INTRODUCTION

America’s health care system is in crisis precisely because we systematically neglect wellness and prevention.

—TOM HARKIN, U.S. SENATOR, IOWA

DOCTORS DON’T HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS. I learned this more than twenty years ago as a young resident in a hospital affiliated with Shanghai Medical University. I was assigned to the outpatient clinic for gastrointestinal disorders, and one day when I was making my treatment rounds at the clinic I saw a patient who was suffering from a case of stomach acid reflux that was keeping him up all night. He had been medicated with all kinds of acid blockers for two months, without relief. As our conversation carried on, the woman who sat next to him in the waiting room barked out, “Drink potato juice in the morning to get rid of it. It sure got rid of mine.” I thought to myself, I am the doctor. What does she know about stomach problems? The next week, when I saw the patient again, he said he had used the potato juice remedy and his acid reflux was 90 percent better. I was humbled.

I knew about many useful natural remedies that had been handed down over the generations, and I learned about others from my patients. I began researching the healing properties of potatoes and other foods. I learned that the potato is not only rich in magnesium and other minerals, but it is also an alkalizing food, meaning it neutralizes acid in the stomach. More recently the potato was discovered to contain compounds called kukoamines that can help lower blood pressure. This knowledge led me to ask, What if everyone learned how to take care of their health problems without fancy drugs and a minimum of invasive treatments? Wouldn’t that produce a healthier and happier population? The search for answers led to the publication of my first book, in 1987, called The Tao of Nutrition.

Just as planet Earth restores a fire-scarred forest with new saplings, each and every being comes with its own intrinsic healing capability. Humans, since time immemorial, have activated this power of self-healing through natural means. They have chanted, danced, prayed, touched, and used plants to restore themselves and others to health. Virtually every culture in the world has developed natural healing traditions that were in popular use until about a hundred years ago. But in the past century this knowledge has nearly disappeared from our collective memory.

AMERICA’S HEALTH CARE CRISIS

AMERICA’S MEDICAL SYSTEM IS DOMINATED by the pharmaceutical, insurance, and biotechnology industries. Both doctors and patients are often left powerless and disillusioned. On the one hand patients are taught to be dependent on their doctors, but on the other, health care providers are overstretched while the insurance industry and HMOs dictate that they should spend still less time with their patients. Trapped in this morass are the nearly quarter of a million Americans who perish each year as a result of medical mistakes, neglect, and drug-or procedure-related side effects. All the while health care costs are spiraling out of control due to untenable economic models. The current health care crisis has exacted a heavy toll on society and individuals alike, sapping productivity and vitality and provoking angst.

Health care consumers have increasingly become frustrated with the broken-down system and are seeking alternative healing methods. The result is a renaissance of traditional medical systems that promises to empower consumers with knowledge and choices. The growth and emergence of alternative healing practices in the last decade have been driven by consumers whose needs have not changed since the days of their ancestors. The health care industry would be better advised to listen to what the consumers of their products and services want rather than force on them from above a system that serves its own self-interest.

We can take a balanced approach in which the best of the world’s medical traditions work side by side for the benefit of the patient. That approach, in fact, has been practiced in China for several decades. Chinese doctors empower their patients by educating them about nutrition and diet therapy. Doctors form lifelong relationships with their patients, allowing them to have input and control over their own health and well-being. The system has worked, and it is a necessity since the government would not be able to support a Western-style health care system for its 1.4 billion patients. I think the two approaches can and should be married to form a comprehensive and successful health care system. (Ironically, as I was finishing this book, the press was reporting that Chinese consumers are increasingly asking for brand-name Western drugs as a result of both marketing efforts by drug companies and China’s modernization drive. If China isn’t careful, it could find itself in the same crisis the United States is in.)

THE NEW PARADIGM OF INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE

RECENTLY, THE TERM “INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE” has been coined to describe the new medical paradigm of offering a multidisciplinary approach to health care. Integrative medicine is a fusion of all medical traditions for the welfare of the patient. It is nondiscriminatory in practice, and it has the potential to best serve patients’ needs.

In addition to Western allopathic medicine, Chinese medicine is gaining recognition as an important health tradition. It has been in continuous practice among a large population for thousands of years, and today it serves close to 2 billion people in China and throughout Asia. Its success rests on a naturalistic philosophy of health and medicine that focuses on treating the person—rather than solely the disease—with natural means such as diet and nutrition, herbal medicine, acupuncture, and bodywork. Chinese medicine is less invasive than Western medicine, too. The relative lack of side effects combined with its mind-body approach has made Chinese medicine a popular choice for people looking for alternatives to traditional Western health care. But instead of a flat-out rejection of Western medicine, why not integrate the best of both worlds?

