solid medical advice, really, and something that seems like an extension of learning what to do with the natural discomforts life brings. ↩︎

Tongue Diagnosis Chart (Plus How to Read It)

A close-up view of a tongue sticking out of a person’s mouth before they consult a tongue diagnosis chart.

Listen instead:

When you go to an acupuncturist or Chinese herbalist, chances are the practitioner will ask you to stick out your tongue for their inspection. That’s because one of our diagnostic techniques is tongue diagnosis. We’re looking for the color, size, coating, moisture level, and any bumps, lines, cracks, or divots.

What the what, and why is your acupuncturist so interested in the looks of your tongue?

There are many reasons Chinese medicine practitioners are interested in their clients’ tongues, which I’ll tackle below. Moreover, odd though it may sound, you can inspect your own tongue. I’ll give you a tongue diagnosis chart so you can next-level your at-home self-care moves like a boss with all those hyphens. Let’s go down the rabbit hole!

Diagnosis in Pre-Modern Times

These days, if we want to know what’s going on inside our bodies, we have many modern options at our disposal.

Physicians can order a lipid panel, connect you up for a nerve conduction test, stick a camera into many a nook and cranny, check kidney and liver functions, pop you into an MRI tube, snap a quick X-ray, and/or choose from any other number of diagnostic tests. Not only can they do these things, they can do most of them before lunch on a Tuesday. NBD.

But what happened before these types of tests were available? Were people bumping around in dark caves, completely unaware of their insides right up until the moment Prometheus stole the liver panel tests from the gods? Of course not. Everything we have today was built incrementally — and, yes, sometimes exponentially — by the brilliant people who came before us.

As we’ve covered in a previous post, Chinese medicine is, to use a technical term, super-duper OLD. Ergo, its diagnostic tools developed without the convenient benefits modern imaging affords us. Let’s pause here for a moment to think about that.

The radical changes that modernity has wrought upon the human experience are staggering to try to conceive of. It’s like thinking about the formation of the Grand Canyon, or trying to understand the distance between the sun and Alpha Centauri.

If you, like me, were alive pre-internet, you have an experiential, practical memory of how different life was before that thing showed up. I’m not here to yap either way about the internet’s pros and cons; rather I want to point out that the internet was a sea change. Love, hate, or love/hate it, the internet redefined how we interact with ourselves, our minds, each other, and our collective. Humans had a lot more room for reflection and downtime before the internet made incessant productivity, busyness, and reachability not only available, but expected.

The internet is just one example of a radical shift brought by a technological innovation, but there are lots more: cars, faster cars, guns, machine guns, electricity, major home appliances, TV, and mobile phones — just to name a few. Imagining life on Earth before these things is challenging and beyond the scope of these words.

Safe to say, pre-modernity, people had a different relationship to time. On the one hand, we might think they had less time because so much was tied up in the labor of daily life: starting a fire, boiling the water, curing the meats, et cetera ad infinitum. On the other hand, we might think they had way more time because (a) they had fewer distractions and (b) they had fewer demands outside daily life.

For the purposes of this essay, I’m going with the tried-and-true idea that privileged people had more freedom of movement and schedule than the people toiling in manual and domestic labor. I’m also going with the idea that privileged people in those days had fewer distractions, and as a result were likely to either go stark-raving unpleasant, or to go stark-raving interesting.

What was it like, then, all those years ago, for the people of privilege who were developing Chinese medicine? Well, I don’t actually know. It’s easy to romanticize or disparage a time I can barely contextualize in reasonable terms.

My most neutral sense is that such folks had a lot more time on their hands to pay attention to stuff, and that their capacity for observation and contemplation was likely superior to ours. Because there were fewer distractions, they were well-practiced observers and contemplators. Also, shorter life spans and different types of health problems may have meant that cause and effect were more proximally related in days of yore.

Anthropological musings and realities aside, the people studying medicine made connections between the inside and outside, and these findings were based on their observations. And sure, many of them were probably wrong or bunk. But many were not, and held up to the tests of time and scrutiny.

One such diagnostic technique is tongue diagnosis.

Quote: Tongue Diagnosis Chart (Plus How to Read It)

Tongue Diagnosis: Straight From the Source’s Mouth

Tongue diagnosis shows up in some of the very old aspects of Chinese medicine. This article by Chen Ze-lin¹says depictions of tongue diagnosis can be found on bones and tortoise shells from the Shang dynasty (circa 1600–1050 BCE).I can barely wrap my mind around walkie-talkies and ear crystals, so please excuse me if I simply goggle at that.

Sometime in the Qin and Han dynasties (221 BCE–220 CE), the Neijing, a medical classic of Chinese medicine, was written. The Neijing, as the Library of Congress succinctly states, is “a summation of Chinese medical knowledge up to the time of the Han dynasty.”

The Neijing mentions the tongue as a consideration in medicine, name-dropping it here and there in diagnostic terms. For example, “Patients… feel chilly, have cold limbs… the tongue has a yellow coating, and the patient is feverish.” This type of talk continues throughout various texts in the subsequent centuries, but without the full-on tongue diagnosis charts and detailed inspections we know today.

Sometime in the 13th century (Song or Yuan dynasty), a practitioner named Ao Shi made the first illustrated books about tongue inspection. These books, Golden Mirror Extracts and Every Point Is Golden, weren’t terribly popular, which I find somewhat baffling. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at tongue pictures, but they are fascinating.²

A little bit later on, another practitioner (Du Qing Bi) added more illustrations to Ao Shi’s. About 100 years or so after that, a practitioner named Xue Ji included the tongue pics in his own book, and they took off in popularity and recognition. So in comparison to the deep history of Chinese medicine, tongue inspection as a specific diagnostic tool is somewhat recent, having become more specifically studied and absorbed into the mainstream in the 1200s–1400s. Subsequent centuries have seen tongue diagnosis become even more enfolded into the medicine.

These days, as Dr. Nancy Holroyde-Downing³ states in her 264-page thesis about tongue diagnosis (bravo!), the inspection of the tongue is very prominent in Chinese medicine:

“The inspection of the tongue, initially associated with portents of impending death or with the presence of febrile illness known as shanghan 傷寒 (cold damage), is now a pervasive aspect of a traditional diagnosis, and, as noted above, it is a fundamental part of the curriculum in most colleges of Chinese medicine. It is discussed in diagrammatic and theoretical detail in contemporary Chinese medical textbooks and is a feature of the ‘signs and symptoms’ used in planning or discussing acupuncture and herbal medicine treatment.”

True story! And as with everything in Chinese medicine, there are lots of ways to understand it. You can run a search for “Chinese medicine tongue diagnosis chart” and find pretty different — and nonetheless correct — results.

Open Up and Say Ahhhhhh

The most circulated tongue diagnosis chart, taught in both TCM and classical Chinese medicine, looks something like this:

Infographic: Tongue Diagnosis Chart (Plus How to Read It)

You’ll see that the tongue is a map, with areas of it linked to various internal organs. Over millennia and/or centuries of tongue observation as it relates to states of health, this is the generally accepted orientation guide of what to look for, and where. The heart is at the tip; just behind that is the lungs; in the center of the tongue is the stomach; the far back, or root, is the kidney area; the sides are the liver.

