In ancient China, the best doctors had no sick patients. If you had sick patients, you were a ‘bad’ doctor. I’m going to paraphrase and butcher history here quiet a bit, but stick with me.
Lots of ancient medicine around the world revolved around understanding people’s lives, their environment, work, social structure and the factors that would affect them. Medicine was tailored to the individual and it was something that was practised as a preventative form of medicine rather than a reactive form. In other words, the aim of medicine was to keep you healthy, to prevent you getting sick and when you did get sick, to return you to health as quickly as possible.
China is vast. It holds within it different climates and environments. Different styes of acupuncture developed in different parts of the country and some doctors became famous by treating illnesses that were common in their part of the country, but not so common in another part of the country. Think dessert and arid regions versus lush and humid regions of China.
The Chinese doctor was part of the community. Not only skilled in medicine, he was as much weather forecaster, star gazer and a herbalist. Which makes sense because Chinese Medicine in particular is rooted in the concept of everything being integrated. What this wide range of skills meant was the Chinese Doctor was adept at recognising incoming factors that would affect his/her patients.
Think of it this way. Mary and Joe work in the rice paddies. They are in a damp, humid environment all day long, bent over, sun hitting their backs. The local village doctor knows Mary and Joe’s work. He knows they suffer from dampness. He knows this dampness and being bent over all day will in the long run lead to lower back issues. He’s looking at his charts and sees an incoming period of damp weather which could aggravate or speed up the onset of sore backs for Mary and Joe. He’s already prescribing medicine and treating points to prevent the weather from affecting Mary and Joe before it even begins. He has them do regular Tai Chi, Qi Gong or some other form of movement with a focus on strengthening the lower back. This is preventative healthcare.
Ok, so this is a simple example – but it illustrates the methods by which the best doctors in China practised medicine. Taking account of one’s work environment, social environment, weather environment and the constitutional make-up you were born with was an important part of medicine as much as being able to pinpoint which lumbar vertebrae were affected.
There were many facets to this type of medicine – weather forecasting, knowing the birth charts of individuals, understanding herbs and points were just some. The other face of medicine – acute injuries (e.g. your hand getting chopped off) -developed on the battlefield, right alongside the martial arts.
Thus the best doctors had no sick patients in the village. They were sought after. If the Imperial Court was travelling through or heard of such a doctor, they were whisked off to the Imperial Palace to treat the Emperor. No second thought for the village people. You really didn’t want to be a doctor at the Imperial Palace if you were unable to keep patients healthy. Punishment would be swift.
This style of thinking that illness is not something that can be treated in isolation is the very root of Chinese Medicine. It refuses to isolate the illness and instead takes the individual as a whole – this means we don’t treat just a sore back and ignore the rest of the body, but take into account how the illness manifested via the body and its environment.
Unfortunately, a lot of this knowledge was lost. The purges of the Chinese Doctors during Communist revolutions ensured a lot of this way of thinking was eradicated. What the purges led to was a lot of people in the villages becoming sick. Thus the Communist dictator, Chairman Mao, brought back Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture, but it was a different style. Although still modelled on preventative healthcare, it relied on a mix of Chinese and Western theory and was based on a Russian Communist vision of doctors travelling from village to village.
The doctors were quickly trained, had a mix of Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine training and were sent back out into the far flung reaches of China to treat the villagers. They became known as ‘bare foot’ doctors, travelling between villages trying to treat people who were already sick. However, the peasants still preferred the elite Chinese Doctors (or which few were left) or western trained doctors. Both the elite Chinese Doctors and Western Doctors looked down upon Mao’s barefoot doctors. Elite Chinese Doctors pretty much went underground or stopped practising out of fear of being packed off to “re-education” camps.
Over time a fragile peace developed between these various types of doctors but it pretty much fell apart in the 1970’s. What remained was a strange mix of Western and Chinese theory meshed together. Modern Traditional Chinese Medicine grew out of this to a degree, but there has been a strong focus on reverting to the old texts to get the full understanding of what the best doctors in China did, prior to the Communist revolutions.
This isn’t to say that Chinese Medicine was perfect and there was was no sick people. Far from it. Chinese Medicine, much like western medicine, had to contend with diseases such as black death (killed tens of millions of Chinese), poor working conditions for people and environmental factors. But at its root, its way of thinking has always been how to prevent an illness. When it does treat illness, it does so in a way that encompasses the whole of the individual rather than the sickness.
