To tackle such a topic as why we get sick we first have to understand what is sickness? I’ve discussed this elsewhere so I’ll keep it simple. We generally understand illness and disease as some symptom or combination of symptoms that cause pain and discomfort or otherwise interrupts our daily life. At its most basic illness is a part of or process of the body that is not working normally or has been damaged in some way.
To address illness we then need to figure out what the damage is or what part or process is not working normally and in what way is it not working normally. Advances in our understanding of the body and it’s physiology coupled with technology that lets us view, measure, evaluate, etc has allowed modern medicine to help with all sorts of illnesses. In particular our understanding of the chemistry and inner workings of the body have led to the development of all sorts of treatments, particularly pharmaceutical. For instance, if someone has low energy, weight gain, and other symptoms we can take a small amount of blood and determine how much of the various chemicals of the body are present and understand why they have their symptoms. For instance, a blood test can show low levels of thyroid hormone and that patient will receive a diagnosis of hypothyroidism. Since they have low levels of thyroid hormone they are prescribed a drug such as levothyroxine to make up for the body’s decreased production of thyroid hormone. In theory, this will fix their problems as long as they take the synthetic hormone. The End.
Or is it? Often the modern medical approach ends there – the problem (low thyroid hormone) was identified and the solution (synthetic thyroid hormone) was administered. But why was this person producing decreased thyroid levels in the first place?
It is this sort of thinking that provides the back bone of Chinese medical practice. We use the terms root and branch to discuss disease. To hopefully make an easier analogy I’ll use the terms root and flower. The flower of disease are it’s symptoms where as the root is the underlying cause; the flower we see, the root we don’t (until we apply various diagnostic methods). For most people they are only concerned with getting rid of the flower. For this analogy let’s use dandelions because they’re a weed and I don’t want to talk about destroy something nice like roses or other ornamental flowers.
If you have dandelions that you want to get rid of you can go mow the lawn or go pluck them and voila, no dandelions. Of course anyone who has had dandelions knows that this doesn’t get rid of them, the roots will just sprout new flowers, maybe not until next year, but they’ll be there.
To apply this analogy to our hypothyroid patient experiencing the symptoms is like noticing you have weeds. The diagnosis is like identifying those weeds as dandelions. Administering pharmaceuticals is like mowing the lawn and getting rid of the flowers. The reason I say it this way is because often times if the pharmaceutic treatment is stopped the symptoms come back, so it’s like mowing every day to prevent the flowers from growing. This is a perfectly good way of keeping your lawn free of dandelion flowers. Of course, it would be better to get rid of the roots instead so that you don’t need the daily mowing.
In Chinese medicine the goal is to try to understand the roots of disease so that we can give therapies to bring the body back into optimal health. Our treatments (acupuncture, herbs, etc) will usually simultaneously be treating the root and the branch/flower. So we immediately try to get rid of symptoms (dandelion flower) and then work on getting rid of the cause (dandelion roots). This strategy not only helps the patient get rid of that which is bothering them (flower) but also helps prevent the problem from recurring in the long run. In the ideal situation we also help the patient reach a state of health that also prevents the problems from rooting again. (After all dandelions haven’t always been in the ground, they came from somewhere else at some point in time).
Now lets look at how we develop diseases in the first place. Each disease, just like each different weeds that could grow in our lawn or garden, will have different causes. In Chinese medicine we can break up these causes into three main categories – heredity, environment/lifestyle, and emotion. Heredity on one hand is straightforward, there are various genetic diseases that can be passed from parent to child or caused by a genetic mutation, such as color blindness, down’s syndrome, or hemophilia. Chinese medicine has understood this concept long before we knew what genes or chromosomes were. However, the Chinese medical concept of heredity takes a broader view as well. The idea gets boiled down into the idea of “essence” the basic part of us that is inherited from our parents. In fact, eggs and sperm are seen as an expression of essence. This essence gets combined from our parents to create us. Therefore essence contains the idea of genetic inheritance, but it is also our starting point in life so to speak. Most of us start life healthy, though some of us start out with disease or other health challenges. This idea extends to that of constitution, our basic state that has tendencies towards certain imbalances. We stay healthy by keeping those imbalances in check through various means, and conversely our bodies can be pushed into certain disease states easier than others. One aspect of our constitution is hot vs cold. In a very generalized sense males tend towards more heat (yang) and females more cold (yin) and we are more warm as kids (yang) and colder as we age (yin). Therefore our age and gender can give us an idea of our constitution and this constitution can change somewhat over our lifetimes. Since we may each be closer to one extreme or other we are more likely to be affected by conditions that push us further away from neutral. These conditions come from the other two sources of disease.