In our estimation, this chart is not useful for the lay person in terms of self-diagnosis. It’s easy to look at it and think either This is ridiculous! or Saints preserve us! I have a sore on my tongue! Is my heart diseased or is it my lungs? HELP.

Not helpful. Connecting the tongue to the internal landscape of the body is much more nuanced than the above italicized sentences suggest. There are many theoretical and clinical underpinnings the practitioner must learn and practice for tongue diagnosis to be meaningful and effective. In fact, it doesn’t even necessarily imply there’s involvement with your organs at all. It’s subtle and layered, which is pretty much another way of saying, it’s Chinese medicine.

So what is useful for you in terms of that at-home self-care I referenced way back at the beginning of this rabbit hole? If you examine your own tongue in the mirror, what would Chinese medicine suggest you look for, and what would it suggest you do about it?

At Huwe Acupuncture, we suggest looking for two main things: scallops and coat. We also find that small dietary changes can change the state of the tongue a good deal.

Scallops

The source: A scalloped tongue is the result of the tongue’s sides pushing against the teeth. Now, you might think that’s simply a result of tongue size. And you’d be sort of right — but the tongue’s size changes depending on what’s going on with your digestion.

The main takeaway: A scalloped tongue is typically an indication of sluggish or bogged down digestion. The body’s ability to transform food and drink into energy becomes compromised. We often suggest to clients that they incorporate fresh ginger and cooked scallions to aid in digestion and appetite.

Coat

The source: Tongue coat can indicate all kinds of things related to yin and yang — for example, is the situation primarily rooted in heat or cold? Absence of tongue coat is also informative.

The main takeaways:

Lack of coat or thin coat both suggest the need to build fluids. This can be achieved through fluids, probiotics, fermented foods, juicy foods like zucchini or okra, and soups.
Thick coat typically indicates food stagnation. Chinese medicine suggests diversifying the diet in these cases.

For example, an overabundance of carbohydrates can be mitigated with sprouts. Too much protein can be leavened by a pineapple marinade, which helps break down protein. Excess fat can be aided by spices such as pepper. Or, digestive enzymes can handle any of the above.

Conclusion to Tongue Diagnosis Charts

Because Chinese medicine didn’t disappear with the advent and development of biomedicine, the diagnostic system of tongue inspection remains. While we do caution against oversimplification when applying this system to your own health, it can be helpful to familiarize yourself with your tongue.

Hilarious as it sounds, staring at your tongue in the mirror can help you gain an understanding of how it changes. Check it out when you’re feeling great (energized, well-rested, not stressed, happy, etc.), when you’re feeling not-so-great (hungry, hangry, sleep-deprived, stressed, hungover, etc.), and also whenever you feel like it.

Noticing the change in scallops and coat structure can give you insights into what you need. And knowing is half the battle.

by Mary Beth Huwe

Footnotes

Ze-lin, Chen 1987, “Brief history of tongue inspection,” Chinese Medical Journal, pp. 38-44, accessed December 2023 from https://mednexus.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/cmj.0366-6999.100.01.p38.01. ↩︎
Also gross! Have you ever looked up black hairy tongue (BHT)? ↩︎
Holroyde-Downing, Nancy 2017, “Tongues on fire: on the origins and transmission of a system of tongue diagnosis, a dissertation submitted to the faculty of University College London,” accessed December 2023 from https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10040369/1/Holroyde-Downing_10040369_thesis.pdf ↩︎

Words Matter: How the Language of Chinese Medicine Assists Healing

A dictionary is opened to the word “terminology,” representing how the unique language of Chinese medicine assists healing.

Listen instead:

As patients of biomedicine in the West, we’re accustomed to a certain kind of language. Diagnoses and terminology are generally based in Latin and/or Greek terms that only sometimes jangle the anglophone ear.

Insomnia,¹ for example, is the inability to experience somnolence (sleep) and is a pretty well-known term. Idiopathic hypersomnia,on the other hand — which means you’re real sleepy and we don’t know why —while decipherable for the word nerds² among us, is a little wonky.

This type of naming is somehow both very descriptive and not especially illuminating. If you go to the doctor because you’re unable sleep, and they tell you that you have something called inability to sleep, you may or may not be reassured.

It all reminds me of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis. The Dawn Treader is a boat and it’s on, you know, a sea voyage… in another world. As is to be expected under such circumstances, the protagonists meet all kinds of unexpected characters and happenings throughout the voyage. One such protagonist, Eustace, is speaking with one such character, Ramandu.

This part of their conversation is noteworthy:

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.” ³

Well, exactly. Language has the ability to deepen our understanding about the nature of a thing, and the nature of a thing is far more than its label.

Another common naming style in biomedicine is eponymic. An eponym basically means that the thing thus named was named for a person, typically the person who “discovered” said thing.

This is my least favored type of naming, and I find it especially irksome in medical and anatomical terms. Bartholin glands, Haab’s reflex,and Abdallat-Davis-Farrage syndrome⁴ all tell us absolutely nothing about the thing they are allegedly describing. Also, labeling people’s body parts with one’s own surname is rude. Ew.

When used expansively in a medical context, language can help us understand ourselves and our health better. And in that way, language can augment our capacity to heal. Let’s see how that comes into play with the language of classical Chinese medicine.

Infographic: Words Matter: How the Language of Chinese Medicine Assists Healing

The Medical Language of Chinese Medicine

Language in Chinese medicine is, as we say around here, a little different. Hat-tip to Port Wellness Acupuncture for this acupuncture glossary and explanation: “[A]n acupuncturist commonly uses words in an uncommon way.” Agreeeeeeed.

There are a couple of reasons for that. Naturally, Chinese medicine terms and diagnoses are all translated from Chinese into English. Additionally, the medicine has evolved over millennia, right alongside the people it treated. Furthermore, Chinese medicine is phenomenological in nature — it’s about being able to synthesize the myriad aspects of our lives.

As I don’t speak or read Chinese, I’m uncertain how anachronistic the medical language sounds to fluent speakers. But in my experience, the language of Chinese medicine more often than not connects us to the nature of the thing, rather than offering a surface description or the self-immortalization endemic to the eponym.

Chinese medicine terms include words like qi, phlegm, wind, cold, damp, heat,and fire. Examples of Chinese medicine diagnoses include Wind-Heat Invasion, Phlegm-Fire Harassing the Heart, and Wind-Damp-Phlegm Bi Obstruction.

These terms are delineations of the stuff of life, and these diagnoses describe the root cause of the issue — neither highlighting the resultant symptoms, nor the surname of the dude du jour.

