Classical Chinese Medicine

Ancient Nature-based wisdom, in the language of modern science.

For a sample of my approach to integrating Classical Chinese Medicine and modern science, check out this snippet from a talk I gave on Healthy Seminars.

Travelers among Streams and Mountains by Fan Kuan .jpeg

Ancient Chinese Medical Cosmology

Since 2001, when I first heard Heiner Fruehauf speak, and glanced at the HuangDi NeiJing SuWen, the origin story of Classical Chinese Medicine, I've been addictively hooked.

The story it tells is exceedingly beautiful:

Imagine a model of the world in which Heaven and Earth engage in a constant mingling of energies, and everything in between those two, all the plants and animals, mountains and seas, result from the different moods and subtle shades of their exchanges.

In Classical Chinese medicine, they call all of creation "the 10,000 things", while the realm in which all the things exist, constantly being born, transforming, and dying, is called the realm of interaction.

Crucially, humans too result from this forever tango between Heaven and Earth. Humans are not set apart from nature, but rather, are deeply embedded in her story. Our physiology results from this Heaven-Earth dynamic. But then, how we live with Nature, aligned, or misaligned, depends on us.

Now, how do we move from a good story to a medical model that gives good results?

Chinese medicine has survived for 2000 years, an endorsement that speaks for itself. But also, the WHO has included the system in it's ICD-11 (ch 26), the global standard for medical coding.

But why has this ancient medical system persisted? What is it about this story that works? How did they come up with it?

And what can we learn from a medical model that includes nature? Can we do the same today? Can we uncover the science that restores humans to the web of life, give us a place within nature, not above it?

I believe it's possible to translate the ancient model into language that the larger scientific community can understand today. We can all access an ancient dynamic system that provides the missing links to transform the body into something whole and integrated with nature.

The Classical Herbalists's Apothecary

Below is an interactive map I made of most of the Classical Chinese herbal formulas. Feel free to hit "start presentation" and play around with them.

These are 2000 year old formulas which we still use today. They were prescribed according to very different rules, many of which are completely cryptic for today's practitioners. As a classical practitioner, part of our job is to decode the original systems.