There are many ways to turn on (activate, create, maximize) this miraculous internal medicine. By enhancing wellbeing and function capacity, disease is neutralized and healed. Even better, disease can be prevented. Even better, wellness is sustained. Even better, peak states of performance and flow are initiated and sustained. These methods were fully described in the ancient, totally personalized, yet very practical and inexpensive views of Chinese philosophy and cosmology, Chinese Medicine and Qigong, Taiji and Kungfu.
The Yellow Emperor and his master physicians compiled an entire book on mobilizing the “healer within” – The Classic of Inner Medicine – Huang Ti Nei Jing (1).
Some of these ancient methods, acupuncture and massage, require treatment from a licensed medical provider for which there is a cost. Some of them require the ingestion of nourishing and functional activating substances like herbal medicine, which also has a cost.
However, self-cultivation through Qigong, Tai Chi, and meditation can be utilized by individuals at home or in public venues (parks, churches, schools, hospitals) for free.
Heal Yourself
By virtue of this inner capacity for integrating the Body-Mind-Spirit (Coherence of The Three Treasures), Asian tribes (including India and Yoga) created both clinical treatment and proactive health and resiliency maximization, a form of wellness-based medicine where the physician is within. These systems maximize inherent capacity, homeostatic capacity, mitochondrial fitness, trans-normal ability, peak performance, and flow.
This profound approach to health care has a multitude of positives for personal wellbeing. Ask this question – “Why don’t contemporary societies make a very big deal out of its wellness and peak performance. The wellness or personal health resiliency mechanism and the very low-cost wellness practices – like Qigong and Tai Chi – are associated with a self-determining wellness based medical system? This could eventually eliminate the medical industrial complex.
The foundation of healing and prevention in the ancient Asian systems is to activate naturally occurring inner healing resources through personal behaviors in a system called Yang Sheng which is equivalent to today’s health hacking and self-directed wellness systems – nutrients, rest, hydration PLUS Qigong and Tai Chi (Kungfu and Yoga too). Based on the knowledge, wisdom and application of Chinese wellness-based practices, individuals, families, agencies, institutions, communities, states and even nations can easily prevent diseases that are widely known to be preventable and eliminate unnecessary medical costs -- now.
The basis – Qigong and Tai Chi
It is widely known that the most horrific diseases are preventable. (2, 3) The American wellness and health hacking revolution is now wide awake. Recently, a former United States President has put the words “prevention” and “personal responsibility” into the same phrase and set “8 Principles of Health Care,” including “Invest in prevention and wellness”. (4) When our society looks for what to actually do about this, one of the cheapest “programs” (due to group-based implementation) is Asian self-care – Yang Sheng with Qigong and Tai Chi.
Buried in the controversial Affordable Care Act, there are numerous clauses that incentivize health promotion and disease prevention with financial benefits and even penalties for the neglect of health promotion. This suggests that the application of Qigong and Tai Chi and all of the Asian wellness oriented – Yang Sheng – practices could eventually gain the support of policy and law in coming years. However, citizens are not waiting. We are hacking the brain, the vagal system, the telomeres, the mitochondria now.
A Secret Worthy of Being Common Knowledge
The same mechanism that mobilizes healing resources through Chinese clinical therapeutics, can be activated by average citizens at home for no cost. Individuals can heal themselves for free as well as collaborate with their integrative medical team. The citizens of any nation can solve any health crisis that is due to chronic degenerative disease through the application of personal practice of Qigong and Tai Chi as well as Yoga and meditation.
It is possible for people to curtail the waste of billions of dollars annually. It is a potential bailout.
My Own Revelation
The words of Lao Zi (Lao Tze) launched me personally into Asian Medicine in 1967, in Cincinnati Ohio, in Dao De Jing # 10: “Can you cultivate your essential energy and sustain the suppleness of a newborn with no cares?” To me this is the ultimate health/medical insight. Is it possible that doctors – of both conventional medicine and traditional medicine -- should have more questions for their clients and less answers? For me in my career, this question and others posed by Lao Zi form the theoretical and economic basis for the Chinese wellness-based system of health care and medicine. Later that year I took my first Tai Chi class, by 1977 I was opening my clinical practice in Columbus Ohio, a state that only recently embraced licensure.
Another question that comes from the Dao De Jing, #52, “Do you practice eternity?” Questions like this are not typically a part of medical inquiry, however, wisdom questions like this point to aspects of personal awareness that can lead to healing insight that neither surgery nor pharmaceutical products can offer.
The Healer Within
Those trained in Chinese medicine know, either overtly or covertly, the medicine is not in the acupuncture needle – it is in the patient. The job of the provider (doctor, practitioner) is not to cure the disease, it is to maximize the natural healing capacity of the human system.
In a time when we have ample evidence that nearly every form of disease is preventable, it is fair to say that the key solution to all problems in health care and medicine is to focus on the prevention of preventable disease. The underlying wellness basis which is inherent to Chinese medicine is rapidly becoming a prominent new feature of health care and medicine in many innovative initiatives, policies and programs.
Certainly, the breakthroughs in surgery, pharmacy and diagnostics of Western conventional medicine have relevance. However, it is the “discovery” (probably better referred to as the recovery) of behavioral prevention and the healer within that will leave a prominent mark in the medical history in the early years of the 21st century. Awareness of the inner medicine, the inherent functional elixir, is rapidly infusing into popular culture.
(Continued in Part 2)
The above is an original article by Dr Roger Jahnke, OMD.
References Part 1.
- Ni, MS. Huang Ti Nei Jing: The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine, Shambala, Boston, 1995.
- McGinnis JM, Foege WH. Actual causes of death in the United States. JAMA.1993 Nov 10;270(18):2207-12.
- Fries JF, Koop CE, Sokolov J, Beadle CE, Wright D. Beyond health promotion: reducing need and demand for medical care. Health Affairs. 1998 Mar-Apr;17(2):70-84.
- Obama B. 8 Principles of Health Care.
