(CHINESE) MEDICINE 3.0 – WHAT EVERY ACUPUNCTURIST SHOULD KNOW

 

Medicine 3.0 is a term for an approach to management of chronic disease championed by Dr Peter Attia. What Dr Attia has found is that in populations where the burden of acute illness has been reduced and lifespan has increased to something over 80 years, the major causes of illness are essentially fourfold: heart disease, metabolic dysfunction, cancer and neurogenerative disease. All of these can be identified from the very early stages of their development and effectively managed largely through diet, exercise and sleep habits.

Dr Attia’s goal is to replace reactive medical treatments, focused on diseases that are already in full effect (and which he calls medicine 2.0) with early proactive “treatment” through early identification of the preconditions of disease and the cultivation of daily habits that promote health and longevity, which he calls medicine 3.0. He substantiates his approach with references to the vast amounts of research data available on the effects of exercise, diet and sleep on the primary degenerative diseases of old age.

For anyone practicing Chinese medicine, this approach should feel familiar; we are admonished at the very roots of our medical tradition that:

 

This is why the Wise do not treat what is already sick, they treat what is not yet sick, do not put in order what is already chaotic, they govern what is not yet chaos. When the sickness is already developed before giving medicine, chaos is already developed before imposing order, is this not like being thirsty before beginning to dig a well or going to battle before casting weapons? Is it not late?

Suwen 2
Great Discourse on the Four Qi and Regulating Shen

 

Yet, if we are honest with ourselves as acupuncturists, we are very commonly deploying our tools in a very reactive “medicine 2.0” manner.

If we adopt a “medicine 3.0” approach to patient management in our clinics of Chinese medicine, we can immediately see a number of places we have very strong strategies on offer to help our clients achieve both a long lifespan and a long and satisfying “healthspan”, and I will share three examples.

1. Channel therapy based approach and the tools of acupuncture, moxibustion, manual therapy and herbal medicine offer personalized and highly effective solutions to diet and sleep challenges.

The importance of diet is of course common knowledge. Never the less finding the right diet is a highly individual project and everyones challenges are different. In addition to clinical treatment, our channel therapy based approach offers ways of understanding the effects of different foods through the qualities of the five flavours and their interactions with the seasons and other climatic factors. This common sense approach is easy understand, time tested and practical in aiding to develop an optimal dietary plan.

The prime importance of sleep on the other hand has only been fully recognized by the scientific research in recent years. It is now known that chronic lack of sleep sets off a cascade of stressors in the body leading to many chronic disease conditions. Healthy sleep is a matter of regulating yin and yang in the body, this means mentally being calm enough to sleep while physically body temperature must be carefully regulated, as the Lingshu chapter nine tells us, “the cold and the warmth in the roots and branches need to be mutually supporting.”

 

2. Sufficient exercise is identified as a primary factor in growing old gracefully. Examined through the lens of channel theory, optimal exercise is not only about quantity, but also quality.

The basic metrics of how we maintain muscle, cardiovascular capacity and coordination are quite straight forward. The variety of ways we can do this, the aesthetic enjoyment we can take away, the benefits in not only maintaining, but optimizing function of the musculoskeletal system in light of channel theory and the spiritual connections between mind, body and spirit are all areas in which the traditions from which Chinese medicine arises are steeped in generations of acquired knowledge and skill. This base of knowledge and skill is currently vastly under utilized in the Chinese medicine community.

The Neijing tell us;

The central region is flat and by means of the humidity of heaven and earth is able to generate the thousand things in great multitudes, people here have varieties of foods to eat and do not have to struggle, therefore their illnesses are wilting reversal and hot and cold, their proper cures are guiding and pulling exercise and pressing and lifting the legs, thus these therapies come from the central region.

Su Wen 12
Discourse on Different Methods Proper to Each Region

 

Wilting reversal and hot and cold, all the presenting conditions of decrepit old age in medicine 3.0, fall into these categories. The Neijing is telling us that daoyin, i.e. exercise and manual therapy, are the modalities of choice to manage these problems.

This is indeed a place where we see the ancient natural science of China and modern evidence based research agreeing to an amazing degree and a place where we can see a huge potential awaiting the application of these ideas in the medicine 3.0 context.

 

3. All of the conditions that medicine 3.0 seeks to address and all of its interventions are essentially culturally based.

The effort to live not only a long, but also a healthy and enjoyable life, is intimately tied to the cultural in which you live. The medicine of the Neijing seeks to not only treat disease, but to understand how disease arises and how health arises out of active participation in the world around us. To be healthy is to participate in the rhythms of the natural world.

The ways in which a culture interacts with the natural world will dictate how individuals within that culture live and interact. In the end we find treating the root of disease requires more than the simple treatment of the individual it requires care of society and all that entails.

 

A medicine of the future in which old and new are combined.

Medicine 3.0 is modern technological medicine coming back to and catching up with the wisdom of age old traditions. As practitioners of Chinese medicine we have much to offer the development and optimization of this new way of applying the research of modern medicine while at the same time we can benefit greatly from examining and improving our own practices in light of this same research and the clarity it lends to the foundational texts of our profession.

 

 

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