Wind-Heat Invasion could be the common cold or a far more advanced infection. Phlegm-Fire Harassing the Heart could mean fierce anxiety or heart failure. This language isn’t a lack of precision, and it isn’t intended to sugarcoat a bad situation; instead, it’s a different way to calculate malfunction and our role within it.

Diagnosis: Problems, Reworked

A Chinese medicine diagnosis can offer glimmers of understanding into our disease processes, and give us the wiggle room to make small adjustments in our lives that amplify our healing capacity.

Let’s look at three fairly common and challenging diagnoses — insomnia, lupus, and cancer — and how they might be worded in Chinese medicine:

Insomnia in Chinese medicine is considered a consequence of other issues. Wind-Heat Invasion and Phlegm-Fire Harassing the Heart could both cause insomnia — and a slew of other unpleasant symptoms as well.

Insomnia could be broken down into a variety of roots and branches: is it difficulty falling asleep? Staying asleep? Is it acute? Chronic? Episodic? Depending on the source of your insomnia, you could take different actions to reduce its occurrence and impact.
Lupus could be defined as Latent Heat, which is what happens when the body is no longer able to contain heat — or inflammation. This expression of disease can manifest in a variety of symptoms such as pain and swelling in the joints, low fever, headaches, and pain in the chest upon deep breathing.

But Latent Heat could also show up as any number of other biomedical diagnoses, including — but nowhere near limited to — rheumatoid arthritis, myasthenia gravis, and Lyme disease. In other words, if you have Latent Heat, you don’t necessarily have what biomedicine would call lupus. But if you have what biomedicine calls lupus, you do have Latent Heat.

Regardless of specific biomed labels, a person with Latent Heat can reduce their body’s inflammatory load with heat-clearing acupuncture, herbs, and other regenerative tactics prescribed by their Chinese medicine provider.
Cancer, typically considered by Chinese medicine to be Fire Toxins in the Essence, is one of the scariest diagnoses people in the United States face. The biomedical language surrounding it leads to a certain reductive precision that can be very helpful in determining type, stage, and treatment.

But the language of Fire Toxins in the Essence — especially once unpacked with a practitioner — helps a person with cancer understand the mechanism of what’s happening. When the body is making cancer cells, which are by definition toxic, the repercussions are widespread and taxing. We’ve found that clients with cancer can move forward into the unknown with more steadiness when they focus on replenishing fluids, repairing damaged digestive processes, and thinking about ways to reduce the impact of the “fire.”

Quote: Words Matter: How the Language of Chinese Medicine Assists Healing

Conclusion

Rather than removing us further from our symptoms and healing through confusing or obfuscating terminology, Chinese medicine diagnoses seek to connect people with their experiences.

As always, I’m not insinuating that you can think yourself well with magic words or Chinese medicine language around diagnosis. What I do put forward is that this type of linguistic approach can be a reframe of your experience, and can help you understand the nature of what you need.

And when you understand the nature of what you need, you can help yourself become more adaptive — which is another way of saying healable.

Footnotes

To be precise — which is what footnotes are all about — insomnia, according to Merriam-Webster, = in (without) + somnus (sleep). ↩︎
You — which is to say, we — are delightful people! ↩︎
Lewis, C.S. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, p. 209.New York, HarperCollins Children’s Books, 1952. ↩︎
A super fun site — which is the best kind of site — Whonamedit?, lists out medical eponyms. ↩︎

We Believe in Treating People, Not Diseases

Listen instead:

We’re often asked, what does Chinese medicine treat? The answer requires some explanation, because Chinese medicine treats people, not diseases. That means no matter who you are or what you’re suffering from, classical Chinese medicine is an option for you — not just an alternative or a last-ditch effort, but an actual, serious, thoughtful medicine.

We’ve helped people aged one month to 92 years with conditions such as fatigue, headaches, menstrual problems, joint injuries, pain, HIV, digestive complaints, back aches, earaches, nose bleeds, infertility, nightmares, constipation, anxiety, cancer, insomnia, nausea, brain injury, neuropathy, pregnancy complications, depression, lupus, Parkinson’s, diabetes, and smoking.

Yeah, that’s a lot.

And each of those individuals received individualized care — because effective Chinese medicine is specifically tailored for an individual at a certain place in time. Encompassing the different modalities of acupuncture, moxibustion, body work (tui na and cupping), herbal medicine, meditation, and movement, Chinese medicine is deeply comprehensive.

Quote: We Believe in Treating People, Not Diseases

We Treat People, Not Diseases

Let’s take the example of acupuncture. If five people came in today complaining of headaches, they wouldn’t all receive the same acupuncture treatment. Each individual’s point prescription would depend on that person’s detailed picture of pathology: the location of the headache, the type of pain, the time at which it occurs, the triggers, the pulse picture, and the tongue.

Each of these components is significant, both in its own right and in relationship to the others. Furthermore, if the same five people with headaches came again next week, they wouldn’t receive the same points they received today. Each individual is reevaluated each time, and though the treatment may remain targeted toward the same general channels and points, it wouldn’t necessarily do so.

Infographic: We Believe in Treating People, Not Diseases

Is Acupuncture for You?

Of course, we can’t legally guarantee that acupuncture will provide you with a cure, and we wouldn’t want to make such a claim even if we could. What we put forward is that even if acupuncture doesn’t cure your disease, save your life, or remove your symptoms, it will very likely change the way you feel about your disease, your life, and your symptoms.

In this way, acupuncture greatly and profoundly reduces suffering.

Some people wonder whether acupuncture is for them. The short answer is yes. Acupuncture is for anyone who wants it. Maybe you’re in the best shape of your life, or maybe you feel like you’re falling through the cracks of modern healthcare. Maybe you don’t notice your body unless it’s hurting you.

Maybe you have only a vague sense that something is lacking in your health, or maybe you’re very sick. Chinese medicine is multidimensional. It has something to offer every one of those maybes because it’s a medicine that takes the full constellation of the individual — of you — into account.

by Mary Beth Huwe

How to Talk to Your Doctor (in 5 Easy Steps!)

A doctor and patient practice good doctor-patient communication by following Huwe Acupuncture’s easy 5-step guide.

Listen instead:

At Huwe Acupuncture, we’re grateful to have respectful relationships with several area doctors in various specialties. Many of our clients are referred to us from physicians in primary care, pain management, Lyme, and gynecology, who recognize — even if somewhat bemusedly — the benefits acupuncture provides to their patients’ well-being.

One of the benefits of being outside the mainstream medical model is that we have time to talk to our clients. We know, then, that the physicians who refer to us are some of the best when it comes to doctor-patient communication. They listen to their patients, problem-solve with them, and are open to solutions (like acupuncture!) that exist outside of their own paradigm.

We also know that, unfortunately, some of our clients don’t have functional relationships with their physicians. In fact, it’s not uncommon for doctor-patient communication to hit a number of pitfalls.

Today I want to outline a straightforward and effective method of supporting communication with your doctor. When you see your doctor as a collaborative ally, you can maximize your appointment to get the most out of your time together.

