One of my earliest inspirations when studying Acupuncture was the book Between Heaven and Earth by Beinfield and Korngold.
There is a lot of wisdom to be gotten from that particular book, but the concept that struck me most was understanding how Western medicine developed.
In short, there was a Frenchman in the 1600s, René Descartes, who developed certain theories about the mechanistic aspects of the natural world. He drew certain conclusions about health and disease based on mechanical laws, which ultimately led to the logic used in the western scientific method.
Although incredibly accurate and responsible for much western scientific development, Descartes’s ideas also limited our worldview; in my opinion, by not accounting for subtlety in the natural world and also in the human body.
Western science, and therefore Western medicine, has incredible value in effective diagnosis and in addressing crisis situations, far more than any other medicine developed on the planet.
However, as one can see by the astounding number of Americans who are simply not healthy, living on medications that they need to take their entire lives in order to suppress certain symptoms, the truth of health goes beyond the scientific method. The key to health is more likely found in a subtle understanding of relationships between organ systems, glandular systems, the nervous system, and the circulatory system in the body that has been eloquently developed over the last 3500 years…known as Chinese medicine.
