Brave New Medicine by Cynthia Li

Author:Cynthia Li
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
Published: 2019-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

The following weekend, David and I hosted a potluck brunch to meet our neighbors. We wanted to know the folks who, without their knowing, were my backup brigade, should I need urgent assistance when David was out of town. We also wanted to express our appreciation for this urban village. In contrast to living in a trendy part of San Francisco where the turnover of residents was high, here, people raised families and lived out their lives. We met a few retired folks, two widows who had lived on the block for fifty years, an opera singer and her opera producer husband, a software engineer and his artist wife, and a few young families. Our block was home to three rabbits, two dogs, a hamster, five ducks, and an ever-multiplying number of stray cats. My parents joined the brunch, too, as did a collective of friends and family from the city—Juan Carlos, Ayi, David’s parents, his brother, and a few other close friends.

After introducing myself to the new neighbors, I grabbed a slice of quiche and sat down next to Juan Carlos, curious to catch up with his life. He had graduated from his traditional Chinese medicine program and was interning at a highly regarded acupuncture clinic. His mentor was Robert (Bob) Levine, and, as it turned out, the clinic was in Berkeley, only a couple of miles away from us. I asked what Bob did, exactly.

“He takes a history, feels the pulses, then treats a patient with acupuncture and herbs.” Juan Carlos’s face lit up. “It’s incredible to see patients heal.”

“Is it gentle?”

“Yes.”

“Can you give me some examples of patient cases?”

There was a patient with metastatic cancer, Juan Carlos said, who was so weak she couldn’t tolerate the chemo or nausea medicines, but after starting acupuncture and herbs, she tolerated her treatments, put on weight, and had more energy. And there was a couple who struggled with infertility and had gone through all sorts of hormone shots and IVF and nothing worked, but after treating both husband and wife with herbs and acupuncture, she got pregnant naturally.

Aware that both of these cases—wasting syndromes in cancer, and infertility—were difficult to treat in the Western medicine model, I found myself thinking about another difficult case: mine.

“D’you think Bob could help my fatigue or insomnia?” I asked.

“Of course. I’ve seen that, too.”

There were scientific studies on acupuncture’s effectiveness with fatigue, chronic pain syndromes, insomnia, and mood disorders. Acupuncture, in the Western medicine terms I could understand, seemed to work by promoting the rest-and-digest phase of the autonomic nervous system, among other mechanisms. Since Chinese medicine is governed by an entirely different language and the organs are arranged in different systems, it was hard, if not impossible, to explain exactly how it worked in terms of physiology. But by this time, I needed less convincing by science. My last ER visit had opened me to the possibility of trying different paths for healing, even paths that might be considered unconventional. A Chinese-American doctor

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.