Jennifer Stone: Early this year, I met with the guest editors of the Origins in Medicine Special Issue. As the discussion unfolded, it went in directions I did not expect. Thank you everyone for joining us. Can you all please briefly introduce yourselves?
Peter Dorsher: I’m Peter Dorsher. I’m a board member for the AAMA MARF Foundation and a former Mayo Clinic staff physician. I retired two months before the pandemic began in 2022. Currently, I’m expanding my research interests in acupuncture, its origins and how it applies to today’s thought processes regarding myofascial pain and other medical conditions, and how we can utilize ancient medical knowledge and practices to our advantage. I also have interest in low-level laser use for myofascial pain. I’ve treated chronic musculoskeletal pain as a physiatrist for close to 40 years now. I’m also an engineer and I like to understand why things work and how they work, and to me, as I’ve looked through history and looked through anatomy and physiology, I think people (clinicians) do the best with what knowledge they have and particularly tools they have at the time to try and describe the human body, how it works, how to make it work better.
Edward Neal: Hi, I’m Edward Neal. I’m a physician dual-trained in Chinese medicine and Western medicine as an internist. I began my training with the AAMA in the early 1990s and later pursued an LAc degree. I also studied Chinese languages both in China and the United States. For the past 20 years, my full-time research has focused on The Huang Di Nei Jing, translating the early texts using a method known as Classical Text Archaeology. This involves using databases to explore the original meanings of ancient characters and text passages. Surprisingly, this approach has revealed a significantly different description than was previously understood. They create a more beautiful, relevant, and cohesive story that aligns with the patterns of nature quite clearly.
Barbara de la Torre: My name is Barbara de la Torre, and I am board certified in Family Medicine and also Medical Acupuncture. I’m a fellow and an executive board member of the American Academy of Medical Acupuncture, and I am a proud second-generation American Academy of Medical Acupuncture physician. I’m Qigong master trained from a very respected lineage, and I continue to study to this day. I’ve integrated acupuncture into traditional health care environments. That was where I spent a lot of my time until the last two years. I’ve worked in primary care, in corporate environments, in urgent care and in obstetrics. I’ve had a fascination with history for as long as I can remember, and every time I find out there’s a barrier, I want to look back further. You must keep looking back, and the farther back you look, the more it makes sense.
Jennifer Stone: Thank you so much everyone. Dr. Dorsher, if I remember correctly, at the 2023 AAMA Conference in Dallas, you spoke about how some of the surgical techniques that we use today came from the Egyptians who were doing brain surgery 5,000 years ago. Is that correct?
Peter Dorsher: Correct. There’s evidence, actually, that there was skull trepanation done in Mongolia several thousand years BC, as well as in Peru, but best delineated in Ancient Egypt around the time of Imhotep, around 3000 BC. He described a number of surgeries, and they were able to successfully perform skull trepanation and set compound fractures. Ancient Egyptian surgeons used vinegar and water poured over Memphite stone to release carbon dioxide as a soporific, and they were already extracting opium from poppy plants for analgesics. Ancient Egyptian clinicians used plant-based treatments including honey and other compounds including frankincense, which have antibacterial properties, to prevent wound infections. And interestingly, I also found passages from even before the Nei Jing of surgeries being done in China as well, where they used a hemp extract as an analgesic. There are ancient writings from about just right around the year zero of successful open surgery of the abdomen with partial intestine resection. Dr. Hua Tuo was a renowned ancient Chinese surgeon and acupuncturist, who is considered the most famous Chinese surgeon.
Surgeries have been done for a very long time, and it’s evident that in 200 BCE around the time of the Nei Jing and even before that, ancient clinicians had extensive, detailed anatomic knowledge and even physiologic concepts including blood circulation and circadian rhythms. At the last AAMA national meeting, I provided clear evidence that the whole idea of dermatomes and segmental innervation of organs are described by the Primary Channel and the Triple Heater physiology, which I think is really interesting. It follows with our modern 3D anatomy. We can see that the Lung channel follows the lateral cord of the brachial plexus, including the musculocutaneous nerve, the lateral antebrachial cutaneous nerve, and even branches of the median and radial nerve are all consistent with that, and that comes off the C6 root. So the ancient Chinese physicians actually had thorough clinical observations and insights. They figured this out but just in a very different language than we have today, which reinforces their brilliance.
