We all have a sense of what it means to practice preventative medicine in our own lives: eat healthy foods, exercise, get enough sleep, and minimize stress. But what does it mean in a medical practice?
Modern medicine deals in observable biological manifestations of disease—a tumor, the presence of bacteria, elevated blood glucose levels, and so on. The problem with this method is that, by the time your condition is serious enough for your doctor to diagnose you, you’re already sick. Now more invasive interventions have to take place, like surgery or pharmaceutical drugs.
But there is a step in between, and this is where Traditional Chinese Medicine can play a role.
Chinese Medicine sees a patient not only biologically, but also psychologically and energetically. What does this mean? By acknowledging the role of mind and energy in human health, it encompasses a broader understanding of the patient. Any complaint, discomfort, or worry is listened to, because it leads us to a nuanced diagnosis and an individualized treatment plan.
Chinese Medicine uses pattern diagnosis, which allows us to see disharmonies in the body before they become diseases. This is why we ask about your digestion, sleep, stress levels, pain in the body, menstrual cycle, sexual health; your skin, eyes, ears, nose; you from head to toe—we need the whole picture! From all this information we see certain patterns emerging. Modern medicine uses disease diagnosis, which means that it will only acknowledge your complaints when they are already diseases… when you’re already sick.
If we address back pain while it is still coming and going (on the level of energy), we can alleviate it before it becomes chronic (entrenched into the physical level.) If we treat menstrual cramps while they are mild (“blood stagnation” in Chinese Medicine), we can avoid the medical diagnosis of fibroids or endometriosis. Before you’re diagnosed with diabetes and put on medication, Chinese Medicine can identify that you are “Spleen Qi Deficient with Damp Accumulation” and through acupuncture and herbal formulas, help to regulate your blood sugar levels. It is far easier to correct imbalances than it is to reverse diseases.
Traditional Chinese doctors were punished for allowing their patients to get sick. If you weren’t preventing disease, you weren’t practicing medicine properly. Our modern medical system, with its focus on disease, does not have a framework or language of diagnosis for preventative medicine. In fact, if no one got sick, it would go out of business.
Have you ever been told by a medical doctor that your complaint is “psychosomatic”? You are sent home either with no answers or a prescription for an antidepressant.
But what does psychosomatic really mean? Psyche means “mind” and soma means “body.” Preventative medicine does not dismiss psychosomatics. Of course the mind and body are interconnected! Stress affects sleep and digestion, chronic pain can cause painful emotions and painful emotions can cause pain, hormonal fluctuations can make us angry or sad… the list is endless.
The mind-body connection is our natural intelligence—for example, when you just know something is wrong or you suspect that certain symptoms are linked. The split between body and mind in Western thinking, and medicine in particular, is to the detriment of us all. Our bodies and our minds are not separate entities. They are intertwined and inseparable. What we think and feel affects our health.
The body speaks to us in symptoms. It’s our job to listen. And it’s our job, here at Division Chiropractic and Acupuncture, to listen to you, to formulate individualized treatment plans to address imbalances long before they become disease.