There is a lot that is broken about our medical system.
Insurance companies have far too much control, doctors are incentivized to be reactive instead of proactive, and patients are caught in the middle.
Unfortunately, I don’t see the private insurance system changing dramatically any time soon, but there are ways to work within this system to protect your health and wellbeing.
Using Western medicine and Chinese medicine in the ways that capitalize on their inherent strengths will save you money & help you live healthier for longer.
Western medicine as we know it has its roots in the early 1900s and is primarily concerned with isolating disease causes and changing or eliminating them.
Many of the most debilitating and deadly diseases from that time have been eliminated or greatly reduced as a result of vaccines and antibiotics that were developed using the principles of this medicine.
Western medicine is very good at what it was developed to do!
Chinese medicine on the other hand has been developed, tested and retested over the last ~3,000 years. At it’s core, Chinese medicine is concerned with how a patient’s full breadth of symptoms reveals the function of their bodily systems.
A Chinese medicine practitioner is less concerned with the bacteria, virus or genetic variation that caused the disease state, and instead focused on how the body is responding to the imbalance. The symptoms are a result of the body trying to work back toward homeostasis and a Chinese medicine practitioner’s job is to help it get there.
As described by Ted Kaptchuk in the Web That Has No Weaver (a must-read if you are interested in learning more about Chinese Medicine):
“The Chinese method is based on the idea that no single part can be understood except in relation to the whole. A symptom, therefore, is not traced back to a cause, but is looked at as a part of a totality… The Chinese system is not less logical than the Western, just less analytical.”
Western medicine will continue to be the best option for treating diseases that have clearly defined mechanisms that can be arrested at the appropriate time.
Chinese medicine, on the other hand, is the perfect complement to Western medicine because it does not require definition of mechanisms in order to be effective. Treating symptoms that do not fit into a pre-defined disease (idiopathic conditions), symptoms that are on their way to becoming a disease (preventative medicine), or multi-system symptoms that have no clear root cause are where Western medicine is severely limited and can fail an individual patient, but where Chinese medicine can provide enormous relief and benefits.
What do you think? Let us know at info@balanceatx.com!
