The Opinionated Bastard

I got a new plugin for movable type, so I’ve tried turning on open commenting again. Let’s hope it works because forcing people to do TypeKey registration cut the comments in half and comments are one of the main encouragements I get as a blogger.

Asking a Western doctor is about Chinese Medicine is like asking the English about the French. You’ll get an answer, but it may not mean anything.

So here is my explanation of how Chinese Medicine sees things in an effort to clarify their terminology.

First off, there are a couple of things to realize. Chinese words tend to have multiple meanings much beyond that of English words. That’s great for writing poetry, but in the West, we’re used to one word meaning pretty much one thing. That’s not so in Chinese. The meaning of a word is either determined by context, or by additional clarifying words. This is one of the big reasons for confusion between Western and Eastern practitioners: The same word means different things to each practice, so they’re actually talking about two completely different things. Further confusion comes about because Chinese medicine also uses organs to refer to location.

The Chinese talk about the 5 organs: Kidney, Liver, Lung, Spleen, Heart. So if you have heartburn due to digestive issues and you go to a Chinese doctor, he would diagnose the problem as relating to the spleen. To the Western doctor this makes no sense. Problems with your spleen don’t cause heartburn, the spleen is just this giant lymph node that lives near your stomach. The Chinese must be delusional.

Ah, but the Western word for spleen doesn’t have the same meaning as the Chinese word for spleen, because the word for spleen in chinese is also the same as the word for the entire digestive system. Translating that word as the english word “spleen” is really an error. “Stomach” would probably be a better translation, and “Digestive System” better still. So the Chinese doctor is saying “you have heartburn because you are having a problem with your digestive system”. Which is pretty much the same thing a Western doctor would say.

So to understand Chinese medicine, you first have to understand that the Chinese have a slightly different model of disease then the Western approach. In the Western model, each organ has a specific function that it does, and if you have a problem, it must relate to some organ not doing its job or some pathogen. There are hundreds of organs, glands, etc. throughout the body, each doing their specific job in the Western model.

The Chinese see no need to draw distinctions at that level. Instead, they group the organs into functional systems. The set or system is then named after the specific organ which they consider to be in charge of that function, or after the organ closest in location to where problems of that type manifest as pain.

While sometimes people consider that “holistic”, its not really, its merely a less reductionist model then Western medicine. So its not so much the fact that Eastern medicine treats the body as a whole, as much as they stop reducing the body into discrete pieces once they reach the system level. They’re also much more focused on how the patient describes they are feeling than in Western medicine which emphasizes what the doctor can observe. Since digestive problems often call stomach or abdominal pain, “spleen” ends up being a good name for a whole set of related heath issues.

Viewed from that perspective, the 5 “organs” of Chinese medicine make a certain amount of sense. Those are the 5 organs whose effect you can actually sense. You can’t ask someone how their adrenal glands are doing today, but you can ask them about their energy level, emotions and the location of any pain.

Given that additional information in Western terms, I can translate the chinese “organs” as follows:

Chinese Spleen (Stomach): Problems relating to the digestive system.

Chinese Liver: Problems with the blood. Since the Liver is responsible for filtering the bloodstream, any sort of poison would tend to annoy the liver, manifesting as pain on your right side. Hence, blood problems are considered liver disorders.

Chinese Lung: Really this is your entire immune system plus your lungs. Since we get colds more then anything else, any sort of immune system issue is considered a lung issue.

Chinese Kidney: The kidney in Chinese medicine relates to energy storage. If you consider that the adrenal glands live right above the kidney, and think about the sympathetic sytems of the body, you can see how this relates to that.

Chinese Heart: Pretty much literally the heart, but also, the heart is considered in charge of the other organs of the body. I’d translate this to being a combination of the parasympathetic systems of the body and the portion of the brain that regulates the body.

Is this model perfectly accurate? No. But it can be useful to think about the body in this way when relating to patients, because their description of their symptoms relate more closely to this model then the model of individual organ function.

