To teach Chinese Medicine to the masses. (See “FAQ” page for specifics)
Chinese Medicine Guys’ Purpose
Why? There’s an old saying, “Ask a Chinese Medicine doctor a question, and they will tell you a story.”
It can be really annoying, especially when I asked one of my Chinese Medicine teachers a seemingly simple question and off they went on a long story. I checked out . . . (not really, but it makes a better story.) So feel free to check out, as I tell a few simple stories that answer the question: Why should I teach Chinese Medicine to the masses? These stories constantly come back to my mind. They come back to me, when I feel like quitting. They come back to me, when making some decision about how to go about doing it. I’ve been at it almost every day for 14 years and I’m not even close to achieving this goal, yet.
Backstory
I was turned onto Chinese Medicine in 1992, when I was living and teaching at a yoga center. Some of my fellow yoga teachers were going to a Chinese Medicine doctor for their woes. I went to see this doctor myself just to check it out by getting a treatment. For some unknown reason, in his waiting room that was pretty nondescript, I knew this was what I wanted to do with my life. It was a weird feeling.
So I started to read some of the basic books on Chinese Medicine. I’m a logical person and up until I became the yoga teacher gone off-the-beaten path trail, I was a “normal” guy. I was a certified public accountant and had also earned a Master’s degree in Computer Science in 1982. From 1982 to 1992, I earned a living in the computer field. Both accounting and computers tend to attract logically-minded people – and a lot of guys.
So I’m reading these Chinese Medicine basic books. I’m not getting much out of them because they are not as logical as I need things in order to understand things.
Nevertheless, I go to a new Chinese Medicine school starting in 1994. I move from my hometown Chicago to Seattle. The school was run by two guys. One was famous in the field for translating Chinese Medicine books from Chinese into English. These books are the definitive Chinese Medicine books in the English language. He also publishes them. It would be a sad state of affairs in English-speaking countries, if he didn’t devote a big part of his life to translating these Chinese Medicine books for people who read English. He’s still at it today. Some of these books have taken as many as six years for him to translate and publish. I often think what if he gave up and didn’t publish these books. I’d be shit out of luck, because my reading of Chinese is pathetic even though I took 3 years of it at his school. My Chinese illiteracy is more a function of the school’s start-up and growing pains of being the first class in teaching things in a new way. Their graduates nowadays can really read Chinese. . . so they aren’t as dependent on books translated into English as I am.
Anyway, I remember when I was ready to graduate and I am sitting down with this teacher/translator/publisher. I was telling him my dream to teach Chinese Medicine to the masses. I wasn’t preening and posing. I wasn’t looking for approval for my purpose in life. I was lost and I didn’t know the next step. The typical next step for our graduates (at least for 99.99% of our Ivory Soap graduates) was to set up a practice and see patients. Case Closed. The scenario was a part of me but treating a handful of people while there were so many others out there who knew nothing about Chinese Medicine. Well, that feeling just kept nagging at me.
Simply, I needed to teach the masses. That was my calling. I remember him just listening intently like he had nothing else to do, or perhaps eat his lunch in peace and quiet. He then told me a story about how when he first wanted to translate and publish books that the publishers he shopped it to wanted to change the books into something he couldn’t live with. So he started his own publishing company. I was looking at him and smiling back now because I am a pretty good listener myself, when I feel someone is saying something worth listening too. I asked, “Didn’t you want to start your own publishing company?” He smiled and said with a shrug, “No”. The shrug implying to me “you gotta do. . .what you gotta do. . . when you want to do it your way”. He then added “And it took a lot longer than I thought it would”.
I’ve remembered that story many times, because it sure has taken me a long time to teach the masses -- 14 years to be exact and I have hardly made any headway. But I’ve created a solid foundation to build on. And that takes times, if quality matters. I think of my teacher and what if he gave up. I’d be shit out of luck. My calling is Chinese Medicine. Yet I wouldn’t have (almost) any books to sink my Chinese Medicine teeth into, if he gave up. So there’s the lesson for me -- when you give up your dream...others can suffer the repercussions.