The ancient Chinese clinicians also figured out that one could treat a point on the Heart channel to affect cardiac function and that heart organ problems may manifest along sites on the Heart channel. We now know this is anatomically plausible from the results of retrograde radio tracer studies that have come out in just the last few years. It’s fascinating that a lot of modern medicine, including myofascial pain, is just redescribing what the ancients told us thousands of years ago.
We need to remember that for hundreds if not thousands of years before the Nei Jing was compiled, clinicians were treating a variety of medical conditions via Bian stones and moxibustion along 11 extremity pathways, as described in the Mawangdui treatises. These 11 pathways were later incorporated into the Nei Jing and are now known as Primary Channels. I think that the ancient Chinese were the most brilliant clinicians, even compared to today. They observed and compiled very subtle autonomic and somatic reflexes in the body through incredible clinical acumen, and it’s just mind-boggling how brilliant these practitioners were and that we are just rediscovering it now.
Edward Neal: I echo much of what Peter said about the level of detail in these descriptions and their advanced clinical experience. One of the intriguing aspects I have encountered in my research is that it appears likely that a significant disruption of transmission occurred in the early stages of the development of Chinese medicine. For example, we see this in the complexity of early writings when compared with post-Han understandings. This was the case for many seminal Warring States texts that were lost or fragmented under the authoritarian Qin rule.
This interruption resulted in a period where knowledge was lost, documents were poorly preserved, practices were disorganized, and information became fragmented. Consequently, people were uncertain about the true meaning of the original writings and practices of Chinese medicine. The result is that we are now practicing a form of medicine that has been reconstructed and is based on later ideas.
What is truly exciting is that, for the first time in 2,000 years, we have access to new tools that allow us to examine characters and databases in innovative ways. This has enabled us to reconstruct the story of Chinese medicine in a completely new light, offering us a fresh perspective on its development and evolution.
Jennifer Stone: Ed, thank you. Are there any other scholars who are doing the same work that you’re doing, reexamining the characters in the ancient medical texts?
Edward Neal: It’s rather complex now. Early texts have been difficult to decipher. They are written in a sparse and ancient grammar that lacks punctuation and is open to multiple interpretations. In addition, the original meanings of characters often differ significantly from their modern counterparts, so it is not simply a matter of looking up characters in a dictionary. Furthermore, the texts were originally highly fragmented and have undergone multiple revisions and editions.
Sinologists are experts in interpreting the meaning of early ideas and texts, but they do not generally possess clinical experience, something that turns out to be crucial when evaluating early medical texts. On the other hand, clinicians may have an interest and dabble in understanding early text material, but they often lack the formal training in language and history that Sinologists have.
Over the centuries, there have been many insightful commentaries on these texts, but due in part to the difficulties of text analysis, these are often statements of different points of view rather than definitive explanations.
Of course, there are many experienced scholars in China who are quite knowledgeable about early texts, but much of their experience and knowledge are filtered through recent cultural stories about what is and is not true. For example, that channels are lines on the body where points are located rather than complex vascular rivers.
So, now, I am a bit by myself using these new techniques of database research to reexamine and retell the original story of Chinese medicine. I hope to have more company soon as other researchers begin to use these methods and we have more students training in these techniques.
Peter Dorsher: Ed, one thing that I was wondering… it’s around the distinction between “Classical acupuncture” and “Traditional Chinese Medicine” and that somehow “Traditional Chinese Medicine” was viewed to be (at least by some people in the acupuncture community) as a modern take on acupuncture, a modern reinterpretation of the Nei Jing and not truly Classical acupuncture as described by the Nei Jing. Maybe Dr. Neal can comment on that.
