Modern life can be exhilarating—but living at a fast pace also brings worries, stress, tension, anxiety, and even mental exhaustion. In today’s chaotic world, many people are looking for a sense of peace and good health.
Dr. Yang Jingduan, a well-known Chinese psychiatrist in Philadelphia, launched a series of lectures titled “The Three Tiers of Doctors Forum” to share his insights into spiritual and physical health.
The following is a transcript of his talk:
Lower-tier doctors treat diseases, middle-tier doctors treat people, and upper-tier doctors treat the country. Welcome, everyone, to the Three Tiers of Doctors Forum. I am Dr. Yang. In the last episode, we discussed the concept of middle-tier doctors treating people and our understanding of it. Before that, we discussed the concept of lower-tier doctors treating diseases. Today, I would like to share my understanding of how upper-tier doctors treat the country.
There is a Chinese saying, “If I cannot be a good premier, I would strive to be a good doctor.” There are stories in Chinese history of individuals leaving the job as premier to become a doctor. The reverse is also true, and there were cases when someone quit his job as a doctor to become the premier. We wonder, what is the relationship between a good premier and a good doctor? The answer lies in the intricate relationship between a doctor’s treatment of a disease and a premier’s management of the country.
A doctor is trained to care about the health of everyone he comes across, relieving personal pain or saving lives through medical treatment. At the same time, country administrators manage a country’s health, alleviating the pain of their people and saving lives. So, the policies, ways of management, methods, and concepts formulated by the premier and his team inevitably have a wide-ranging impact on people’s health and future, thus the saying, “the upper doctors treat the country.”
For the people’s general health, the country needs to formulate viable public health policies to solve fundamental health problems. Doctors alone cannot treat all diseases, cure everyone, and save every life.
It is, therefore, vital to have top-tier doctors treat the country. There are many such examples in our daily lives. For instance, if the government makes an immoral decision and invests its resources in a war that should not be fought in the first place, many innocent lives will be lost. Doctors can hardly recover such losses. This is just one example.
There are also more direct examples, for instance, if a country invests all its financial resources in medical treatment, this might allow the government to achieve cutting-edge medical science breakthroughs, but it will not help much to improve the health of its people. There may even be undesirable side effects.
Currently, in the United States, one of the issues often discussed by politicians is health care policy reform. (They call it health care. The American insurance companies specializing in health are called health insurance companies.) The health care policy in the United States is called health management. However, if you look more carefully, the United States does not have a health management system. Doctors and hospitals are primarily involved in what we call “the lower medicine,” which merely treats diseases and responds to emergencies such as heart attacks, tumors, accidents, and so on. The entire medical system is a disease management and crisis intervention system, which can hardly be called a “health care” system.
The never-ending debate among politicians is nothing more than whether to apply this disease management and crisis intervention system to more people or fewer people, and which group of the population can benefit from it, or which group is to make way for the others, who pays more and who pays less. This debate cannot solve the underlying problem.
I believe what needs to be reformed is how to truly invest public, financial, and human resources to treat people and the country and to improve the health of the entire population. We all hope that as technology in the medical industry becomes more sophisticated, fewer people will need to use the technology. If surgeons do not need to perform so many operations, the number of accidents due to surgery will naturally decrease. We also hope that when people reduce the amount and types of drugs they need to take, the number of people who die from adverse effects of medicines will decrease.
From the TCM [traditional Chinese medicine] perspective, there is another crucial concept in governing the country: the code of conduct a society adheres to, which is paramount.
I like to refer to a car as an example. The fate of a car is closely related to the driver. If the driver does not develop good habits and maintain the car, it will quickly break down.
If the driver’s habits get even worse—for example, the driver does not wear a seatbelt, does not obey the traffic rules, or even drives while drunk—it will not just bring an unfavorable end to the car but will also endanger the lives and health of others.
What should we use to restrain the driver—the spirit and soul—of human beings? What do we use to protect our spirit and soul? This relates to what we often call morality.
The Chinese language has profound connotations. For example, when Chinese people say “I understand” in Chinese, they say wo (I) zhi (know) dao (Tao). In other words, it is only when you understand the Tao or the Way, that you can claim you understand.
“Tao” is what we call the roads or directions of life, more precisely, the correct way of life and truth. In addition, we often evaluate a person’s behavior by the phrase “within the Fa or not.” On the surface, it refers to whether the way of doing things is legal or illegal, right or wrong.
In fact, “Fa” in this context extends further to mean there is truth at every level in this world. To be “within the Fa” means that you grasp the truth. No matter what level of truth, the criterion guides our lives.
In traditional Chinese culture, the concepts of benevolence (ren 仁), righteousness (yi 義), ritual propriety (li 禮), wisdom (zhi 智), and trustworthiness (xin 信) shape people’s thoughts, souls, and behaviors.
Suppose a country’s policymakers vigorously advocate and promote views and protect values that help people achieve benevolence, righteousness, ritual propriety, wisdom, and trustworthiness. In that case, the country’s ruler can be said to have genuinely managed the country and be among the upper tier of doctors. This will bring about good fortune to the people of the country. This is the concept of healing the country by the upper-tier doctors we discuss today.