Ok, I stole the title from here. But by now you've heard about the terribleness that is the latest resurgence of swine flu. Face masks are in people. But as the authors discuss, making public health policy decisions (do you immunize a population, do you restrict travel, etc.) are difficult to make when you don't know very much about the nature of the virus and the deaths it has caused.
But chinese medicine is rich in a history of treating this type of epidemic outbreak. In fact, based on the symptom picture that the disease presents with, swine flu could fall under what is termed "Triple Yang Disease" where wind cold attacks Taiyang and simultaneously turns to heat in the Yangming and Shaoyang layers. Chai Ge Jie Ji Tang is the indicated formula for such symptoms as: severe but gradually decreasing aversion to cold and shivering that turns into increasing fever, mild sweat, head and body aches, orbital pain, dry nose, restlessness, and insomnia, tongue has a thin yellow coat and the pulse is wiry and slightly surging or rapid. Though this formula is not strictly classical (it was developed in the 15th century and is based on Chai Hu Gui Zhi jia Ge Gen Tang) it apparently has a wonderful clinical efficacy.
But the real point is, and the CDC is finding this out all over again, that the flu will effect different people differently. In Mexico, it has reportedly killed over a hundred people, but in the United States it has yet to do so (knock on wood). This is another indicator that the material pathogen is never entirely responsible for disease but it is the combination of the pathogen and the constitution or landscape that indicates severity, death and recovery.
Oh, and for more hillarity, make sure you watch this.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
The Pill
A lot of my patients are likely to be women. One estimate is that higher than 75% of patients for Chinese Medicine are female. So women's health has always been on my radar as something to pay attention to. The pill, apparently, isn't just good for stopping those nasty periods, but is now also marketed as anti-cramping, anti-carcinogenic, tonifying for expecting mothers, regulating mood-swings, and preventing blemishes. Additionally, the placebo pills were introduced to make the woman have her period because the companies didn't think that women would be comfortable not bleeding for a whole year (or more). All of these claims of health and well-being may in fact be true, but what they do not do is treat the underlying imbalance that causes the symptoms. As is usually the case in western medicine, the goal is still "out there in the future" where discoveries can be applied to help fix the current "problem" of unintended pregnancy:
I'm not sure this line of reductionistic thinking is actually healthy. Doesn't everything have a side effect? And just because we can't conceive of one today, does that mean that the side-effects that we may find in the future don't matter? I may not be a dean of a university but I know for a fact that my testes are pretty intimately connected to the rest of me. I'm just sayin.
“The holy grail is a drug that would specifically target the ovaries and testes that would have no effect on any other organ system, so they would be side-effect free,” said Dr. James Strauss, who was co-chairman of a national committee on contraception research and is now dean of the medical school at Virginia Commonwealth University. “That would be based on the discovery of genes only present in those reproductive tissues. We know a significant number of those genes today, and that’s the fruit of 20 years of research. Unfortunately, that knowledge has yet to be translated into a product.”
I'm not sure this line of reductionistic thinking is actually healthy. Doesn't everything have a side effect? And just because we can't conceive of one today, does that mean that the side-effects that we may find in the future don't matter? I may not be a dean of a university but I know for a fact that my testes are pretty intimately connected to the rest of me. I'm just sayin.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Anecdote vs. Science
It is common in the supposed fight of eastern vs. western medicine for the former to blame the latter for lacking faith and missing the underlying cause of the disease, and being impotent in an effective treatment until a material target can be identified and destroyed. Meanwhile, the latter blames the former for being “anecdotal” and medieval and lacking any comprehensive power. In a recent review of the book The Horse Boy the tired argument continues, to the delight of the institutions that protect their ideologies and to the detriment of patients, and families who suffer from recalcitrant disease. The Horse Boy is a book about a father who tries to treat, if not cure, his son of autistic characteristics including “demonic tantrums, speech delays, and incontinence.” The father takes his son to Mongolia to learn to ride horses and be healed by traditional practitioners of shamanism. The result is that much progress was made, including the disappearance of the maniacal tantrums and increased verbal directions to the horses the boy was riding.