I believe that integrative medicine is the answer to solving the American health care crisis because it involves you, the patient, as the stakeholder in the health care system. By educating you and encouraging you to participate in your own health care through lifestyle and dietary changes, stress management, and self-healing, the need for expensive medical procedures and drugs will decline. Your satisfaction will rise from having more control over your health. In exchange, your health insurance premiums will drop because utilization costs will drop. That is more money in your pocket—which is good for the economy. The science and drug industries would be directed more at prevention and wellness, innovating toward improving the quality and length of people’s lives. The reward of integrative medicine is a society of happier and healthier people responsible for their own health and well-being, as well as lower-cost, excellent health care.

THE WELLNESS MEDICINE APPROACH

WHILE THIS BOOK DOES NOT PRETEND to be the ultimate solution to America’s health care dilemma, it is my personal effort to help move the process forward. I introduce time-tested and evidence-based health knowledge that will help you gain more control over your health and wellness. This body of knowledge springs from 5,000 years of Chinese medical tradition, which emphasizes prevention and wellness. Therefore, I use the term Tao of Wellness to describe its concepts and practices for everyday living. Tao means “the Way,” and the philosophical tradition of Taoism is the underpinning of Chinese medicine. Part 1 of this book covers the naturalistic philosophy of Wellness Medicine and its principles and applications. Wellness Medicine embraces a variety of safe, effective diagnostic and treatment options.

The seven key concepts of Wellness Medicine are optimal health, whole person, prevention, self-healing, personalized care, healing partnership, and integration.

 

• Optimal health is the goal of Wellness Medicine. It is the active pursuit of the best level of functioning and balance of an individual’s whole being: body, mind, and spirit.

• Treating the whole person is the focus of Wellness Medicine, including a person’s inner and outer life and his or her relationship to people and the environment. Disease is a symptom of life out of balance.

• Taking care of yourself before a problem arises is at the heart of Wellness Medicine. Practitioners promote healthy lifestyles, energy balance, and prevention of illness instead of disease treatment.

• The power of self-healing is innate in all of us. The aim of the Wellness Medicine practitioner is to educate patients to use this power to enhance the healing process.

• Personalizing health care to you, the individual, is key to effective healing. Wellness Medicine recognizes that each person is unique and has a different nature. Your individualized needs require a customized approach to health care.

• Wellness Medicine is relationship-centered care. The ideal healing partnership, practitioner-patient relationship, encourages the practitioner to listen to and guide the patient toward personal responsibility and full participation in the healing process.

• Effective integration of Eastern and Western medical traditions offers the best available treatment options. Wellness Medicine promotes the use of natural, noninvasive healing practices as the first line of health care, but it will not hesitate to use chemical and invasive medicine when necessary and critical.

THE UNIVERSAL LAW AND YOU

I WILL DISCUSS THE IRREFUTABLE UNIVERSAL LAW that governs the universe and its inhabitants and how violation of the universal law upsets the delicate balance and leads to disharmony and disease. A simple and obvious example of this is a very macho patient of mine from Michigan. He went outdoors in below-zero weather wearing only a T-shirt. He caught a cold and ended up with pneumonia. Understanding how the universal law works and living in accordance with it will help you prevent illness. In the above example, excess yin, represented by coldness, constricted energy and blood flow, thereby denying the patient’s usual immunity from protecting his respiratory system. By increasing yang, or warming energy, in his body right after exposure to cold by drinking ginger and cinnamon tea, he would have been able to better counter the presence of the cold factor. Of course, dressing appropriately would have been my advice beforehand.

TAKING STOCK: YOUR HEALTH INVENTORY

THE FIRST STEP TOWARD BECOMING AN ACTIVE PARTICIPANT in your health care is gaining knowledge of your constitutional archetype. This will make you aware of your physical and emotional tendencies. There are five constitutional archetypes, based on the five elements: fire, earth, metal, water, and wood. Being aware of your archetype and learning to take an inventory of your symptoms and signs regularly can greatly enhance your program of health and wellness. For instance, a student of mine recently learned that his constitution was predominantly the wood element. He also learned that wood element archetype people are prone to high blood pressure, heart disease, headaches, eye problems, and impatience. He noticed that he had been easily agitated, flying off the handle and experiencing headaches and palpitations. This level of awareness prompted him to immediately contact me to have his blood pressure checked and to have an electrocardiogram. I found that his blood pressure was elevated and that there was a slight murmur in his heartbeat, so I sent him to a cardiologist colleague of mine. A test revealed an arrhythmia; luckily it was benign. As a result of early detection, his blood pressure returned to normal with stress-release meditation, not medication. The patient took care of the problem while it was small instead of waiting until after a stroke or heart attack. That is the value of taking your health inventory.