Edward Neal: The history and development of these terms are quite interesting and important for Chinese medicine practitioners to understand the context of our practice.
As you may know, in the early and mid-20th century, there was backlash against traditional medicine, and at one point, acupuncture was outlawed. Later, when the communist government came into power, various attitudes were taken towards traditional medicine, largely influenced by political needs and practical expediencies.
Initially, the schools of traditional medicine established by the communist government were based on the study of medical classics. As other Chinese physicians began to receive training in Western medicine, an introductory course in traditional medicine became required for these students to learn a basic understanding of traditional practices, and so an abbreviated course based on protocols was developed. It was from the notes of these introductory classes for Western medicine-trained doctors that Chinese medicine spread to the West. Without understanding this background, many believed these descriptions to represent ancient wisdom from 2,000 years ago. In the West, this iteration of practice protocols was labeled as “Traditional Chinese Medicine,” a term that has never been used in China. After these protocol systems gained popularity in the West, they were reintroduced back into China and gradually replaced classical education in traditional medicine training programs.
In the West, the terms “Traditional” and “Classical” are often used imprecisely to describe different schools or practices, and much of this history and terminology is not clearly understood. What is crucial to differentiate are the original sources of knowledge and practice, as documented in early texts, and the later styles of practice that evolved from these writings. To say it another way, it is important to discriminate the roots from the branches of knowledge.
Peter Dorsher: So…O’Connor and Bensky would be considered then a traditional Chinese medicine text and not a Classical acupuncture class?
Edward Neal: Dr. Bensky is a bit of an exception. He has lived in Asia, speaks Chinese very well, and is quite knowledgeable about traditions and history. His herbal text references earlier sources of herbal medicine practice and includes the later terminology and ideas of TCM. Regarding this, it is helpful to note also that herbal medicine and acupuncture also have different threads of historical transmission.
So, Dr. Bensky of course is an exception, as someone who lived in China, speaks Chinese very well, and is very knowledgeable and is practicing what I would call post-disruption Chinese medicine.
Peter Dorsher: Would that be considered, whatever the parlance, as Traditional Chinese Medicine versus Classical acupuncture?
Edward Neal: Again, we have to be precise in our use of these terms. In Sinology, the term “classical” is often used to describe the formative period around and before the Han Dynasty (202 BC–220 CE), while term “medieval” is used to describe the period from this time to the later dynasties starting in the 14th century. What is important is that we differentiate the writings of original principles and later expressions, that we know the historical context of practice, and that we clearly define the terms we are using.
Barbara de la Torre: I know there’s a lot of similarities with where we’re all coming from.
I agree wholeheartedly that the semantics are misunderstood, that everything is taken out of context when you don’t have the full system of awareness of a system. And so what I have done in the last two years is reframed, and I still do clinical work for women’s health, but I am now just taking this out to the people and trying to evaluate it from a dynamic systems perspective. If we continue to take a step back, we get better context if we can telescope, then look closely, and step back again.
From my experience with working with patients in traditional environments and introducing them to acupuncture, I found that that context was a big piece. And it goes back to the time of the Han period and the pre-disruption period where you had a divergence already happening between Greek and Chinese medicine.
From the time of Hippocrates moving forward to Galen, you already have a separation of perspectives of the way of seeing things, touching. So all of the senses are taking part in this and systems, even if you have the scholarly piece, which is critical to have that piece of context, unless you have a system functioning efficiently and there are just different parts to it, you can have a disruption of that or an isolation of that knowledge. So, even with the database, we still have a lot of work to have people come into contact with it and understand how amazing this body of knowledge is, but to do that, we must understand the system we live in and work in.
And that’s also the basis of, I’ll borrow the term from Ed, that pre-disruption Chinese medicine is an elegant dynamic system that functions well, but when it’s attenuated, that system is lost. And I look at historical figures in Western medicine to find out what happens, not just 1973, but even going back to the time of Sir William Osler, he was making these bold claims that the Chinese didn’t understand anatomy, physiology, or pathology. But if you look back, you can see his context is that he took it from a religious sinologist, not a medical historian. What I try to do is help bridge the gap between unawareness and awareness.
