WM/CM

[Guest guest]

Joseph Garner wrote:Well said. I have come up with an analogy I tell my patients about seeing the body as a team, for example, a football team. If a football team is not playing well, not winning, how would you go about deciding why and what to do about it? You could analyze each player's health and wellbeing individually, which is analogous to what doctors do with liver enzyme tests and such, but this may lead to the common medically confusing situation where the patient's medical tests all come back normal, but they still feel awful. The individual players in the analogy may be just fine, but they're not communicating well with their teammates, not working together. To me, what makes Chinese medicine unique is its ability to read the lines of communication between organ and other body energy systems and see how they're doing as well as detect individual system flaws or damage.What I don't know is how to translate this into Western testing to see if doctors and Western-type scientists can somehow emulate this mindset and information set. If there ever is some way to do this, this seems to me the only way to test and describe how herbs work in a complex living system. Any thoughts?Joseph Garner

Well put, Joseph. Yes, I use the team analogy all the time when I teach physiology as well as clinical correllations of various concepts. I even refer to my students as Team Helen or Team Philip to get them to see that they are coalition or perhaps an ecology of billions of cells. Somehow during embryology those cells in many cases swam to new locations to set up tissue growth and differentiation. How did some neural crest cells know how to swim to the location of the adrenal medulla to create "neurons" that secrete the neurotransmitter epinephrine but have no axons. I am most fascinated by the ecology of the body and can recommend dozens of current fronteirs that will present new first principles. Yes, CM is the complexity theory. By comparison, in my humble opinion, Western science is the child. At this point (and maybe at all points) I'm more about questions than about answers. There is an entire course that's been taught for over a decade that looks at the first four cells of life from the zygote for much of the course. It's the molecular biology of development ... sort of an early embryology if you will. What's fascinating is that the professors that teach it admit that there is no chemical basis for much of the induction of differentiation. It appears that "position" with regard to other cells has something to do with it. How to they know their position? Vectorial translocation of proteins within cells as well as of cells during development was one of my areas of concentration during my graduate work (1988-1992). Cells and tissues during development follow meridians ... as clear as day. Gonads and kidney tissue are one tissue during early gestation. Then the gonads sort of rip away from the kidney/adrenals and follow briefly created tubes/meridians, and the whole organ translocates from the superior abdominal cavity to the pelvis. The remaining tissue up in the upper abdominal cavity still makes steriod hormones including sex hormones. The other steroid hormones like cortisol and aldosterone have activities that sometimes mimic estrogen (especially when it's in high concentration at mid-cycle). So CM gently pushes me to recognize that kidney function and sexual function are so closely related I can use one term.

Sorry about the verbosity here. Anyway, Marco, perhaps you can see why medical schools give points to applicants who have taken embryology. Embryology is also part of what's taught in first year medical school programs.

In gratitude for your patience.

Emmanuel Segmen