How to Talk to Your Doctor

Ideally, you and your doctor are collaborative partners in your health, and your relationship is built on mutual respect. Your health is — to use a technical term — a big deal. It affects every sphere and level of your life, and it’s not only reasonable to want a good relationship with your doctor; it’s also your responsibility.

Doctors, despite various tropes or norms that point to the contrary, are people, too. They have their own hang-ups and social difficulties, their own strengths and preferences. In some cases, they’ll be excellent communicators. In others, they may be excellent physicians and not-so-great communicators. In most cases, they’ll appreciate your efforts to enhance the efficacy of doctor-patient communication.

1. Make a List

A couple days before your appointment, write down the items you want to cover. Are there particular symptoms you want to ask about? Is there a screening you’re wondering if you should have? Is there anything weighing on your mind?

Give yourself time to jot down whatever occurs to you. Then reshape it into categories or bullet points. Put the list somewhere you won’t lose it, and add to it if more comes to mind.

2. Read Your List Aloud

Bring that thoughtfully crafted list of yours to your appointment. Tell your doctor you made a list of X items that you want to get through in your time together. Then read from it, making sure you cover everything. If there isn’t time to cover it all in that appointment, make a follow-up appointment before you leave that day.

Sometimes people are concerned that their doctor will think they’re bananas for reading from a list. In our experience, the opposite is true. Physicians — particularly primary care doctors — are balancing staggering numbers of proverbial trays. From time demands to practice dynamics to myriad patient needs to insurance mazes, these humans are busy. A prepared and forthcoming patient is a boon for a physician.

When your doctor doesn’t have to work hard on getting good information from you, they can instead focus directly on the issues themselves. This is what good doctor-patient communication does: it creates the avenues for actual interaction. You don’t have time to spend the entire appointment building the road.

3. Tell the (Whole!) Truth

For a variety of reasons, people often withhold relevant information when they’re talking with their doctors.

Sometimes people have white coat syndrome and forget what they wanted to say. This is where that list comes in handy. Other times they think I won’t mention that; it can’t possibly be related. Instead of making that determination on your own, tell the doctor everything you’re noticing that’s bothering you. Let the doctor decide if something is medically significant.

If you’re intentionally concealing information from your doctor because you don’t trust them, move directly to #5.

4. Collaborate

The exact manner of interaction between you and your doctor will be your own. You might have a back-and-forth conversation as you go through your list. Your doctor might listen to everything and then ask questions. It doesn’t much matter what the doctor-patient communication looks like as long as it’s built on reciprocity, collaboration, and mutual respect.

Whether you’re facing a major disease process or are figuring out how to manage life’s demands in a new season, your physician can help you draw the map.

5. Repair or Replace

If your doctor continually puts you off, rushes you, or doesn’t respectfully acknowledge your concerns, don’t let it slide. Name it. See if you can readjust or recalibrate your interactions. Tell your doctor that you’re not feeling heard, and that feeling heard is important to you.

If you aren’t able to repair your relationship with your doctor, it may be that you need a new one. Some people are reluctant to change doctors. There can be many reasons for this — some better than others.

Remember that it’s your right to have a physician who advocates for and with you. When it comes to primary care medicine, fit is really important. This is a person you’ll be seeing for years, a person who’s the gatekeeper of your referrals and who influences in large part the trajectory of your healthcare.

Sometimes switching doctors is easier said than done. Insurance-based medicine¹is not renowned for its flexible, patient-centric, physician-deferential care. It may be, depending on your level of access and privilege, that you have very little choice regarding what healthcare professionals you can see. In such cases, you can sometimes see a different doctor within the same practice without jeopardizing your insurance benefits.

The point is, wherever you can exercise choice and agency, please do. Your health depends on it.

Quote: How to Talk to Your Doctor (in 5 Easy Steps!)

by Mary Beth Huwe

Footnotes

Insurance-based medicine is what we call the current, pervasive, US medical paradigm in which the insurance company commonly overrides the physician’s medical decisions. ↩︎

The Critical Importance of Playfulness in Healing

A laughing child runs through a sprinkler on his lawn in the sun, representing playful healing.

Listen instead:

Implicit in the idea of healing from something is the idea of moving to something else. From a broken wrist to a mended one; from an ulcerated stomach lining to a smooth one; from a C-section to an intact core; from a traumatized self to an integrated self.

We’ll talk another day about what in tarnation healing actually is, the differences between healing and a cure, how healing is simultaneously a birthright and a demand, how it’s both sporadic and the work of a lifetime.

For now, suffice to say that healing has different modes and meanings.

Throughout those variations runs a central, powerful common thread: Healing is some of the most serious work a body/mind/spirit can do. So why is this post called “The Critical Importance of Playfulness in Healing”?

Because here’s the reality: not all serious things are heavy all the time. In fact, many of them aren’t even heavy much of the time.

Furthermore and finally, for something as serious as healing to be successful, a little lightness is required. If this sounds counterintuitive to you, you’re not alone. Please, allow me to peel back a few layers and explore the critical importance of playfulness whenever we endeavor to heal.

Quote: The Critical Importance of Playfulness in Healing

Playfulness: Healing’s Ruby Slippers

Hang with me here, because this might sound a wee bit counter-culture. There are lots of ways to understand our experiences, lives, and world — and, contrary to what various, extreme self-referential interests would have you believe, different does not mean wrong, stupid, or bad. (At least, not necessarily. I won’t dishonor reality by implying different is never wrong, stupid, or bad.)

One of the many ways to understand disease is to see it as a departure from homeostasis in a way that causes disruptive problems. Thus, in illness and disease, there’s a certain departure from integration — a shifting from the natural state of the self.

Similarly, then, healing is a return to homeostasis and a reintegration of the self. Healing is a type of coming back home — except that the house will be a little different this time. Perhaps a room will be added, or a hole patched, or that sagging porch will be gone.

The point is, there are lots of ways to heal. Many paths lead home. And the best news is, like Dorothy, you have the ruby slippers.

Lo, these many years ago when we were in acupuncture school — a four-year (summers included!) combination of Survivor and family Double Dare — part of our training was a two-year internship in the college clinic. This clinic provided low-cost Chinese medicine to area residents, and as a function of that, served some very ill people.

Some of these people didn’t get much better. Maybe they stabilized, maybe they even worsened. Some of these people got much better. As in, much much better — in a way that we might not have predicted from the outset.

I remember being surprised when seemingly simple processes were recalcitrant, while gnarlier patterns just — POOF! — disentangled. That doesn’t surprise me anymore. One of the single most important predictors of outcomes, I’ve found, is how a person is oriented to their imagination.

Oh, That Overwrought Einstein Quote

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ve all probably heard that Einstein quote, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Am I really going to dredge it back up?¹

Yes, friends, I am. And allow me to be clear that imagination in this context is not the same as pretending.

Pretending is an anti-healing quagmire when it combines with its nearby neighbor, denial. More on that another day, but for now let us walk briskly away from imagination as pretending.