Peter Dorsher: I see so much overlap, particularly with myofascial pain syndrome, that there’s this tendency to dismiss ancient knowledge because it isn’t the terminology that we use now and they didn’t necessarily have all the tools we had now, and just to ignore it and say that what we’re doing is the only good thing because it’s “scientific,” even though we’re just rewording what people discovered 2,000 plus years ago.
Barbara de la Torre: And what is science? If you look at even the classical texts in Chinese medicine, that’s science. It’s keen observation of details and documentation. Again, the definitions don’t have it right…nothing is isolated. As we know in Chinese medicine, everything works within another system, so there are no boundaries. What happens is if people have a bound rationality based on, for example, going back to Sir William Osler, who performed acupuncture…he did it very poorly, but he learned it from a British surgeon, and that surgeon learned it from someone else who had no access to the classical texts and much was lost in translation, and it was reappropriated. So, they named things acupuncture in the 19th century, for example, in Great Britain, where it really wasn’t acupuncture at all. It was just using a sharp instrument to do things. That’s how it gets absorbed into a culture where there’s some medical system that’s defined by how believable it is, how satisfying it is to learn, how digestible it is to understand, and how repeatable it is as evidence.
Peter Dorsher: I believe there were Civil War manuscripts that indicate they were doing acupuncture on soldiers during the Civil War, as I recall.
Barbara de la Torre: There are sporadic documentation. I think it was in the Library of Congress or in the National Archives, you could find those documents. But again, talk about attenuation, even less than what we were getting in 1973, and misnamed. It’s sort of like creating a patent. I’m going to call this acupuncture but add no relation to it at all.
Peter Dorsher: When I think about the cultural and cognitive bias, like Dr. Janet Travell in her initial textbook on myofascial pain pretty much dissed acupuncture, by saying acupuncture is conceptual, not real, and what she is doing is different somehow. These biases have been echoed in more recent times in a review of acupuncture Adrian White published, in which he said that the ancient Chinese didn’t know any anatomy, and Mike Cummings in a dry needling book chapter he authored, saying that the ancients lacked clinical knowledge. I think some medical acupuncturists are shooting themselves in the foot, by reinforcing the incorrect assumptions by allopathic physicians who don’t even try to understand acupuncture and write it off as voodoo. These acupuncture detractors, when interpreting the results of large clinical trials of acupuncture including the GERAC trials, which demonstrated the placebo intervention efficacy was almost as favorable one as the verum intervention, said, “See? It’s a placebo,” even though the placebo intervention wasn’t a physiologically inert placebo. So again, because we don’t understand, or have the mechanism fully worked out, how can we make our allopathic colleagues buy into what we’re doing is actually doing something physiologic?
Barbara de la Torre: I don’t think that, even if we do ever really have it fully figured out, that we must really make note of it. Nothing must be perfect for us to do the work we need to do. It’s always an ongoing process, including scholarship. And one of the things that can happen when people are in a bound system, and they can’t cross paradigms, is that anything that’s not in that system of understanding is an aberration. It’s the only way to protect themselves. So our job’s not just to treat patients, it should be also to help people safely cross that paradigm without feeling threatened. And I think that’s very common, especially when we have that expression in medicine is drinking water through a fire hydrant to learn, and then we’re modeling from that allopathic training. You must keep going and you must be perfect at what you do, but we really can’t be. We can’t wait until we have it just right.
Jennifer Stone: Are there things that you see practiced in Western medicine that you know came from Traditional Chinese Medicine or classical medicine? Are there modern techniques that we use in Western medicine that came from ancient medical practices?
Peter Dorsher: My area of research has been focused on the idea that trigger points are in the exact same place as the Classical acupuncture points, have the same pain and non-pain function. The referred pains can replicate the meridians, so it’s all the same. And due to cognitive and cultural biases, they don’t want to acknowledge this. As a matter of fact, someone that’s very high up in the dry needling community, I took one of the Travell seminar series and he came up to me and he said, “I would be very unhappy if what I was doing was acupuncture.”