FIVE PRINCIPLES OF SELF-HEALING AND WELLNESS

Once you’ve learned about the universal law and how to take your health inventory, the chapters that follow will present the five principles of self-healing and wellness. By learning these concepts and practices, you will acquire powerful tools for maintaining and restoring your optimal health. The five principles are:

• diet and nutrition
• herbs and supplements
• exercise and acupressure
• lifestyle and environment
• mind and spirit

DIET AND NUTRITION

DIET AND NUTRITION ARE AT THE TOP OF THE LIST because what you eat affects your health more than anything else. Countless studies have confirmed the healing powers of food—ordinary foods that we eat every day and extraordinary foods that contain powerful compounds useful for the prevention of disease and improving your organ functions. In the Chinese medical tradition, diet and nutrition are considered the most basic of healing modalities.

Over several millennia, the knowledge of nutritional healing has spread far and wide in China. It is common for the Chinese people to swap nutritional remedies with one another. Many of the home remedies presented in Part 2 of this book have survived the test of time and have been confirmed by scientific studies.

HERBS AND SUPPLEMENTS

HERBS AND NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENTS are both preventive and therapeutic modalities, with the former being prevalent in every culture throughout the world and the latter having become popular with the advent of nutritional science research. Chinese herbal medicine is one of the oldest, most systematized, and most researched natural healing systems in the world. The sweeping number of herbs in its collection—at least 10,000 natural substances—is mind-boggling. However, there are only three to four hundred herbs in common usage. Chinese herbal medicine divides herbs into three categories: tonic, medicinal, and potent. Among a Chinese centenarian group that I researched, the common use of tonic herbs in their diet served not only to maintain health and vigor but also to combat disease if it gained a foothold. The medicinal herbs are used to correct imbalances. The potent herbs are to be dispensed for urgent or severe medical conditions only by expert herbal practitioners.

The success of Chinese herbal medicine’s long-recorded remedies has motivated Western pharmaceutical companies to set up research and development centers in China to exploit drug discovery opportunities. One such endeavor focuses on artemisinin, a compound extracted from the Chinese herb artemisia. It has been used for the last two millennia for malaria, and it has been shown to be the only effective treatment for drug-resistant malaria in Africa, according to the World Health Organization. Traditionally, during the rainy mosquito season, households in the regions of China that are prone to malaria would boil artemisia along with other herbs to help prevent contraction of the disease. The herb is also used during the flu season to boost immune function. Studies show that artemisia also possesses antiviral and anticancer properties.

Nutritional supplements have become part of many people’s daily regimen for maintaining health and wellness. Much research on vitamins and nutrients in recent years has contributed to the rising popularity of supplements. Supplementing a varied diet rich in essential nutrients with additional natural compounds can enhance and support your health. By learning about nutritional supplements and working with a knowledgeable Wellness Medicine practitioner, you will have another powerful self-healing method within your reach.

EXERCISE AND ACUPRESSURE

IN MANY YEARS OF CLINICAL PRACTICE AND RESEARCH on centenarians, I have never met a healthy person or centenarian who lived a physically inactive life. Exercise is critical to attaining your health and wellness goals. Aerobic exercise stimulates the cardiovascular system. Aerobic activities include brisk walking, hiking, jogging, swimming, bicycling, stair climbing, and many other activities. Don’t overlook dancing, rollerblading, and other fun activities that are also good for your heart and circulation. Regular exercise is key to preventing and even reversing non-insulin-dependent diabetes, which afflicts more than 12 million Americans each year and is the fastest-growing disease in industrialized countries throughout the world.

Unique to China are gentler types of movement arts that promote energy, balance of function, and a calm mind. I call them mind-body exercises, and they include tai chi, qi gong, and Dao In Qi Gong. These have traditionally been associated with health and longevity. Many recent studies have confirmed their balancing action on blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, equilibrium, and other conditions. One of my late tai chi teachers in China was in his early nineties when I met him. Though he ate about a pound and a half of fatty beef every day, he also practiced about two hours of tai chi every day, and his cholesterol and vital signs were perfectly normal. I am not suggesting that you eat a lot of red meat, I’m merely illustrating the benefits of mind-body exercise. Mind-body exercise works through a system of energy communication within the body—by deliberately activating the flow of energy and removing blockages, communication is restored and organ functions return to their optimal level.

This energy communication system underlies the Chinese medical system of acupuncture, in which needle stimulation and activation of certain acupoints in the body’s energy communication network elicit specific and intended physiological responses. Integrating acupuncture into your health and wellness program can help you maintain healthy energy flow, and it can prevent and treat physical imbalances. If you are unable to work with a licensed practitioner of acupuncture, you can use self-healing acupressure tips found in Part 2. By using a finger instead of a needle to stimulate the acupoints, you will still be able to activate the acupoints for their intended effects. Recently a patient’s eight-year-old child came in with a headache. I used acupressure on an acupoint in the web between her thumb and index finger called Valley of Harmony. Within five minutes her headache was gone. Acupressure is that simple and accessible.