Rather, we’ll take the view of imagination as a playful, creative interaction with reality— as curiosity combined with a loosely-held, ever-evolving vision. This is a mighty fine line, and I mean that in the literal and colloquial senses. It’s a thin and nuanced balance; once you learn to see it, you may be inclined to wolf whistle.

Infographic: The Critical Importance of Playfulness in Healing

In terms of healing, this curious, nimble, imaginative frame of mind is like a booster for whatever treatment you’re undergoing. It allows you the freedom to own your healing process in a couple of ways.²

Firstly, scientific, technical knowledge about the condition happening to you is not required. You can pursue that knowledge if it’s helpful to you, but it may not be.

When you allow yourself to truly have the experiential knowledge about the condition happening to you, you’re engaging with healing in a very real way. That’s when you learn to read the language of what’s happening and of what you need. And maybe that’s what healing is: becoming fluent.

Secondly, the playfulness of imagination creates an opening for change. Because there are many paths home, it’s important both to pick a path to focus on and to abandon a path that isn’t working. That requires a good deal of flexibility and discernment.

Both flexibility and discernment are centered when we engage our imaginations. Visualizing yourself whole and healed is a powerful way to become whole and healed. But trying to visualize each turn you must take to reach that destination is powerfully distracting and even destructive.

The truth is, reality changes. A responsive, adaptive approach to healing helps us change, too, so we’re meeting reality as it changes. If we don’t do that, we’re meeting our denials and projections instead.

Countdowns, Games, and How to Play

As promised above, I’ve peeled back some layers. Now let’s pop ’em back into place and zoom out for a minute into the practical application of these ideas.

If you’ve ever been a child, which I’m fairly certain you have, you’ll have some recollection of playing. The example we like to give is of a (terribly cute) child we once knew playing in a large cardboard box in our living room. At first, the box was a spaceship. A great deal of the child’s energy went into the preparations required for flight. She needed to instruct her crew, load supplies, do lots and lots of checking, and any other number of Important Tasks simply beyond my comprehension.

She bustled and hustled and enjoyed herself immensely. Once everything was properly arranged, she climbed aboard and then jubilantly counted down to lift-off. Then something interesting happened. As soon as she shouted BLAST OFF, the game changed. The box ceased to be a spaceship; it was now a car.

The game wasn’t really about being in outer space. It was about preparing for space travel as if she could fly. She knew she couldn’t fly, and that reality robbed her of nothing. She was still happy to play until she bumped up against something that she couldn’t change.

So she changed with it. She changed the spaceship into a car, and then the car changed into something else. When the reality of gravity and cardboard boxes entered in, she was able to shift into another direction of play.

That cardboard box became many things in the weeks that followed, until it lost its shine for her. Then she moved onto magic wands.

Now, I’m not telling you to delude yourself into healing. But I am suggesting that suspending a little bit of disbelief can be a very healing approach. Accept that you don’t know every future twist and turn of your situation. Suspend the future. Explore it right now, whatever it is. Ask yourself, can I take care of this need, and can it be fun? Can it be like a snow day that cancels my plans and lets me rest?

This kind of playfulness allows you to meet your changing needs as they arise, rather than becoming overwhelmed and frozen. When we project into the future about things we don’t know as if we do know them, we miss the boat. And the spaceship. And the car. And the way home.

by Mary Beth Huwe

Footnotes

I would also like to dredge up this J.B.S. Haldane quote. ↩︎
Probably more, but I’m a mere mortal here, just doing my best. ↩︎

Classical Chinese Medicine vs. TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine)

A person sits in traditional Chinese clothing pouring a tea service, in a post on classical vs. traditional Chinese medicine.

Listen instead:

If you grew up in the United States in the late 20th century, it’s statistically unlikely you had much exposure to Chinese medicine. Unless you happened to frequent or live in Chinatown on either of our country’s coasts, you probably didn’t integrate acupuncture, herbalism, martial arts, or Chinese food therapy into your life.

Probably it was more of a Tylenol and Flintstones vitamins experience, shaken (not stirred) over a No Pain, No Gain mentality, and held together by a li’l Pepto-Bismol. No shame. Same here. The smell of Pepto still soothes me.

In recent decades, though, America has seen an increase in access to acupuncture. A 2014 NIH paper about the rise of acupuncture in the US reports that more than 10 million acupuncture treatments are given per year in the States. In the intervening decade, that number has likely risen.

In short, more and more people in the US are beginning to discover the benefits of acupuncture and Chinese medicine. And in the process, people are learning that not all acupuncture is the same.¹

Today in the US, acupuncture typically falls under one of two branches: classical Chinese medicine (CCM) and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Today’s post aims to disambiguate classical and traditional Chinese medicine, two styles whose dramatically different approaches can yield dramatically different results. Let’s go.

Infographic: Classical Chinese Medicine vs. TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine)

The Question Is — Who Cares?

Before we launch into classical vs. traditional Chinese medicine, I’d like to put forward two quick notes:

Why it matters.You’ve probably noticed that every so often people in any given (and every given) industry can become highly concerned — preoccupied, even — by discrepancies and distinctions that make the rest of us roll our eyes so hard we sprain something. I don’t want to do that to you.

The classical vs. traditional Chinese medicine distinction isn’t simply an academic one. I’m pointing out these styles’ differences because it actually matters for acupuncture clients. It’s worth knowing that not all acupuncture is the same, so you can best choose a practitioner whose training and style meets your needs.

Here’s my bias. At Huwe Acupuncture, we practice classical Chinese medicine, and we do that on purpose. We’re not a traditional Chinese medicine clinic, though we learned TCM differentiation and treatment principles because the national board exams are TCM-based. (The reason for this is deeply political.)

6,000+ Years of Chinese Medicine in a Few Paragraphs?

There are many types and styles of Chinese medicine — so many that it’s laughable to try to enumerate them. After all, Chinese medicine writings date back to 206 BCE, but its practice goes back even further. No one really knows when acupuncture came into being, but we have archaeological evidence that acupuncture existed in China in the Neolithic era,² which means around, say, 6,500 years ago-ish. Old, in other words.

Not only is it an old medicine, but it’s also a cumulative medicine — meaning that as new discoveries were made, old ones weren’t necessarily discarded as irrelevant. Instead, the new idea was added as another school of thought. Thus a practitioner can learn and practice multiple, wildly different approaches, including — but nowhere near limited to — Attacking & Purging, Warming the Interior, Cold Damage, Pestilent Factors, and Tonifying.³

There’s also the reality that acupuncture is only one part of Chinese medicine. This medicine is vast, wide-ranging, and includes overlapping — but nonetheless distinct — modalities such as moxibustion, cupping, herbalism, tui na, martial arts AKA tai chi AKA qigong AKA daoyin, dietary recommendations, and meditation.

How this medicine was taught and passed down through the millennia is, naturally, a mixture of tradition, drama, intrigue, and political influence. The form we see today is no exception.