However, in the press, the story was not about why this therapy may or may not work, but how this was an “anecdotal story” and should not be the purveyor of false hope. Because it was not part of a randomized controlled trial, no conclusions could be drawn. But can we honestly say this is the case for this father and son? That no conclusions can be drawn? Hardly. The positioning of this story as “anecdotal”, as some “scientific” commentators have dubbed it is actually misleading. The term anecdote is defined in Webster’s as: “a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident” the etymology of which includes the greek root anekdota which means unpublished. Herein lies the problem. So-called “anecdotal” stories are dubbed by the gold-standard scientific community as “unpublishable” so their relevance is instantly mitigated. Instead of spurning ideas for research, an idea such as giving horseback riding lessons to an autistic child is deemed “anecdotal” (which has the hint of implausible) by the scientific community to avoid any sort of general recommendation for the public at large. In a way, this is the stalwart western doctor’s job: to give advice that benefits the average. For example, if you have cancer, chemotherapy and radiation and surgery are likely to help you out, but there is nothing to say you, the patient, fall inside or outside of the standard deviation that they are using to make the recommendation. This is why all decisions for treatment are up to the patient themselves. The doctor makes their best guess and the rest is entirely left to something outside of their control. This is because medicine is hard work. The body constantly proves to be too complex to apply our reductionistic materialist models.
In Chinese Medicine we can understand instantly why horseback riding would be beneficial for those suffering from autism. The Horse is the animal that goes with the Heart, and as such rules the mental-emotional lives of our patients. Horses are used in crowd control because they have a pacifying nature to them. They instill peace in their riders. Horses understand the spirit of their rider: if the rider doesn’t have a good heart, they disobey. Born wild, they need to be trained to be useful just as we all must learn how to love. The Heart itself sounds like a galloping horse. Horses are used often in therapy to teach troubled youth how to care and love something beyond themselves. Their hoofs, legs, shoulders, skin, hair, blood, and fat (donkey hide gelatin) are useful in treatment, especially in regulating female hormones.
All this being said, it is important to realize that treating all autistic children with horse therapy will not cure all children who suffer from this ailment. However, what is clearly needed is more research and exposure to this potentially promising treatment modality. What is not needed is fear about what such a treatment may mean to the establishment.
However, in the press, the story was not about why this therapy may or may not work, but how this was an “anecdotal story” and should not be the purveyor of false hope. Because it was not part of a randomized controlled trial, no conclusions could be drawn. But can we honestly say this is the case for this father and son? That no conclusions can be drawn? Hardly. The positioning of this story as “anecdotal”, as some “scientific” commentators have dubbed it is actually misleading. The term anecdote is defined in Webster’s as: “a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident” the etymology of which includes the greek root anekdota which means unpublished. Herein lies the problem. So-called “anecdotal” stories are dubbed by the gold-standard scientific community as “unpublishable” so their relevance is instantly mitigated. Instead of spurning ideas for research, an idea such as giving horseback riding lessons to an autistic child is deemed “anecdotal” (which has the hint of implausible) by the scientific community to avoid any sort of general recommendation for the public at large. In a way, this is the stalwart western doctor’s job: to give advice that benefits the average. For example, if you have cancer, chemotherapy and radiation and surgery are likely to help you out, but there is nothing to say you, the patient, fall inside or outside of the standard deviation that they are using to make the recommendation. This is why all decisions for treatment are up to the patient themselves. The doctor makes their best guess and the rest is entirely left to something outside of their control. This is because medicine is hard work. The body constantly proves to be too complex to apply our reductionistic materialist models.
In Chinese Medicine we can understand instantly why horseback riding would be beneficial for those suffering from autism. The Horse is the animal that goes with the Heart, and as such rules the mental-emotional lives of our patients. Horses are used in crowd control because they have a pacifying nature to them. They instill peace in their riders. Horses understand the spirit of their rider: if the rider doesn’t have a good heart, they disobey. Born wild, they need to be trained to be useful just as we all must learn how to love. The Heart itself sounds like a galloping horse. Horses are used often in therapy to teach troubled youth how to care and love something beyond themselves. Their hoofs, legs, shoulders, skin, hair, blood, and fat (donkey hide gelatin) are useful in treatment, especially in regulating female hormones.
All this being said, it is important to realize that treating all autistic children with horse therapy will not cure all children who suffer from this ailment. However, what is clearly needed is more research and exposure to this potentially promising treatment modality. What is not needed is fear about what such a treatment may mean to the establishment.
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