Beyond just cognitive and cultural biases, I think some of these issues reflect turf issues as well. And the dry needling community in general has just said, “Well, we don’t move chi, and the ancient Chinese didn’t really know anatomy, so we’re doing something different.” But in practical terms, I think myofascial pain syndrome is clearly just a partial rediscovery of what the Chinese described thousands of years before, but there’s reticence to acknowledge that.
Jennifer Stone: Can you say something more about why he would be disappointed if he were practicing acupuncture?
Peter Dorsher: Because I think this gentleman was one of the true disciples of Janet Travell, and I think there’s this need in Western medicine to say, “Oh, look what we discovered scientifically,” so that they’re not happy with the concept that someone figured this out without the tools we have now, but just through incredible clinical skills and intuition, and that somehow that tarnishes the legacy of Janet Travell and David Simons, even though it doesn’t; it’s just a reworking of it.
And the other things I would mention is now in medicine, we know that for instance, they have something called the posterior tibial nerve stimulator device that’s being used to treat urge continence that treats right near Spleen and Kidney channel acupoints that has those indications. The Interstim device is implanted at S2 of the Bladder back Shu point. There are the seasickness bands that stimulate P6. I’ve seen a strap on TV that goes over GB 34 and another one at around ST 36 marketed for sciatic and other body pains, and then for migraine, the Cephalic device that treats all along the Bladder and Gallbladder and Conception Vessel points in the forehead, and yet this is viewed as a novel “scientific” discovery and gives no credit that the Chinese described this thousands of years before.
Jennifer Stone: Cultural misappropriation?
Peter Dorsher: Yes, and cognitive bias. And I still see it with the myofascial pain pundits. They’ll tend not to quote literature that doesn’t serve their idea that muscles are causing myofascial trigger point pain, even though it doesn’t make sense for all the fascial and scar and periosteal trigger points that Travell and Simons say exist. Those trigger points have nothing to do with a motor endplate or muscle, so their theory of myofascial pain’s origins doesn’t hold water, yet this is what is pushed in the books and at the national and international meetings.
Jennifer Stone: Can you all talk a little bit more about how and when Western medicine evolved?
Edward Neal: I’m not an expert on this, but the study of the cross-fertilization of ideas between Asia, Greece, and India is an active area of scholarship, and there were probably more interactions than are commonly realized, facilitated by the relationships and interactions of the Silk Road.
Barbara de la Torre: There’s evidence that early Asian medicine migrated successfully. For example, Chinese medicine migrated to surrounding East Asian countries in its total form, at least compared to other Western nations. By the time it reached the West, it was late. But there was more synergy in that period of time between 800 and 200 BC, where there were almost some commonalities, whether you’re talking about the humors or the pulses. The pulses were not that different at that time. They became different later, so as the systems diverged, they moved apart.
Edward Neal: China has always been an isolated country, both geographically and culturally, and it has historically perceived itself in this manner. This perspective has given rise to what Joseph Needham referred to as the “China problem.” This involves the observation that many significant discoveries, such as mathematics, gunpowder, surgery, anesthesia, and more, originated in China and were only later “discovered” in the Western world without proper attribution. For instance, the circulation of blood was well-described in China quite early, only to be later “discovered” by Harvey in the 17th century.
This issue leads us to the problem of cultural appropriation, a topic that many Chinese people are rightfully sensitive about. In this context, it is not the act of combining different strands of knowledge to create something new that is the problem, such as merging ancient understandings with modern discoveries, as nature herself constantly employs this type of creative process. Instead, it centers on the issue of ownership and the relationships between the roots and branches of knowledge. If we claim something as our own that was discovered much earlier in a different cultural context, it reflects basic ignorance and disrespect, disrupting our harmony with the world. Acknowledging the origins of these discoveries sets things right.