LIFESTYLE AND ENVIRONMENT

YOUR LIFESTYLE AND ENVIRONMENT INFLUENCE your health and well-being. Engaging in the activities that make your body supple, your mind clear, and your spirit content is the secret of the centenarians. Simplifying your lifestyle and developing healthy habits will not only contribute to an increased quality of life but will also help you avoid illness. For example, taking a power nap in the early afternoon both refreshes you and will lower your risk of heart disease and stroke. How about taking a walk after dinner rather than sitting on your couch? The benefits may include less heartburn and indigestion, better energy, and improved circulation.

A healthy lifestyle reduces the likelihood that your bad genes will get expressed. This is an important element in the nature versus nurture equation. Nature refers to natural law, in this case your genetic makeup, and nurture refers to what people do to facilitate nature. For instance, a mother feeds her baby to help him or her grow.

Nurture has to do with the physical environment, which can either support or derail your health plan. Environmental factors subliminally influence your mood, bodily function, and physical energy. For example, on the way to work one day, I noticed that the sky was cloudy—an unusual sight for always sunny southern California. Among the patients I saw that day, about ten of them complained of headache and pressure in their sinuses that had come on within the last twenty-four hours. I knew then that the low-pressure weather system had been building and these patients were suffering the effects. By learning the rhythms of nature and the way they affect your health, you can become proactive in adapting to environmental changes and thus prevent illness.

A change in weather is more apparent than other environmental factors, like sick-building syndrome, for instance. The out-gassing of formaldehyde from furniture and carpeting, other indoor pollution, and inadequate oxygen contribute to some $10 billion of lost productivity—not to mention the illnesses related to the exposure. What about your environment? Your community can be either health promoting or stress inducing. If you are looking for health and wellness, surround yourself with people who are supportive and uplifting and share positive values.

An even more subtle environmental influence is the energy lines that crisscross the surface of our planet. These lines have long been recognized as an invisible but powerful influence on our health, well-being, and success in life. This is the basis for the Chinese science of feng shui, the practice of arranging your physical space to optimize positive energy flow in all aspects of your life. Similar to the practice of restoring flow to the body’s energy communication network or meridians in acupuncture, arranging your living and working environment in harmony with the earth’s meridians will enhance the quality of your life.

MIND AND SPIRIT

AN ANCIENT CHINESE SAYING WARNS US, “Fortune and disaster do not come through gates, but man himself invites their arrival.” This saying reveals that energy of a specific vibrational frequency responds to and attracts energies of the corresponding frequency. Thus your experience is determined by the energy you embody. The power of the mind should never be underestimated. Subtle energy may be expressed by your conscious mind as ideas, concepts, and behavior, or through your unconscious mind as subtle impressions absorbed through the senses. It has long been observed and now confirmed that there is a personality profile of people who are prone to develop cancer, called personality type C. The type C person tends to be melancholic, depressed, and excessively worried. Years ago I had the pleasure of working with the late Norman Cousins, whose research showed that the mind has a powerful influence on many physiological functions, including a significant influence on the immune system. He demonstrated that an increase in the immune killer cells that attack cancer occurred in people who experienced thirty minutes of deep belly laughter every day for twelve weeks. His work became the foundation for the field of psychoneuroimmunology. Proper training of your mind is fundamental to effective self-healing.

Among all of the precious rewards of life, inner peace is the most worthy and is the most essential element of spiritual growth. No matter what your religious faith, cultivating yourself spiritually and strengthening your connection to the universal divine will bring you inner peace and the ability to cope with life’s troubles, including illness and personal loss. Your spiritual clarity will serve to guide you in your life’s quest for health, healing, and happiness.

I hope that in reading this book you will become empowered with knowledge and understanding about your health so that you can take care of yourself, and at the same time communicate clearly with your health care practitioner. By having access to and integrating the medical systems of East and West to serve your needs, you will have the best of both worlds. I am convinced that everyone needs appropriate support throughout their lives, so when you have built your effective healing partnerships with professionals you respect and trust, it will surely lessen suffering and bring more peace and enjoyment to your life.

I offer many natural remedies in the chapters ahead. But when it comes to self-healing, nothing comes close to the healing power of love. Love is the power to connect. All lives and things in the universe are part of one interconnected whole. Love opens hearts and engenders compassion. Wellness Medicine recognizes that the healing power of love breaks down blockages and separation, eases pain, comforts loss, and unites humanity with the universal divine. When you cultivate self-love, like a mother’s unconditional love for her child, there is nothing that you wouldn’t do to get yourself well. Likewise, universal love among all people will help heal the strife and the suffering in our world. I believe that world peace cannot exist until each and every citizen of the world learns to heal themselves.

This book is my humble offering toward that dream.