Case in point: The other day my wife and I went to the doctor, and he was talking about how if you’re having gall bladder problems, that may lead to abdominal pain, and he didn’t see why because all the gall bladder did was collect bile salts for use in digesting fat.

That’s because he’s thinking in the reductionist Western model, where each organ does its job but doesn’t interact with any of the others. Excepts that’s not how the body works, the organs are constantly interacting. In Eastern terms, the gall bladder is part of the spleen system. So if its not functioning properly, then the other organs will have to work harder. Those organs might then complain, causing you abdominal pain. If you step back a level and restate the Eastern diagnosis in Western terms: “a problem with one part of the digestive system may manifest itself as pain with another part of the digestive system” you can see how reducing down to the organ level may not always be the appropriate model to use.

So there’s a place for both systems. I’ve found that Western medicine is much better at intervention, while Chinese medicine is better at long term issues. If you have pneumonia and you go to a Chinese practitioner, he would say you have a problem with Lung, in this case meaning both literally your lungs, and more generally your immune system. He’d be right in his way. Your lungs are having problems due to a pathogen, which if your immune system was stronger, it could throw off. So he might prescribe you some immune strengthening herbs, and weeks later, you’d feel better.

A Western doctor would blame the pathogen, and he’d be just as right in his way. So he’d prescribe you an antibiotic to kill the pathogen. You’d feel better in about a week, except then you’d have to suffer through the side effects of the antibiotic: digestive problems, lack of energy for months afterwards (antibiotics are somewhat poisonous, that’s how they work, by poisoning the bacteria).

So if you’re dying, a Western doctor could save your life. But if you keep getting chronic colds, a Chinese doctor could make you healthier.

Lately, I’ve been doing both. I go to the Western doctor for antibiotics, then I go to the Chinese doctor to help me recover from the antibiotics.

The Noise is out, and I got a check from them, which makes me a professional writer.

Here’s this month rant.

I’ve been having this thought for awhile, I decided to write it down:

The anti-War people are fundamentally certain they have the moral high ground.

I’m not so sure that’s true. The reality is that Saddam killed 2.5 million people in Iraq over the last 10 years, which works out to 20,000 people a month.

Yes its bad that because we’ve gone into Iraq, some people have died, and every death in Iraq counts against our involvement.

But that doesn’t mean that we should have stood by either, that’s just as morally reprehensible. Its been 2 years now since we invaded Iraq. Does that mean that 480,000 people are alive in Iraq that wouldn’t have been otherwise?

I dunno. I’m uncomfortable with “body count” morality. We can’t use Saddam’s body count as a justification for our own. Each and every death in Iraq since April 2003 is a stain upon our nation’s conscience. Yet those 2.5 million Iraqis that Saddam killed were a stain upon the worlds conscience.

Since we’re talking about morality, I think the concept of sin is appropriate here: Which is the greater sin? To try to perform a good work, but do it imperfectly, or to stand idly by while another performs evil?

I don’t know the answer, though personally, I’d lean towards trying instead of doing nothing. If you try, even a partial success means the situation improves.

If you really want the moral high ground, you have to provide an real alternative.

Added a local blog (Flagstaff, AZ) to the blog roll today: Clever Zen Monkey

SpamLookup is working great for me.

Not only is it blocking a bunch of spam, but I cleverly added a filter to block all spam with &#1 in it, which is the beginning of an encoded spam message. That seems to be blocking tons of spam, since my real commenters don’t use HTML-encoded entities. Between its general lookup, and that filter, only a couple of things have slipped through, enough for me to manage by hand.

I didn’t get this until I got to the end. Then it made me laugh out loud as it sunk in.

Long Live Pope Cliff Clavin

A while back, I wrote a piece on education and I asked some teachers with blogs for comments.

While most agreed with me that bureaucracy was the problem, the comments all had one theme:

Quality teachers are the answer to education, period.

