Have to study today. A self-study test for Friday, for the second Anatomy class. And for that class, we also have to know the basics of the appendicular skeleton. Appendicular being – said the man who recently read it – the parts of the skeleton appended to the axis of it, to the spine, ribs, and head. The appendages are fairly moveable around that axis, giving us the ability to move as much as we can.
There are a lot of joints and thingies in a human being. Whaddyaknow.
The Anatomy is done partially to make the course more complete and give practitioners able to both describe and understand things from a Western diagnostic viewpoint – say that a patient walks in with a previous diagnosis from his Western doctor. This diagnosis might be useless or it might have been correct, but it´s still good to understand the language of it. This will also come in later, when we have classes on Western Pathology and differential diagnosis. The second part is that it is meant to help the practitioner better understand the living, breathing human person they are treating. ”Living anatomy, not dead anatomy,” to quote one of the teachers. Chinese medicine has done autopsies and performed surgery since time immemorial, but always focused its techniques, learning and treatment on a living human person – note, not a living human body: a person. The focus in Chinese medicine has always been on what health is, and how you balance and restore it, rather than look at a disease and how you cure it.
Tomorrow, on Thursday, it´s Points class. There is always a test on last weeks points and channels, and the introduction to a new one. Then those points are marked out on other students, and they mark on you. So far, the main focus is on a limited amount of points, all in the easiest channels that are simply out into the arms instead of the longer, more complicated channels that move throughout the body and into the feet. But for those in the class with no previous knowledge in Chinese medicine (read, ”almost all”) it must be fairly daunting. The pace is fast, the knowledge of points, channels, and information around it covers a lot, and all this in a medical system they have barely begun to understand yet.
Chinese medicine is a huge field. The amount of knowledge that a good, classical chinese medical practitioner knows and uses for analyzing a patient is simply stupendous. And at the very apex of that skill, you find the legendary laoyisheng, the Old Doctors, who at their peak can do ”one needle acupuncture”, where their diagnostic skills are so good that they see the one point on the patient that will make everything else balance and unfold like a flower. There are very few people like that around. At best, you might find one who puts in five needles to get that effect. But now we are talking classical chinese medicine, CCM, only, not the hybrid TCM version, nor the Western acupuncture that is slowly killing chinese medicine in the West.
In Points last week, we went through the Pericardium channel (shou jueyin xinbao jing). I´ll put up a separate post on this later, where we´ll get illustrated how it might work and the treatments that can be used from it.
Now – more coffee, and more skeleton. Your humerus has a radial groove, a deltoid tuberosity and a surgical neck. Who knew?