Traditional Chinese Medicine’s Short History: Lost in Translation

According to a very fine article by scholar Ian Johnson, the Chinese term for this medicine, zhongyi, translates simply to Chinese medicine.⁴“Outside China,” Johnson goes on to say, “the unfortunate term ‘traditional Chinese medicine,’ or TCM, has taken hold, even though it doesn’t exist in Chinese.”

Johnson explains that the English language term traditional Chinese medicine originated in the 1950s in Chinese Communist Party publications aimed at the West. The idea here was for China to distance itself from Chinese medicine while cozying up to biomedicine. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP, or the Party) wished to be viewed as both modern and culturally unimpeachable.

The use of the word traditional, at least according to this word nerd,was apt. In English, that’s exactly the word we use to describe medicine that predates biomedicine. Sometimes we know the names of traditional medical systems — Ayurveda in India, for example. Other times, often in the wake of colonization and/or genocidal measures, we know the names of specific traditional medicines. Either way, the term traditional tells us something very specific when modifying medicine.

So while they wanted to distance themselves from Chinese medicine, whose theories were not validated by scientific imaging or studies, the Party couldn’t simply eradicate Chinese medicine. For one thing, they didn’t have enough practitioners of biomedicine to take its place. For another, there was some ambivalence surrounding it — after first renouncing Chinese medicine, Chairman Mao Zedong later endorsed it… ish. That is to say, he announced support of Chinese medicine, but didn’t believe in its efficacy or use it himself. In short, the Communists had to sort of incorporate Chinese medicine… and sort of eschew it.

In the end, the Party renamed and radically altered the practice and teaching of Chinese medicine, so that it became much less like its actual traditional self, despite the “traditional” moniker. Practitioners of Chinese medicine in China were sometimes exiled, sometimes fled the country, and sometimes were taught a bit of biomedicine and sent to far-off reaches of the country. In other cases, to quote this article by classical practitioner Heiner Fruehauf:

“[M]any physicians frantically burned their stitch-bound volumes and other old-fashioned belongings to avoid persecution, and as others died from grief or physical abuse, much of the physical legacy of Chinese medicine perished irretrievably.”

The dissemination of Chinese medicine within the country was overhauled. Learning no longer occurred in an apprenticeship to a practitioner, but became standardized and taught from textbooks. If an aspect of Chinese medicine was deemed superstitious — read “unprovable by modern science” — it was discarded.

Truncated and simplified from its origins and theoretical backbone, TCM takes a prescriptive version of Chinese medicine, or as Johnson describes it, “a sort of handyman approach.” The individualized, comprehensive power of Chinese medicine is watered down in this approach, which amounts more or less to Use this point prescription for this ailment.

Rather like a word-for-word translation, TCM doesn’t encapsulate the full breadth of Chinese medicine’s deep understanding and wide-ranging flexibility. Instead, it seeks to emulate biomedicine in an awkward application of Western thought to Chinese medicine. Its results are, then, as mixed as its components. It is this version of Chinese medicine that began to be practiced in China, and was most broadly released to the West.

Quote: Classical Chinese Medicine vs. TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine)

Classical Chinese Medicine: The True Traditional Medicine

But what happened to the non-physical parts of Chinese medicine that were removed from favor in the 1900s? What happened to the people who had once practiced those arts and survived? Some lineages are traceable to and alive in the United States today.

Classical Chinese medicine, or CCM, is the practice of Chinese medicine prior to the Party overhaul. This format of the medicine is comprehensive, individualized, and less formulaic than TCM. It gives the practitioner more access points to the client, and pulls fully from the depths of the medicine. For example, the classical acupuncturist treats choosing among 74 channel systems; the TCM practitioner chooses from among 14.⁵ With a more robust understanding of the ways in which healing works, the CCM practitioner can help guide people more fluently from illness to wellness.

Many professionals seek to revive and reinstate Chinese medicine to its full expression in the West, and some changes are being seen in China as well. Heiner Fruehauf, Ann Cecil-Sterman, Dianne Connolly, and Sabine Wills are all well-known, Western-born practitioners whose work with the classics and the classical approach reach Western practitioners. Many TCM practitioners avail themselves of continuing education to learn more about clinical efficacy and the classics.

At our clinic, we’re lucky to have learned classical Chinese medicine from the start. In fact, it’s why we both (individually) chose the four-year, graduate academic program we did. At that time, it was one of the only classical schools in the country. The classical component of the curriculum was taught by Jeffrey Yuen, an internationally renowned leader in the dissemination of classical Chinese medicine. Master Yuen’s considerable experience is rooted in Daoist philosophy, and is — as far as I can tell — unmatched.

Conclusion

None of this is meant as slanderous toward TCM; it is simply the reality of how Chinese medicine has changed in recent political times, and how it was introduced to the outside world as a result. As clients of acupuncture in our younger years, we Huwes both experienced TCM as a beneficial paradigm for healing.

Our subsequent experience and education have convinced us, though, that the more deeply the practitioner understands the complexity and elegance of Chinese medicine, the more frequent the opportunities for healing. And this is where classical Chinese medicine truly shines.

by Mary Beth Huwe

Footnotes:

Acupuncture itself is believed to have originated in China, based on the evidence of classical texts and other historical data. That said, Japanese and Korean cultures also have distinct acupuncture traditions. Our training includes some Japanese and Korean approaches, but mainly focused on Chinese medicine, based on the medical classics. ↩︎
This is a disputed claim. See a counterargument. ↩︎
We’ll address terminology directly another time, but if these terms seem jolting, please remember (a) language evolves over time, and these are old terms (b) these old terms are translations out of another culture into our language, and (c) there’s a paradigmatic difference between Chinese medicine and biomedicine. ↩︎
Johnson, Ian. “Chinese Medicine in the Covid Wards.” ChinaFile, 4 Oct. 2021, https://www.chinafile.com/library/nyrb-china-archive/chinese-medicine-covid-wards. Retrieved 28 Nov. 2023. ↩︎
CCM uses these channels: primary, extraordinary, luos, sinews, and divergents. TCM typically uses primary channels, plus two extraordinary channels (the Ren and the Du). ↩︎

Gratitude = the New Guilt… But You Don’t Have to Buy It.

by Mary Beth Huwe

It’s November… and you know the Script, right? It’s all about the gratitude.

It’s the time of year I am supposed to effuse about the WONDERFUL things in my life, and how #grateful and #blessed I am. (With a parenthetical, often unvoiced hope that this process will attract more wonderful things into my life, and shove the crappy stuff out of the picture.)

To not talk (and post) about gratitude would be, you know, ungrateful.

It would be negative.

And privileged.

And generally obnoxious.

As an acupuncturist and a writer, my assumed part in this narrative is to describe what’s naturally happening in the fall, and how we can experience and cultivate gratitude. To wax philosophical about acknowledging what’s precious and valuable to us, and letting go of what serves us no longer.

In deference to the Script, I’ll suggest that we let go of the Script. I don’t think it’s serving us.

The Pressure of the “Attitude of Gratitude.”