Frankly, I was somewhat thunderstruck. This ran completely counter to everything I expected. The teachers talked about how some teachers were burned out, they advocated merit pay, etc.

Basically, everything the NEA (the teachers union) has fought against the last two decades the teachers were for, and everything the NEA fought for, the teachers were against.

Now, in retrospect, that shouldn’t be too surprising. My mother, despite being the shop steward for her union, hated the union. The only thing worse then the idiots in the union were the nincompoops in the district office.

Now, today, I find out that that NEA is suing the government over NCLB. Hat Tip: Eduwonk.

The core of the lawsuit boils down to the contention that No Child Left Behind is forcing school districts (and by extension states) to spend too much on education. This is, to put it mildly, a novel argument from the NEA.

Or as ScrappleFace put it, the NEA wants “No Bureaucrat Left Behind”.

Now I’ve never been a big fan of the NEA. This is an organization that rates schools not by whether or not the kids are learning, but on how much the school spends. We wonder why education keeps getting more expensive while kids seem to be learning less and less? Because the NEA is measuring the wrong thing.

As the son of a shop steward for the NEA, the grandson of a man who spent time in Leavenworth for running a labor union, I never thought I’d say this but:

It’s time to bust the Teachers Union.

Save our kids, kill the NEA!

I’ve been thinking of myself as attempting to be a straight, conservative Oscar Wilde.

Now I know, I’m really Ann Coulter With a Penis

Congratulations to Time Magazine for giving her the cover.

From the WSJ:

Abuse of the taxing power is about as serious as corruption can get in our democracy, and it should be of bipartisan concern. In the 1990s, conservative critics of the Clinton Administration such as the Heritage Foundation had to endure suspicious audits. And of course the Nixon Tapes reveal that the former Republican President ordered tax investigations of Democratic opponents and donors. These columns recently raised doubts about an IRS probe of the tax status of the NAACP.

Effing Politicians on BOTH sides.

So Flagstaff is having a vote on this local proposition. Basically, the issue is all about whether or not to let Whalemart build a super-Whalemart in town.

Typical of the hippies in town, its a badly written and badly argued proposition.

Since I don’t live in town, I can’t vote for or against it, though I decided to write an article for the Noise about it.

45 seconds after sending my piece off to my editor, I get this spam from one of the hippies claiming that the main guy arguing against the proposition was a liar.

So far, having reviewed all the pro and against stuff, its been the pro-proposition guys who are the liar. This was no exception. The claim is that Flagstaff, on National Geographic Traveler’s 10 Great Towns list, is one of only 3 towns without a WhaleMart Super Center already. That is, the anti-proposition guy pointed out that 7 out of the 10 didn’t have a Super Center.

The email claims that none of them have it. Here’s a quote from the email:

National Geographic Traveler’s 10 Great Towns:

1. Berkeley, CA. No Wal-Mart Supercenters within 30 miles.

2. Eugene, OR. No Wal-Mart Supercenters within 30 miles.

3. Boulder, CO. Nearest Wal-Mart Supercenter 9 miles away.

4. Madison, WI No Wal-Mart Supercenters within 30 miles.

5. Ann Arbor, MI No Wal-Mart Supercenters within 20 miles.

6. Chapel Hill, NC No Wal-Mart Supercenters within 10 miles.

7. Charlottesville, VA No Wal-Mart Supercenters within 30 miles.

8. Princeton, NJ No Wal-Mart Supercenters within 30 miles.

9. Hanover, NH No Wal-Mart Supercenters within 20 miles.

It’s pretty obvious that this is a lie. In these days of urban sprawl, saying that Boulder, CO doesn’t have a WhaleMart Super Center because its not within 9 miles of downtown is just stupid. Berkeley, CA is in Silicon Valley, am I supposed to believe that Silicon Valley doesn’t have umpteen Super Centers? Similarly with Chapel Hill, I’ve been there, if the Supercenter is in Raleigh or Durham, that’s the same thing as being in Chapel Hill as far as a resident shopping there, its part of the “Triangle” and all the shopping ends up being in Raleigh or Durham. So out of 3 items on the list, I’m already distrustful of 3 of them, and I notice 2 others that say “20 miles” instead of “30 miles”.

