Semantics

I've had a wicked cold for the past few days. I forgot to take my Tan Ma Gou Teng Yin Wan, or Jade Screen. I've been sick a lot this year, kind of unusual for me. My acupuncturist at the school clinic gave me Jade Screen to prevent that from happening.

Lesson #1 in Chinese medicine: Herbs don't work if you don't take them.

I've been thinking a lot about how well all of our classes dovetail into one another. In Living Anatomy, we're learning how to palpate the clavicle, shoulder, and upper arm while in Points class we're learning the lung points, which are mostly on the arm and shoulder.

In our Research class, we've spent some time learning techniques on how to be mindful; present with our studies, with our day-to-day lives, and eventually present with our patients, giving them our full attention and focus.

That attention is expounded upon in the Respectful Touch class where we learn to be sensitive to our patients' comfort and boundaries. What I like about Respectful Touch is that it asks us to be aware of our own issues as well. For the next three to four years we, as students, are going to be practicing on one another. It'll be good to get it right with each other so that we can be the amazing practitioners I know we're all going to be.

I really enjoyed this week's lecture in A&P. Our professor, Regina Dehen, talked about physics and energy and basically how we don't really know why atoms stay together or do the weird things that they do.

Energy is weird, even within the laws of Thermodynamics--order and entropy, yin and yang. So it's pretty cool to see how physics dovetails into our TCM Theory class and the focus on yin and yang energy. Sometimes the differences between Western and Eastern medicine seem nothing more than an issue in semantics...

And all that comes full circle back to Research where we will learn the skills to analyze, and for some of us, create the studies to prove the efficacy of acupuncture in a Western paradigm.

One of the papers we had to read for the next lecture was titled, "Understanding unexpected courses of multiple sclerosis among patients using complementary and alternative medicine: A travel from recipient to explorer"

It was a study done in Sweden looking at people who use Complimentary Alternative Medicine (CAM) to treat their multiple sclerosis. I felt as if I were reading my life story.

For those patients who had frustrating experiences with Western medicine, CAM empowered them to take control of the disease and their lives. It was pretty awesome to have such a personal connection to a scientific paper. Validating...

After a long day of bed rest and bad sci-fi shows yesterday, I'm going to try to catch up on studies today. I'm blessed to be living in a household with other OCOM students. We've all agreed to meet up and palpate each other. There will be a quiz this week...now where did I put that coracoid process?