Here’s what I’m noticing, both in the clinic and in the world: somehow gratitude has become the new guilt.

#Gratitude has acquired a hashtag. People are worrying if they’re #gratituding enough, if they’re doing it right.

When something crappy happens, they wonder if they’ve attracted it through a lack of gratitude. With their karma. Maybe because they don’t hold a state of mental purity, of eternal gratitude. And what about their chakras? Probably they’re filthy. Or is that the aura? Crap.

#Gratitude has become a weapon to beat ourselves up with – to prod us to some sort of finish line of personal growth. It covers up a few nagging fears.

While it may not be conscious, I think the train of thought driving this Gratitude Self-Abuse is that we believe we don’t deserve our own happiness. We believe we don’t deserve our #blessings. We must prove – to ourselves and to each other – that through our unyielding, relentless application of gratitude, we have earned the beauty of life.

Most major religions would object to that part that says we must earn the beauty of life.

Earning the beauty of life isn’t our job; honoring it is.
But #Gratituding has an agenda:

Make the Crappy Stuff Go Away.
Earn the Beautiful Stuff.

It is denial. It’s denial hyped up on an energy drink after 5 hours of sleep for a week straight. It’s intense, in other words. It’s trying to force a feeling of gratitude where there isn’t one. It fails to honor. It fails to pause and notice.

Honoring Beauty → Spontaneous Gratitude

Honoring beauty is the simple action that leads to gratitude. I’d say it basically means “notice with respect and humility.”

When we notice the beauty in our lives without pausing to quiz ourselves about whether or not we deserve it (or justifying why we do deserve it,) we naturally feel grateful.

Then actual gratitude just… arises. Spontaneously. Like magic! It’s not a thing we have to apply to our lives or do to ourselves.

It can be really, really simple to honor beauty and feel gratitude.

You don’t need any supplies, but if you like them – go for it. An altar, a journal, a photo… whatever works for you. All that’s actually required is an openness of the senses.

Or even just one of the senses.

Here’s an example, using the sense of sight:

Notice the beauty in small, quotidian things.
- I see an intricate bird’s nest outside my window.

Bam. That’s all you need to do with your outward senses. Now the rest of it becomes internal:

Feel the feelings that arise when you notice small, quotidian things.
- What a peaceful feeling that bird’s nest gives me.
- I love seeing life that’s outside of my own life.
- I’m in awe of that tiny bird’s craftsmanship.

And that’s all you need to do on the inside. Just allow the feelings to arise, and feel them. If you want to, you can then:

Notice how those feelings can create more of the same feelings.
- - Wow… I can just *think* about that bird’s nest and feel peaceful. I only need to see it in my mind’s eye, and I can benefit from it.
Now I’m noticing similarly beautiful things – like that spider’s web. Or the ripple of the new butter in the tub.

Honoring beauty can take practice, and so it deserves your patience and self-kindness. Which is, I think, the actual point of any practice.

Wishing y’all well,

PS – What About the Bad Feelings?

If we allow ourselves to feel the bad feelings, won’t we just attract more bad feelings?

Denying the “bad feelings” will never make them go away. Denial doesn’t allow things to change, because it keeps stuffing them down. And so they keep popping back up. If there’s an endless loop of nasty chatter in your mind, you can rest assured that denial is in there somewhere.

I think it’s true that wallowing in bad feelings can create more bad feelings, but that’s not the same as feeling your feelings. You know the saying, “You have to feel it to heal it?” Feeling something is the first part of being able to let it go. There are lots of safe ways and modalities to help a person do that without self-injury.

XO,
MBH

These writings are an exploration of what it means to be human – to be sick, to be well, and to heal – viewed through the lens of acupuncture and, occasionally, herbal medicine.

My words aren’t medical advice. And they aren’t meant to be the final word on… well, anything. Rather, I hope they are a beginning of a conversation you have with someone in your life. Thanks for reading!

Ridding Medicine of Blame (and our lives of clutter)

by Mary Beth Huwe

For a recording of me reading this post to you, click here.

One of the reasons I’m an acupuncturist is because I’m interested in what ails us as a people. Bodies are excellent at showing us what’s not working for us on cultural and social levels. They are clear reflections of things in our lives we’d otherwise ignore.

Though I don’t love the term mind-body connection, I haven’t come up with something I like better… so I’m going to use it in this case. Some people are dismissive of the mind-body connection, using it as a way to minimize or invalidate symptoms and conditions as psychosomatic or stress-related.

Well, I get migraines – but that’s just from stress.

My high blood pressure goes down when school’s not in session, so I know it’s just because of that.

It’s worry that gives me insomnia; it’s always worse when my kids are at their dad’s house for the weekend. He’s so unreliable.

Many people are quite ready to connect illnesses like headaches, sleep conditions, and mood disorders with environmental causes – and somehow in the process write them off as all in the mind, psychosomatic, or otherwise not real. That’s symptomatic of incomplete thinking.

Tell me one last thing, said Harry. Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?

Dumbledore beamed at him…

Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

When “Mind-Body” Becomes Blame
A frequent consequence of the “psychosomatic” dismissal in medicine is blame – by the patient, by his/her family, and even by the medical practitioner (regardless of his or her chosen modality of medicine.)

It looks something like this:

Susan wouldn’t get migraines if she weren’t so sensitive.

I just need to quit caring so much; then my blood pressure will go down.

Carole, stop being such a worrywart and take a sleeping pill.

Do we do that with other diseases – ones that have visible “causes?”

(1) Do we say things like:

Well, Phil’s heart attack was just from stress.

Maybe, but we’ll probably also throw in some comments about blocked arteries, diet, HDL, and impeded bloodflow.

(2) What about this:

Matt’s such a hypersensitive guy – that poison ivy spread because it’s all in his head.

Probably not… but if Matt had hives, it might be a different story.

(3) Or this one:

Cancer? Again? Really? Why doesn’t Daphne get a grip?

It may be easier to see in cases like heart attacks, communicable diseases, and cancer – but it’s true across the board: there’s no place for blame in a healthy medicine.

I take this to what some might call a radical extreme: I do not blame the smoker for lung cancer or the alcoholic for cirrhosis. The drive to engage in such destructive habits is part of the illness. And/or maybe the guy with heart disease who won’t lay off the onion rings and KFC chooses it, knowing the risk. I think that’s his right.

Regardless, blame does nothing to relieve the burden of acute illness or the suffering.

Our entire experience as people is a psychosomatic one.

Every disease is reflective of and related to our lives.

And not one disease is blameworthy.

We Are in Relationship with Our Environments
In terms of health (and most other things,) it really makes zero sense to attempt to extract an individual from his/her environment in order to understand “the problem.” It may not make all people comfortable, but there is no question that we are all in relationship with our environments. The question is, is that relationship healthy or detrimental?

Illness is always a stress response that causes harm. The “healthiest” humans on the planet are those who can train their stress responses to become helpful to the whole system, and who can ultimately override the stressful conditions themselves.

