Now CM/WM, was Chai Hu, cox-2

[Guest guest]

, " " wrote:

For me, Chinese medicine's

> great strength lies in its understanding of relationships between

> phenomena inside and outside the self, and how these phenomena are

> connected and interact with each other. Global interactions of

> medicinal prescriptions with the complexity of the human being is

one of these relationships.

 

 

Z'ev:

 

The analogy of the boat reminds me of Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic

Greek philosopher who approached this same problem by asking the

question 'can we step into the same river twice?'. Unfortunately,

his line of thinking did not take hold in Western culture.

 

While there are many parallels or similarities between Chinese and

Western medicine, I suspect Western science won't be interested in

them until the tools of Complexity Theory become more sophisticated--

-perhaps in 20 years. They have only begun to develop the tools to

approach it from their direction.

 

I suspect more will have to be done from our end, in order to insure

that our way of looking at things won't be ignored or dismissed by

scientific rationalizations. The trend to explain away phenomena in

CM (qi is metaphysics, meridians don't exist, the efficacy of herbs

is due solely to unknown chemical constituents) by scientific

methods is becoming stronger with the growing self-interests of

pharmaceutical companies and medical acupuncturists. The cultural

predilections like the ones we are discussing are detailed in

Nisbett's book.

 

CM does not have many details, although it does have organization;

whereas WM has myriad detials, but without much organization.

Perhaps we can start a thread to reverse this situation? For

example, many of the phenomena of WM can be tracked in the pulses

when we use the methods baed on the Nan Jing. Not that the Nan Jing

foreshadows the details of WM, but it does provide a theoretical

framework for interpretation if we look at them from a perspective

of dynamical systems. One of my articles about the Dong Han Pulse

Diagnosis system discusses some of the overlap in WM.

 

One of the more interesting parallels I've seen relatively recently

is not from pulse diagnosis. It is the one between the way oxygen is

taken in by the lungs and sent through the circulation to the

mitochondria of all cells where ADP is converted to ATP (glucose +

oxygen + ADP = carbon dioxide + water + ATP). If we consider the

mitochondria as an example of Kidney yang function, then this is a

parallel to the CM notion that the lung sends qi to the kidney and

the kidney grasps the qi.

 

 

Jim Ramholz

[Guest guest]

Dear Jim,

 

Jim:

 

One of the more interesting parallels I've seen relatively recently is not from pulse diagnosis. It is the one between the way oxygen is taken in by the lungs and sent through the circulation to the mitochondria of all cells where ADP is converted to ATP (glucose + oxygen + ADP = carbon dioxide + water + ATP). If we consider the mitochondria as an example of Kidney yang function, then this is a parallel to the CM notion that the lung sends qi to the kidney and the kidney grasps the qi.

Marco:

 

If this is partially the case. (presumably there is no one to one correspondence or?)

 

How can that information help affect treatment in a useful manner?

 

Marco