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A commenter on Goose-Stepping Hippies writes:

My mom was addicted to cigarettes, and it killed her.  You've got some interesting hippy theories yourself, Pierce.

I'm really sorry about your mom. That's tough.

My wife's addiction to cigarettes was tied in with her hypoglycemia: she smoked during the parts of the day when she needed an energy boost. Fixing the hypoglycemia meant she no longer needed the cigarettes.

I remember asking my sensei about her smoking, and his question back to me still floors me:

Why does she smoke?

I had never, ever thought of it that way. I sort of sat there with my mouth making fish motions... My sensei commented to me that tobacco was a powerful herb, and it was possible she was self-medicating. To me this has always highlighted the difference between the clinic and the Western approach: ask the patient why they do something, and then fix that.

I went home and asked her, and she said she craved cigarettes the most when her energy was low. So the first one in the morning, during her lull in the afternoon, those were the hardest to give up.

From that moment on, I stopped bugging her about quitting. She'd been trying for two years, and at that point was both wearing nicotine patches and smoking. Instead I bugged her about going to clinic. What I'd said to her also clicked with her, and she came into the clinic and started getting treated for her hypoglycemia.

Soon, she came to realize that the cigarettes were the devil's bargain: she would get a boost of energy for 15 minutes from a cigarette, but she would end up being more tired later. It gave her a 15 minute boost at the cost of an hour nap. Not a good trade. So they seemed less attractive as a solution . As the clinic evened out her energy levels (and mood swings, thank God!), she didn't need the crutch of the tobacco.

The real test came when her dad died (of Lung Cancer), and she had to go out to California alone. Despite all the stress, not once did she smoke to relieve it. In her mind, she knew they didn't really work as a solution, plus her hypoglycemia was gone, so she no longer had the large peaks and valleys.

All of that taught me the lesson to not be so judgmental about other people's addictions, even people who are addicted to things like crack or heroin. My first question is always: Why?

So yeah, if you want to call it that, I have my own hippy theory: judge not, lest you be judged.

The Taoists have an interesting concept of karma.

“The more good you do, the more good you want to do. The more evil you do, the more evil you want to do.”

That is, its not that bad things happen to bad people, as much has doing bad things makes you a worse person.

There's little moral distinction in Taoism, they consider the evil path as valid as the good path or the true neutral.

What they don't like is compromise being occasionally good or occasionally evil.

Like being a pacifist, yet praising Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden.

Or believing in the war, but not believing in foreign aid...

Hmmm... How did Iraq get in here? This was supposed to be about Darth Vader...Oh, I remember.

Awhile back I posted about how we get ADHD (Attention Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder) kids in the clinic occasionally.

Someone followed up with some questions because of an ADHD kid they were trying to help, so I thought I'd share the answers.

Anyhow, what do you know about getting this cool little 8 year kid fixed via QiGong? I've been looking at some TCM stuff too. Do you know which organs are the root of the ADHD?

ADHD is one of those diagnoses that for an Eastern practitioner could really mean anything. Every patient I've seen diagnosed with ADHD has had a different problem from a Eastern perspective and had different symptoms from anyones perspective: if I lined up all my ADHD patients together, it would be obvious to you just looking at them that they had different complaints. That is, I've seen ADHD cover everything from kids who look totally listless to kids who are vibrating where they stand.

So when I treat a kid with ADHD, I generally ask:

1. How do the parents see the ADHD manifesting itself?

2. What led to the diagnosis of ADHD?

3. How does the child respond to heavy physical exercise? If you have the child run around the building for 5-10 minutes are their particular symptoms better or worse?

4. Does the child prefer to concentrate on a single task for a long period of time, or flit from thing to thing? That is, would the kid spend 4 hours playing with legos, or 15 minutes each playing with 16 different toys?

Based on the answer to those questions, the treatment will vary widely. So while we have a lot of success with ADHD, its hard for me to treat remotely.

Since you don't have me available unless you live in Flagstaff, I'll make the following suggestions for the rest of you:

Find a good kung-fu/tai chi class to enroll the kid into. The old softer styles of Kung Fu didn't separate health from martial arts the way the more derivative successors like Karate do. So its quite possible that by enrolling the kid in a kid kung fu class that their system will gradually rebalance itself as they learn. Most instructors have some sort of trial lesson thing so that they can scope out the kid and the parents. In that introductory visit, if the parents talk to the instructor about the ADHD diagnosis, the instructor may very well be able to figure out how to get the kid to focus, especially if the instructor is pretty experienced with kids. People were coaching kids for a long time before there was ADHD

Now, finding what I would consider a “good” kid program is hard to explain because the martial arts you teach kids has to be customized for their age anyways. I'd probably examine the adult side in some detail, looking for tai chi or qi gong classes on the adult side.

The ideal would be something like we have locally where the kids program is separate but the adult program includes both qi gong, qi gong healing, and a healing clinic so you know there will be crossover to the kids program. That would be the ideal, but that's hard to find. If you find some websites for programs in your area I can look at them, but the parents should also follow their instincts when they meet the instructors: better a good coach in a bad program then a good program with a bad coach, and better a program that they can commit to driving the kid to twice a week then one across down they'll never go to.

Here's a study about Tai Chi and ADHD if you're interested.

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.

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.

As if doing Qi Gong once/day wasn’t bad enough, I got my wife to get me this biofeedback doohickey for my birthday.

The horror! When will it end!

I draw the line at Birkenstocks though. Its COLD in Flagstaff in winter, plus you get those little cinders inside them…

Maybe it would be more macho if I called it “Jedi training”?

Nah, just more geeky…

The biofeedback dohickey thing is pretty cool though. The exercises have been pretty easy though given how much Qi Gong I do.

It always comes back and bites you in the butt.

I finally started doing Qi Gong every day.

Previously, I always had a hard time getting started in the morning. I didn’t really wake up until 10 am. Now, I find if I do 20 minutes of Qi Gong, I’m ready to go, and alert. So for a 20 minute investment, its like I have an extra 2 hours in the day.

Sounds good right? Except I’ve turned into one of those people that I used to make fun of. You know, those people who get up early and do calisthenics and stuff.

I have a plan though. From now on, I’m going to be judgemental about rich people.

Yeah, that’ll do it.