Here’s a fun little report from Harvard in 2002 about Tibetan monks raising their body temperatures through meditation.

Now ask yourself – does this seem more credible now that I’ve cited Harvard research and Tibetan monks by providing a link to an article on the Internet?

Why? Why do we need Harvard and Tibetan monks to legitimize our “mind-body” connection?

What disconnect has happened to make us crave sound-bytes of double-blind placebo research, instead of actual investigation?

How have we become so defrauded, alienated, and disinherited that we seek external authority to sanction our internal authority?

That Relationship Includes Stuff
Understanding that our environments and habits are directly related to our states of health means taking stock of what we fill our environments with.

I was reminded of this over the weekend as I cleaned out my (tiny) closets to make room for the new addition to the family. I came across some nice shoes and found myself thinking I *should* either keep or sell them – instead of giving them to our local clothing closet. I could probably get $50 for these, I thought. That would be handy. So I guess I should do that.

My instinct, though, is to give them to the clothing closet. I’m a big believer in wide-open generosity for lots of reasons. One of which is that it’s a natural combatant to avarice, and it opens up a greater vision of how things can fit together. It’s Mary Poppins v. Mr. Banks.

Truth be told, I’m not happy with *lots* of stuff. I’d rather get a high-quality, beautiful thing I love, use the hell out of it till I’m done, give it to someone who likes/needs it, and then move on. For me, keeping stuff keeps me feeling bound.

Is this just an excuse, I’ve wondered? Am I actually hiding? Is my aversion to accumulation really a shield that “protects” me from having?

wonder woman dflct — *Deflection is tricky business.*

And the answer is no.

The reason I don’t like having a bunch of stuff is because it weighs me down.

It’s clear, of course, that “a bunch of stuff” is a subjective term. Determining what qualifies as “a bunch of stuff” is like looking at my index finger and trying to figure out if it’s a “big ” finger. Well… yeah… when compared to my pinky. And… no… when compared to my ring finger.

The actual question, I think, is more along the lines of “is my index finger a big enough finger in this case?”

If the case in question is app selection on my iPad, yes. If the case in question is picking a gorilla’s nose… maybe not. They have large nostrils.

So, too, with stuff. The actual question is, “How is this level of stuff affecting me?”

For example, I realize I have a “bunch of stuff” when I start having neurotic internal conversations about what I *should* be doing with it. That’s my indication that fearful lack is running the show. The *should* is the tagline of the fearful belief that I won’t be able to get what I need in the future, so I’d better hold on to everything that’s in my sphere now… JUST IN CASE.

In reality, the only thing I *should* be doing is living my daggum life, and spreading the wealth and love in the ways that I can.

I don’t want two pairs of running shoes; I don’t run. So I’m done talking with my shoes. I’m sending them to the clothing closet. I’ve seen the people in my town who need them, and they ain’t me.

Getting those shoes out of the way and to their rightful owners is a way of clearing my own clutter and making space. Maybe that space stay cleared, maybe it will be filled with something new. I don’t have to know the outcome. But I do have to be smart enough to know that I can’t keep inhaling if I’m still holding onto my most recent breath.

……..

The Case of the Lost Essay (What NOT To Do When Disappointment Strikes!)

by Mary Beth Huwe

Click here to listen to me read this post to you.

This morning I experienced the kind of computer blip that I thought never happened to anyone anymore.

Last week I wrote – and labored over – and twiddled around with – and tweaked – and thought A LOT about – and edited – and changed the name of – and rearranged – an essay about communication and buzzwords.

After several days of this process, I had the essay in (what I consider to be) publishable format. I scheduled it to be published yesterday. And it was. Sort of.

The title of the post was published. And so were the categories and tags. But the TEXT – the part that I labored over, twiddled around with, tweaked, thought about, edited, and rearranged – had disappeared.

Now, I would like to claim that I am responding to this very philosophically.

But I am not.

My response is more like this:

The first reaction

I am awash in the bitter freshness of having lost something that I worked hard on, enjoyed, and was excited to share.

And if I am honest, I see that I am also in denial.

I am hoping the writing is not – in fact – lost. That I after I publish this post I will – gasp! – recover the other one.

I am hoping I can experience the relief of a close shave – you know, “learn a lesson” about scorpions without having to experience the fullness of the sting. Just a little sting-y nibble, please.

Sigh.

Toughening up

So I wrote a blog post and I lost it. Is that going to change the course of the world? Am I such a middle-schooler that I believe my thoughts about buzzwords and messaging MATTER in an all-caps and italicized sort of way?

I’m going to give that a no and a yes.

No because disappointments like this may not determine the direction of the universe – or maybe they do, I can’t claim to say. (I’ve heard that Hitler was a frustrated and thwarted artist. Conceptually, I think that adds up.)

But certainly in this case, a disappeared blog post is not a matter of life and death. No small children are going to go unfed due to its not being published. No weapons were unintentionally detonated in the loss of this essay. And I’m grateful for that. But it’s a false conclusion that because no catastrophe has ensued, my thoughts about buzzwords and messaging don’t matter.

Creation matters

And that’s why yes. When we create something in our jobs or lives – whatever that something is – if it is meaningful to us, it is meaningful. No external authority (be it criticism or praise) can diminish or validate that significance because such things are under the jurisdiction of our internal sovereignty.

But what often happens for people in something like The Case of the Lost Essay, is a self-imposed “toughening up” process that does no good. It goes something like, “Big deal. It doesn’t matter. Get over it. Quit whining. Think of all the suffering in the world, and how much worse that is than this.”

Guess what. That’s not helpful. That is not “perspective.” It’s invalidation, and it ultimately leads to repression and a lack of compassion.

Measuring your own small sadness against all the suffering in the world doesn’t make you less sad. Or any kinder. It just makes you mean.

I repeat, this does no good.

It’s like stepping in dog poop with your right shoe and deciding to wipe it on your left shoe, just to even things out.

I see this process unfold in the treatment room and I see this process unfold in writing clients. And today I see the spark of this process in myself.

The bottom line, though, is we can’t get over something we never let ourselves feel.

From what I’ve observed, most of us are afraid of getting stuck (“wallerin” we call it here in Dixie) in self-pity so we never enter into sadness and disappointment. This is a mistake, I think.

This avoidance adds force and fear to the depth of sadness and disappointment. And if we can’t get our sea legs with “little losses” (like the Case of the Lost Essay,) how unrealistic of us to expect ourselves to weather the big ones.

So, yes. My proverbial right shoe stinks right now. And I am not going to smear it across the left one, too. Sometimes that’s the best we can do, and I think it’s good enough.

Shine on, y’all.

…

Mary Beth Huwe is a writer, an editor, an acupuncturist, and a mama. She helps people identify, articulate, and translate their most essential messages into kickin’ content that is both creative and practical.

These essays are forays into the art and essence of communication. They have not been subjected to the full scrutiny of said editor’s eye, and may contain typos. (But you’ll probably never find apostrophe abuse, because that’s just cruel.)