Right. Learning is happening. Students go to classes, do tests, discuss things and debate what the teachers say. Some classes are interesting, some less so, as in all university programs. Clinic goes on, with discussions of diagnostics and treatments both in video-clinic and observation-clinic.
We found out that the class in ”qigong tuina” actually is a class in anmo, basic chinese massage, which the teacher said her teachers called it when she learned from them. I don´t know how this then became renamed qigong tuina, as that is something quite different to anmo, just like normal tuina is something other than qigong tuina too. Oh well. Like some other things here, I file it under the folder Shi ma? (”Oh, really?” in Chinese.)
The class in theory is currently looking at the causes of disease, the sanyin. These include both internal and external causes, and then how their aetiology works, how they shape an imbalance in a person, and how this manifests in different ways depending on how deeply it has gone. Again, old Chinese medicine recommends treating before there actually is an illness noticeable at all, and the diagnostic skills of classical Chinese medicine teaches how to do this with great skill and precision.
If your qi is good and stable, you are rarely affected by external factors at all. But if it starts to weaken, they become a bigger factor. You also have the internal factors, one of which is the ”Seven Emotions” (qi qing). Well balanced, they are simply there, making life life and letting us enjoy it for good and for bad. Unbalanced, they can give rise to deeper imbalances pulling qi and physical body down with them and creating ill health that actually has emotional causes.
They are: anger, sadness, joy, grief, pensiveness, fear and fright.
Having too much of any of them will injure our health. If they do it for a long time, it will shape it and let the injury settle deeply in our system. The longer they go on, the more tense the person becomes and the easier they have for feeling that emotion even more, so the vicious cycle goes around and around, deepening.
Pensiveness might be interesting to look at a little deeper. It´s not a word used a lot. What it actually covers is blockages in the Earth element of the person: a constant worry or never-ending thoughts that just keep nagging and never stop just go on and on and keep going on without stopping and often just repeat the same things in loop on and on and on without stopping and never –
You get the point, right? Good.
This is called sixiang in Chinese: obsessive thinking. If it´s done in a loop the size of a centimeter instead, it´s called mental illness.
Chinese medicine can treat emotional problems quite well, if the acupuncturist is skilled. It can´t do magic, can´t fix them, but it can balance them a whole lot and make someone´s life more harmonious and balanced both inside and outside. Westernized acupuncture cannot do this, so if you look for that kind of treatment, you need to find an acupuncturist trained in old chinese medicine, classical chinese medicine in one school or the other.
Emotions can be the joy of life, as well as the bittersweet. But they should not be the poison of it. Then there are treatments and ways of training that can, could, and will help to make life more worth living again.
Another Shi ma?-filing last week was a comment in clinic where a patient was coming in for treatment for infertility, which acupuncture usually treats very well, but she came in after 14 miscarriages and had four children before that, the youngest of which was 17. The reason for wanting another was that ”the others were too old now”. This seemed like a doubtful case for me to treat and help get more children, and I asked about that. The teacher answered, ”If you don´t, someone else will.” Really? They might, but the choice you make is always for your system and your integrity, not someone else´s. It´s the same logic that goes towards ”I won´t help homeless people because they probably get help somewhere else”.
Shi ma. Oh, really? File.