A quick trip to the Walmart web catches the “Yes” guys in their shading of the truth:

Since most of my readers don’t live in Flagstaff, here’s where you can find out more:

The hippies in favor of the proposition can’t seem to agree, so there are two pro-proposition websites:

YesForFlagstaff YesOnProp100

Of the two, YesOnProp100 is the more honest one as YesForFlagstaff has a number of factual errors on their website. Something that bothered me about the YesOnProp100 site though is that they site this study. Well, unlike the hippies, I actually downloaded and read the study, and according to it, ALL businesses are bad which is just stupid. It’s not even clear that it applies to Flagstaff anyways, given that Barnstable, Massachusetts and Flagstaff are probably very different towns. The study was written from a very narrow viewpoint, that of property taxes anyways, and sales tax is a big factor in Flagstaff.

The anti-proposition folks only have the one website, which is basically sponsored by Wal-Mart:

ProtectFlag

Taken together, I’d have to rate the WalMart site as being the most honest. The pro-proposition sites shade the truth in various ways about what the proposition is supposed to do, while the anti-site provides a link to the proposition at the top of their home page. I kind of worry about political sites that argue for a proposition they don’t want people to read…

The Arizona Daily Sun, a paper I can’t stand, ended up coming out against the proposition, and given their general liberal bent, that’s kind of surprising. You can read their editorial here. So the fact that even they condemned the proposition says something important to me.

In the usual ranting on SlashDot

First:

every project final report had to mention possible military applications

That’s kind of depressing… why didn’t they require that every final report had to mention applications that could improve life in underdeveloped areas or something?

Then students would pursue projects with this in mind, instead of developing with military applications in mind. Highly reliable and easy-to-repair water pumps, improved farming tools constructable from local materials, simple and effective water filtration devices, etc.?

You say that like those aren’t military applications, I think perhaps your out of touch with what modern military actualy does. Demonizing anything military is easy, and the people who do it the most are the people who don’t realize that it’s the military’s infrastructure that make most humanitarian relief operations possible. Next time you think somebody needs 10,000 tons of relief supplies ask FedEx what the going rate is, and if they drop it off in a hostile fire zone.

I like that last bit about FedEx. After the Tsunami, there was some ex-military blogger who was at this trade show where some Frenchman made a crack about Bush sending an aircraft carrier to aid the tsunami victims. The blogger in question pointed out that aircraft carriers can generate electricity and produce fresh water, as well as airlift supplies. At the time our US Military was delivering aid while the UN guys were sitting around with their thumb up their ass.

I can’t find the original article, but Michelle Malkin has some stats about the U.S.S. Lincoln.

It’s this Necklace

So some of you know I’ve been studying Qi Gong at Water Mountain in Flagstaff.

Well, the other day, I went over to a friends house and they had this toy:

Fisher-Price Games: Oreo Matchin’ Middles

Basically, it consists of these giant sized plastic Oreos with different shapes cut into the “cream filling” part. A Square, a Circle, a Triangle, a Star, you get the idea.

So I sat there, and using my Qi Gong, tried to guess what each shape was in the middle.

Did amazingly well. Pretty freaky though.

Some shapes were easier to sense then others. I ended up picking out the 4 most distinct: Square, Circle, Triangle, Star, but I got confused between the triangle and star a lot.

The other shapes, like the crescent moon or oval were harder. The crescent moon was harder because it felt both spiky and roundy, while the oval felt similar to the circle, just squished.

After some practice with the 4 easy ones, I got better at the other 8 though.

Now I had to order one from Amazon. :-)

Even though I know how to do it, and I know what I’m doing, Qi Gong still freaks me out sometimes.

Makes martial arts movies more interesting though.

Funny story about commie pizza from my ex-business partner

I would have called it hippie pizza.