So I go to the Chinese Medicine school not knowing if this stuff is logical. If it isn’t logical, I’m shit out of luck (again). My ability to learn is totally dependent on something being logical – otherwise I’m not getting my head around it. Luckily, the other founder of the school is also a very logical person. His lectures were very logical and he was an excellent teacher of beginners. Within the first week of his many classes, I was starting to grasp Chinese Medicine. And my love affair with Chinese Medicine began – and no drinks were involved! So Chinese Medicine is logical -- or at least there were logical parts of it that I could focus on.
The next step was to see if Chinese Medicine actually did work? Fortunately in the same first week of school, we got to follow our teachers around as they treated patients.
The very first week, a patient comes in and she has severe low back pain. She is at her wits’ end. She is scheduled for surgery but decides, out of desperation, to grab one last straw before surgery and comes to the school’s teaching clinic to try Chinese Medicine for the first time.
Our teacher obtains the patient’s intake. He then explains it to the students along with his diagnosis and then gives the patient an acupuncture treatment. A week goes by and the patient comes back. One of the students is now assigned to do the patient intake. The first real question we are taught to ask a patient is, “How are things going for the problem you came in for?” The teacher and four students are there. One student, an ex-computer guy himself, asks the patient, “How’s your low back pain?”. As I write now, I swear I feel like it happened yesterday but it was 1994.
The patient says, “It’s gone.” The student questioner can’t control himself. He blurts out exactly what I was thinking and says in the treatment room in a loud voice, “You’re kidding me.” We all laugh in the room. The outburst student wasn’t in hot water. No, it was just a good day for student learning at the clinic. What’s the lesson? This stuff can really help others.
I imagine most people who have a calling have a story to tell like this one. I don’t know why this story stands out for me from all the things in the world to focus one’s life on. But many times -- over the last 14 years -- when I think about throwing in my life’s purpose towel, I think, “How would I like to be this person who was saved from surgery by one treatment that cost almost nothing.”
I swear I think out that story and being that person. There are a lot of people out there, who could be helped by Chinese Medicine. I also learned slowly, after that person’s low back pain treatment was successfully treated, that you had to be really talented at Chinese Medicine to get those kind of results. And even if you were the greatest on the planet, sometimes it just doesn’t work. Maybe another Chinese Medicine doctor/guy/practitioner could succeed where another one failed.
Flash forward a few years -- Now, it’s five years after I graduated from Chinese Medicine school. I am now teaching students at a Chinese Medicine school in Chicago. My results weren’t as good as those my teachers in Seattle were getting – by in my opinion, they were masters and I was only 9 years into Chinese Medicine.
It takes a long time to get good at Chinese Medicine. It probably takes a long time to be good at anything. I often wonder how good I would be by now, if I started studying this stuff when I was in grammar school. I’d be much better than I am now. Part of my purpose is to turn the masses’ onto Chinese Medicine so that classes are taught at every age level -- grammar school, high school and college. I often imagine being a kid getting turned on by this stuff and finding my Chinese Medicine calling at earlier age. I could be a kid who found his calling at age 8. I’d have a longer time mastering Chinese Medicine, and in turn, I’d make a bigger impact on humanity.
Just one more story: I promise. I’ll snap you back out of your doze, salivating at the promise of the end of these stories. But really. Check out Steven Jobs’ Stanford Commencement lecture. It’s brilliant. It touched me, and by the number of Youtube views, it touched a lot of people. It’s how a few personal stories become the structure holding one’s life’s purpose together. It’s the kind of stories to guide you through your life as you find your own path. There are no shortcuts, that I know of. It’s pretty much one long Al Gore fixing-global-warming path, waiting in front of you.
The final story, perhaps. I am teaching at the Chinese Medicine school. I am frustrated because I was teaching Chinese herbs and Chinese herb formulas, which I love, but the way the school required me to teach this class was wrong. I had to give quizzes or tests almost every week of the course. This had them focusing all the energy on cramming information and spitting it back out to me. While it may have helped the students pass the national board exams, but, in my opinion, it didn’t really help them truly understand the material to ultimately benefit their patients. Also, this testing method sucked the life out of the class which became as much fun as memorizing a Chinese phone book.
