Modern life is exhilarating—but living in a fast-paced rhythm also brings worries, stress, tension, anxiety, and even mental exhaustion. People’s desires for personal health within the chaos of life are becoming more prevalent.
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 insight into spiritual health and physical health. The following is a transcript of his talk.
The Lower-tier doctors treat diseases, the middle tier treats people, and the upper-tier doctors treat the country. Health is a business for everybody. Welcome everybody to the Three Tiers Doctors Forum. I am Dr. Yang.
In the last episode, we talked about the concept of medical treatment. Today we will focus on talking about our understanding of how the middle tier treats people. By the way—people are an extremely complicated entity because people not only have a physical structure, but also a very complicated biochemical system.
During our life, we are constantly exhaling and inhaling. In other words, there is such a set of energy structures and circulation within our body, which is constantly moving that allows people to maintain good physical and psychological function. But even so, human beings are not yet complete.
Take the car, as an example. Even though it has a body structure, oil, water, electrical circuits, and an engine—it still cannot move. It still needs a driver to get it going. The same is true for human beings, who need the soul and spirit to control the human body. Without those, one will not be a complete, valuable, and meaningful person in society. In that sense, the composition of human beings is indeed extremely complicated.
In fact, our ancient Chinese medicine has a very thorough understanding of these things. In the “Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon,” there is a complete system and a good discussion of the spirit, ethereal soul, corporeal soul, intent, and will, which are all within the category of spirit and soul.
Based on this discussion, there exist some codes of conduct as required for the human spirit and soul. They are benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and integrity. Because of this, TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) requires people to achieve peace of mind and believes that regulating the mind is the key to health. And through such regulation, one can really achieve a peaceful state of mind.
Emotion is a kind of strong energy. When the emotion is not at peace, the energy system in the body will become out of balance, causing various dysfunctions in it, and various biochemical reactions in the body will also be affected. Over time, various physical diseases will come by themselves.
The development of modern medicine has gone through a short process, with a history of just above 200 years. Its progress is extremely fast. However, various modern medical research has proved repeatedly that the wisdom and legends of our ancient Chinese medicine are valid and also scientifically sound.
For example, we now realize that one’s suffering from mental stress can lead to imbalances and obstacles in the nervous system, which can lead to endocrine dysfunction, which in turn can also lead to immune system disorders. Under this situation, all kinds of physiological, psychological, physical, and mental diseases will come about. And modern medicine has now recognized this aspect very clearly.
More importantly, modern medicine has realized that possessing a disease-causing gene does not necessarily mean a disease. The results of modern medical research have found that each of us has thousands of various kinds of gene changes, or mutations, but it does not mean that all of them will cause problems to our health. It is only when the mutation affects the structure of some larger protein molecules and functions, it will then have an impact. It does not mean that if a person is born with a certain genetic defect, [s]he is finished, and [s]he is destined to be sick. It is never like that.
As we all know, a lot of environmental factors, such as nutritional status, various environmental pollution, such as heavy metals, poisoning, or infection, and mental stress, have all been found to affect the regulation of mutated genes. Gene expression can be turned either on or off. If you do a good job in mental stress reduction, in your diet and nutrition, in your daily life, in exercise and breath adjustment, and when all these are done properly, the many bad genes that could have been turned on may just stay turned off.
In other words, even though one has a genetic weakness or defect, it does not necessarily cause disease. Modern medicine calls it environmental genetic medicine, formally called epigenetics. Of course, we also talk about precision medicine nowadays, which means determining a person’s health status and treatment plan based on his genetic characteristics and genetic status. In fact, TCM has long recognized this point. People have different constitutions and possess all such different innate factors.
Medical science today has realized that various methods of relieving our mental stress, improving our mental health, improving our nutrition, and exercising all have a profound impact on the occurrence, progress, and worsening of diseases. So, health is not just to rely on the doctor and taking medicine. You can take a lot of initiative yourself. And at the same time, you are quite able and responsible to keep yourself healthy. This is the very concept of middle-tier doctors’ treatment of people.
The middle-tier doctors here is not about traditional Chinese medicine, but about instructing and helping people to improve their mental health, their diet and nutrition, their life health, and their ability to reduce stress and/or resist stress.
This category of middle-tier doctors treating people also includes some methods applied in detoxification for some chronic infections and poisoning. So, in our future lectures, we will have a lot more to share and discuss in this area. Since most of these can be done by ourselves, we can all do it after learning.
Middle-tier doctors treating people actually refers to adjusting from a sub-health to a healthy state, thus preventing the sub-health state from developing into a disease state, and avoiding entering the worse stage of requiring lowest-tier doctors to treat diseases.
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