Environment and lifestyle is a big source of our diseases. Environment is of course things like the climates we live in and the weather we deal with day to day. Those of us living in Central New York are going to be dealing with different challenges to our health than someone living in San Diego for instance. Environment also includes indoor conditions as well as pollution and exposure to various things that can make us sick such as viruses and bacteria. Understanding what we are exposed to and eliminating those things that push us out of balance is an important part of being healthy.
Lifestyle, of course, is also another big source of our diseases. For this discussion lifestyle primarily includes diet, exercise, and sleep. I won’t go into too much depth about these because we all know how these factors impact our health. I will say that diet can be a misunderstood aspect. We usually think of diet in terms of weight gain/loss or how it impacts cholesterol and blood pressure or how it may cause nutrient deficiencies. These are, of course, quite important, but it is additionally important to understand that various foods can cause imbalance when consumed in excess. Often when people talk about food there will be comments of this is healthy or that is not healthy, a very black and white approach. This can be very misleading. On it’s own there are few foods that are so black and white and foods need to be judged within the larger context of one’s diet. In excess, foods that most of us would consider “healthy” may in fact contribute to disease. A great example is salad. Most of us consider salads to be a healthy food, but if we eat the same salad for lunch every day of the week for weeks on end is that still healthy? Maybe and maybe not depending on our constitution and the rest of our diet. Likewise we all know it is important to exercise, but there is a point where too much exercise, or improper exercise, can do more harm than good. There is a lot of information out there about how to eat or exercise properly but not a lot of information about how to decide what is right for you as an individual. That is why it is important to learn how to listen to the signals your body gives you and make use of health professionals (I know a great acupuncturist that can help you – wink wink) that can help you determine what is right for you.
The last major cause of disease is emotion. In many ways emotion will overlap with the other categories. While not necessarily genetic, emotional tendencies can be passed from parent to child. If we have a stressful job or a busy lifestyle that will also pre-dispose us to certain emotions. The emotional category can be one of the trickiest to understand and manage, but also one of the most powerful. One of the most common emotional causes of disease is stress, which can come from our lifestyles or environments. However, I separate the emotional component out because we may only have so much control over our environment but we can gain control of our emotions. But first we need to understand how emotions create disease.
In Chinese medicine we categorize all of the different parts and processes of the body into one of 5 major systems of the body. These 5 systems correlate to the 5 elements – fire, earth, metal, wood, water – which create a way of understanding the body that is both simple and accessible to every but it can also be very intricate and complex. These 5 elements have a variety of correspondences including organs and emotions. What this means is that our internal organs are influenced by our emotional state, but also that the health of our body can influence our emotional state. In other words a healthy person maintains emotional balance and an emotionally balanced person stays healthy. For anyone who has a stressful life, short temper, is anxious or depressed, etc you will quickly realize it is a lot easier said than done to control our emotions. Learning how to do so is well beyond the scope of this article.
I’ve finished explaining some of the major causes of disease in a very general way, but now what? How do we use this information to help us. The first step, and what I’m hoping to accomplish with this article is to bring awareness to the areas of our life that can contribute to our diseases. If we can start identifying the parts of our life that cause disease we can take steps to change them or prevent them. In cases such as heredity or environment we may not always be able to change them, but knowing our basic starting point helps us make better decisions and avoid the things that can push us out of balance. Hopefully I’ve been able to trigger some deeper thinking, but in reality most of us don’t fully understand how all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together. It took me years of graduate level education to learn a lot of this (and I still have more to learn), so I would not expect everyone to have some sudden realization based only on this article. This is one way in which getting a few acupuncture treatments a year can be a good way to promote health. An acupuncturist’s job is to determine your imbalances and correct them with an acupuncture treatment. We can also help shed light on what your constitution is and what sorts of things in your life are pushing you out of balance. The acupuncture treatments help correct the imbalances and return you to a healthier state, but the knowledge that we can impart can help you find ways of living a healthier and happier life.
Update – right after posting this on my website I found the following picture from another acupuncturist. This helps explain the correlation between emotion and organ health.