I alternated between frustration, anger and hopelessness. It just wasn’t working for me. Wrong place for me. Chinese Medicine was a joyful experience. It was joyful when it was taught by my teachers at a different Chinese Medicine school. I had become my own worst teaching nightmare. Memorize and regurgitate. Repeat each week. During this time, I’m at a coffeehouse preparing for a class I was gonna teach. I take a break to read the NY Times. (A newspaper that’s a godsend to humanity.) I was reading a group of articles on Hormone Replacement Therapy for women with menopausal symptoms and the drugs with horrible side effects. It was understandably scaring off women from using these Western Meds.
I started to cry uncontrollably. I was frustrated. I was angry. I was sad. These women in the article didn’t know anything about Chinese Medicine. It just wasn’t an option. It just wasn’t on their radar screen. . . as my sister Carol often reminds me. Even the great NY Times didn’t have a mention of Chinese Medicine being a legitimate option for treating menopausal symptoms. The women interviewed in the articles were representative of the millions of women who had menopausal symptoms and how they depended on these Hormone Replacement drugs to make their lives more manageable. But now with the scary side effects of using these drugs, they didn’t know how to deal with their symptoms. They were afraid of going back to their life before the drugs.
And I’d cry. I’d wipe away the tears. And read some more of this great journalism, admiring how well written it was, even if it only covered the Western Medicine view of things. I could still admire while I read and cried. I was going down the road to nowhere teaching at that school. I cried wondering what it would be like to be one of these millions of women probably going off their Hormone Replacement drugs. Not knowing where to turn. Not knowing that for many of them, not all of them, they could be greatly helped by treatments by a competent Chinese Medicine practitioner for their menopause.
That was about six years ago. These personal stories and a few others I’ll spare you from reading, have propelled me forward – even more resolute – in my dream to teach Chinese Medicine to the masses.
The result (so far): This website and some small simple Chinese Medicine books I wrote with my sister Carol’s help. We’ve got a few other ideas in the hopper that will remain a secret until it’s time to unleash them.
And now for the burning question? Do I practice what I preach? Let’s just say, “I’m not just the President of the Hair Club for Men, I am a client too.”
I am 52 years-old. I am in excellent health. I haven’t been to a Western Medicine doctor in more than 17 years. More like 20 years – but I can say with absolute certainty, it’s been over 17 years.
I haven’t gone to the Emergency Room. I have no outstanding medical bills. I have no medical complaints. I haven’t had health insurance for 17 years. I haven’t taken any prescription drugs for over 17 years, except for a few days on pain killers after a bad tooth was extracted. I don’t want to be forced to get some life-sucking job to get dough to buy health insurance when I prefer to use the Chinese Medicine option. That is truly preventive care in my books.
It can’t be just all my good genes either. My dad had a few heart surgeries in his 50’s before dying of a heart attack at age 59. If you wanted a poster child for how to live your life if you want a heart attack, well he’s your guy. He loved being a dentist doing high quality work, this helped his heart. What didn’t help his heart? Let’s start with smoking, poor diet, constant stress, five kids growing up in the wild ‘70s, a wife who divorced him. Hard to believe he didn’t make it to 60.
What else contributed to his rapid decline? Insurance. And I’m not just saying this to bolster my Chinese Medicine claims. Really.
Toward the end of his life, he was saddled with endless insurance forms to complete (which he did himself by hand), just to get paid for a filling – even a cleaning. I believe this killed him as much as his cigarette smoking – and I am not kidding.
It was killing his love of being a dentist. Towards the end of his life, he said he wouldn’t be a dentist nowadays. What a dental loss. How he felt then, seems to be how a lot of Western doctors feel about being a doctor in the modern medical insurance world. Insurance is sucking the life out of them.
A lot of Chinese Medicine practitioners practice like my dad use to practice dentistry and how a lot of Western doctors were probably able to practice some 40 years ago. I hope to show modern Chinese Medicine doctors practicing this “more time with each patient” way. Even if for many of them covering their nut and earning a decent living is a struggle. I don’t pretend to have the answers to how Western doctors can transform their practice into something that resembles the more time per patient way that is common in current Chinese Medicine practitioners. But maybe showing it here, how some truly talented Chinese Medicine healers work will spur on some new medical models for Western doctors too.
These are the stories that guide this website and really all the CMG stuff. They are the best way I can think of to describe the “About” of Chinese Medicine Guys. All the choices for this website and other CMG stuff is derived from these stories and a few others. They ground me. They are my blueprint.
For more specific CMG choices, check out the “FAQ” page.