Of course, achieving this requires a fundamental understanding of history and cultural differences to begin with, which is often lacking.
Peter Dorsher: And in ancient Egypt. Imhotep did pulse diagnosis.
Edward Neal: Yes, in the West, there is often a kind of culture-centric ignorance that prevails, with the belief that all the world’s great ideas originated here. This tendency is common in civilizations that have had a dominant global presence, such as ours. However, it is crucial to recognize that there is no inherent difference between a Chinese and a Western body or between traditional and modern physiology and anatomy. We all share a single human body created by the same principles of nature that govern all things.
Various cultural and temporal narratives provide different perspectives and stories, offering new insights and understandings. Still, there is no one definitive or superior perspective. As our understanding of the world deepens, these diverse stories will tend to converge rather than diverge. Our perception of the world is inherently imperfect, like the blind men feeling an elephant. Each perspective contributes to a better understanding of the whole.
Peter Dorsher: Absolutely.
Edward Neal: And when we only feel a part of the elephant, we may feel protective of what we do have, inherently sensing that we only hold a small piece of the puzzle. As a result, we may fight over and protect what little we do possess. This leads to discussions about which story is right, when, in fact, stories are just ways we use to interact with a world that we imperfectly understand. Once we better understand the nature of stories, we can move between them fluidly, utilizing the strength inherent in each understanding.
When I am called to consult on a patient in the hospital, I will first listen to the Western medical narrative, using the language and ideas of this perspective. Then, I will pause and shift gears to comprehend the problem from the language and ideas of the early writings of Chinese medicine, in which all things are created and governed by intangible patterns of motion and the fundamental underlying principles of nature. This typically allows me to see things in new ways that open innovative avenues of treatment. However, if I attempt to translate the story of early ideas into modern equivalents, it will remain unsuccessful.
In human culture, the past has been respected as the primary source of knowledge and wisdom. This forms a proper root-branch relationship in terms of the patterns of nature. In this way, all things originate from basic patterns of the cosmos. These patterns create the foundations of nature, which in turn shape our human bodies and influence the experience of health and illness. Physician-scholars who came before us recorded their precious insights and experiences, which we study to build upon and innovate. Like a tree that grows from a root, this follows the way root-branch relationships naturally occur in nature. However, in the 16th century, with the development of the tools of the scientific and industrial revolutions, this orientation got turned upside down. Since then, we have come to expect our well-being to come from the discoveries of the future, and the past has relevance only as a minor historical interest. This has severed our connection with the way things work in nature and has given rise to a type of cultural time sickness. Traditional practices such as Chinese medicine will never be fully understood from this viewpoint.
Barbara de la Torre: One thing I would say, it’s true that we don’t have the same bodies, but in for example systems theory, we never really see the world from what it is, we see it based on a model of what we think it looks like based on our perceptions. So the body maps are quite different, and that’s where there was a loss. And then it’s interesting, Ed’s point on China being a closed society, that’s also reflected on how it went to the West. It didn’t come from China; it came from Japan. So it was actually from the Dutch East India company and from the physicians there who were bringing it over to the West through Japanese acupuncture and not through Chinese, directly through China.
Edward Neal: The important thing is that the original writings of Chinese medicine were based on detailed observations of the cosmos and nature, and these principles are the same whether you live in China or the West, on the moon or on Earth. Our different practices are united by these fundamental principles, and it becomes immensely powerful when we commence our discussions and studies from this perspective.
The early Chinese texts are crucial to our profession because they contain the basic principles, terms, and practices of our medicine, all based on insightful descriptions of nature. However, due to early disruptions in the transmission of these ideas early in their history, a general confusion has persisted within our tradition for centuries.
In this sense, classical text research is as essential to Chinese medicine as genomics research is to modern cancer care, it is a basic science of the profession. What is truly exciting is that we now have the methods and resources to begin retelling this amazing story.
