Saturday 23 November 2013

Chinese medicine seminar Berdorf

Biomedical Explanation of Chinese Medicine? Seminar at Hotel Bisdorff in Berdorf, the "Heart of the Little Luxembourgian Switzerland".

Bisdorff


The seminar was organized by MedChine, organisation that promotes traditional Chinese Medicine in Europe. The speaker was Robert Doane, former oil trader and meditation teacher, who started new career as acupuncturist when he was 45 yrs old, and became owner of Americas biggest Chinese medical clinic.
Seminar

He states that acupuncture is based on physiology just like western medicine is. It use the mechanisms we all have in our body.
No new age religion, but physiology

He called people who have pain in their body to come forward and gave them acupuncture. One lady needed some 20 needles "stabbed" on her hands and feet to heal the headache. Mr. Doane explaned how some of the conditions can be healed easily with acupuncture and Chinese herbs, others need western medicine, including surgery. His clinic has treated tens of thousands of patients and he has clear idea, what can be done with acupuncture.

Another lady had back pain. She needed around 30 needles on her hands and head to get better. I have the impression that it really works. I wish I could try it. He explained that "Acupuncture in Chinese is called Zhen Ci or needle therapy. The needle therapy is done on the jie of the body. Jie translates as neural nodes. The purpose of the needle therapy is to break up blood flow problems in the body which lead to malfunction and necrosis."
Still pain?

He also talked about heart disease and weight loss. "The culprit of heart disease appears to be inflammation. Inflammation of the vessel wall attracts cholesterol to patch the inflammation. Yes, the cholesterol patch can become thick, but the reason it is there is not actually due to the cholesterol itself. The cholesterol is simply repairing the vessel damage."

About the weight loss he explained that "What we have found in over 15 years of weight loss programs in our clinic is that the best, fastest, and safest way to lose weight is to increase the protein content of your food and decrease the simple carbohydrate consumption. Does cholesterol go up? Yes, it does, but the HDL (good cholesterol) goes up faster than the LDL (bad one) and this is better for you than having low HDL levels."

Too much carbohydrates in the food will make pancreas to secrete more insulin, which gives the body command to store fat. But: "If the meal is weighted towards protein, the pancreas will release gulcagon. Glucagon is the opposite of insulin and commands the body to burn fat. If each meal has a glucagon reaction on the pancreas, then each meal will turn the body into a fat burning factory. This is the key to losing weight and keeping it off."
Immediate effect

The seminar was very informative and great fun. I didn't know that western medicine has forgotten to heal heart conditions before they produce heart attack. But in Chinese medicine the condition of the heart and blood circulation is very important in preventing almost any other ailment. The condition of the body can be analysed with Chinese pulse reading. It can help to pinpoint the illness when diagnosis made with western methods is uncertain. Other thing that surprised me was that acupuncture does not work with mysterious energy flows in the body, but simply give impulses to the nervous system to open blood circulation in parts of the body that don't work properly. Mr. Doane tries to demystify acupuncture and show that together with modern western medicine it can give very good results. One of the reasons for misunderstandings about Chinese medicine come from wrong translations made in 1930's. For example the word "Ci" is not energy, but simply oxygen. Chinese medicine could figure out already more than 2000 years ago how heart and blood circulation work.

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