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.
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.”
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.
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
- 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. ↩︎