Barbara de la Torre: I would add that the Travell dry needling devotee who is not comfortable with having it be called acupuncture, again, that’s an issue with how we are forming these models of understanding health. And it’s interesting because it’s not just the practitioners that need to know how effective this kind of medicine is, but also the patients, and they don’t speak in that language of scholarship. That’s the one thing we just must keep in mind.
And I wouldn’t say that we’d have to talk about Qi in a specific way to them, but just in terms of patterns of understanding and being able to distinguish it from the West and how it’s complimentary because right now, a lot of times there’s these systems traps with people where there’s either resistance, and you’ll see that a lot of times with policy, with rationality. It’s just a tug of war, and a lot of times you cannot settle these discords without somehow reaching a common goal for people. So that may be another element.
Peter Dorsher: We talk about Chinese medicine and Greek medicine and modern medicine, but then we think about Otzi, who’s 3200 BC. He had the 60 tattoos many of which were at acupoint locations, but he was also found to have activated charcoal in his backpack as well as birch polypore, which is anti-parasitic, which is consistent with him treating his whipworm infection. So there was medicine back then that wasn’t documented, and did it come from China? Did it come from ancient Egypt? I don’t know. But I think all this just points out that there’s a commonality, as Ed is saying, that we’re all treating one body, but may use different terms. Reductionist thinking versus more holistic thinking, but we’re all treating the same organism that’s basically wired and built the same way, let’s put it that way, and it hasn’t changed that much in several thousands of years.
Edward Neal: Yes, as mentioned, due to the temporal disruption that occurred in the recent past, during which time was turned upside down, the past has been relegated to little more than historical interest. This has created a distinction in time: a time when people didn’t yet know and a modern time when people do know. This temporal distinction separates times when people were ignorant in the past from the present, where we are knowledgeable.
For example, if I were an ophthalmologist, I would be unlikely to study ancient Greek medical texts in search of new techniques for cataract surgery tomorrow. Our tools are simply superior now, and we believe we know more at this moment. Therefore, the idea that texts written 2,000 years ago could be valuable for study can be challenging for us to grasp. However, these ancient writings can be immensely helpful in finding innovative approaches to common global health challenges such as cancer and drug-resistant infectious diseases because they offer new perspectives.
In many ways, the detailed descriptions of anatomy found in early texts surpass our current modern understandings. From the viewpoint of traditional people who base their behavior and life on immutable principles of nature, it may seem that modern people are the ones who appear confused.
We live in times where our very nature is threatened by our tools and our approach to life. It begs the question: Who is the foolish one, the people of the past or us? Our salvation is likely to come from re-telling our stories about time, nature, and our role in the cosmos. The goal is not to return to living in the past but to form a new synthesis between our past wisdom, modern discoveries, and nature. In this regard, the early Chinese medical texts are invaluable beyond words.
Barbara de la Torre: I would say that the origins of the medical system as we know it is very layered and complex and can’t be answered in one interview, and that in order for us to really move forward with bringing acupuncture into the mainstream, we have to not just look back, we also have to talk to our colleagues, our patients in unique ways because everybody is coming with a different perspective to the table. So I would think of it as almost as a peace accord or some way of bringing people to a common ground. Not that everyone must travel somewhere. We need some, but every system, just like our bodies, the heart doesn’t do everything, the liver doesn’t do everything. Neither does the kidney or the lung or spleen. Why do we expect people to do that? So we just try to find a better understanding as we move forward without taking too many steps back.
Peter Dorsher: And every one of us has our cognitive and cultural biases, there’s no question about that, and so we must analyze Chinese medicine, Greek medicine, modern medicine in that perspective as well.
And I think ultimately, I got to believe that they’re all describing some fundamental aspect of the human body. We’re all treating the same conditions, and that’s the beauty of it all. And I think we have so much to learn, as Ed and Barbara said, that we’ve just touched the surface of the subtlety the ancient Chinese clinicians understood of the body—its biorhythms and circadian rhythms and how it interacts with nature and seasons, and we haven’t even gone anywhere near those topics in allopathic medicine. We haven’t even tried to understand much of that in Western medicine.