The other day I was talking with another Oriental Medicine (OM) practitioner, discussing the challenges in communicating ideas to patients between eastern and western medical traditions. I was focusing on how I tried to explain Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) diagnoses to a patient.  She challenged me to take a step back even further and answer a more fundamental question…What is the definition of health?

A very basic definition of health is the state of being free from illness or injury. However, I would like to expand on this definition. I actually like to think about how well the body is functioning overall; I know quite a few people in my life who would classify as healthy under the basic definition but when I look at them, I see potential red flags all over the place.

From a standpoint of eastern medical traditions, health is better described as when the body is in balance. Yet- what is balance? In this context, balance is primarily talking about the harmonious flow of the concept of qi (chi) throughout the body. So, what in the heck is qi?

Qi is perhaps most easily described as the summation of all emotional, physiological or biological processes of the body. From the standpoint of an OM practitioner, harmonious “qi flow” among the mind and the body is generally the desired outcome of any treatment. 

If this is sounding too “out there”, let's think of a metaphor.  All the various physiological functions of the body can be thought of as a form of traffic; in a city there will be major routes that traffic will take, with vehicles entering and exiting the system all the time on their way from point A to point B, each vehicle with its own specific goal in mind. 

 This is not unlike the concept of all of the body's circulation of blood & lymph going through the entire system, picking up wastes and then dropping them off for disposal; picking up nutrients and transporting them to where they are needed; hormones and nerves delivering messages along the way from the brain to the entire system; if everything is harmonious, then all the moving parts can move smoothly together and then split apart to get to where they're going to do their job. 

Now let's imagine there's been a major accident- for example a ruptured spleen after a car accident. There's going to be major re-routing and functional adaptation going on in the body just like there would be if there was a big disruption to the transport system in any city. 

Let's think of another scenario, one where the entire transport system is aging. Here, the roads are getting beat up, full of potholes and need resurfacing-perhaps like arteries that are clogged with fatty deposits. The waste system is overloaded and no longer handling the trash volume so efficiently so it's now piling up, which is just like a diseased liver or kidneys. And just like in a city transport system, it is possible to do repairs. Sometimes this takes a major overhaul (like a surgery or drastic lifestyle change), or it needs constant but diligent steady efforts to clean up and fix the system (like the things that OM practitioners excel at). Western doctors actually also have the same strategy and oftentimes with medication they are attempting to do the more minor repair to avoid the major overhauls.

The often early “symptoms” of congestion in any system-be it traffic, or a circulatory system, or the digestive system --is trouble. It’s easy to recognize the more drastic forms of congestion- impacted bowel, an injured limb that is swelling badly, stuffy sinuses or perhaps bloated after a big holiday meal.  

But I would say there are subtler forms of body traffic “congestion” that can lead to just as dramatic forms of poor health. For example, a subtle form of “congestion” that raises my OM practitioner eyebrows is when people tell me about slowing  down of their bowels, or a creeping decline in their ability to sleep through the night.

Consider this- overwhelmingly research indicates a diet that is overly rich in fats and sugars, and perhaps sparse on fiber, can lead to chronic disease such as diabetes and coronary artery disease. A lot of times these diseases are found by an annual routine blood test or after an event such as chest pain after an unusually strenuous bout of exercise.  Does this mean the person was “healthy” before the diagnosis? Obviously, most people would say “no”—but that signs and symptoms may have been so subtle that they would have called themselves “pretty healthy” right up until the event.  

So where am I going with this and what does it have to do with Chinese medicine? I have much more to say— so will post the rest in Part 2 in a couple days!

First, I would like to know what YOU think of as health?