TCM & Ayurveda – NaPodPoMo – Self Powered Healing

In this episode of Self Powered Healing, I wanted to talk a bit about some of the healing traditions that have existed throughout the world and throughout time. Every culture has had its healers of some sort, be they medicine men or medicine women or other types of healers. Western medicine tends to consider most or all of them to be pseudoscientific, and they’re all classified as alternative medicine at this point. And a lot of that might be because they don’t really understand how they work. I’m going to focus on two very well known healing modalities.  

One is Traditional Chinese Medicine, or TCM, and the other is Ayurveda. They have both been around for thousands of years. It would take years of study, though, to understand either one of them fully, so I’m just going to give an overview today.  

Out of curiosity, I started with Wikipedia to see what they defined Traditional Chinese Medicine to be. And this is what they said, I’ll quote.  

“Traditional Chinese Medicine is an alternative medical practice drawn from traditional medicine in China. A large share of its claims are pseudoscientific, with the majority of treatments having no robust evidence of effectiveness. or logical mechanism of action.”  

There we have that Flexner dictated term, alternative medical practice. And we also have labeled them as pseudoscientific. And it says no robust evidence of effectiveness because there are no peer reviewed studies. And no logical mechanism of action simply because they don’t understand it.  

Honestly though, I think there is great value in TCM and as a matter of fact I have a healing story about a lady who healed her thyroid primarily through TCM that will be coming up soon.  

After that I went to TCMworld.com to get a more… well, it’s biased the other way for sure, but a better definition of what TCM really is. And it says, “Traditional Chinese Medicine is an ancient and natural form of healing that recognizes the inseparable relationship of body, mind, spirit, and nature.”  

TCM looks at the body and health from a different perspective, obviously, than western medicine. It’s based on four guiding principles.  

The first principle is that the body is looked at as a whole, integrated, complex system, which is made up of various parts of the physical body, as well as the mind, the emotions, and the spirit. It’s an interrelated system that is miraculously complex and is powered by a life force energy called Qi.  

The second principle says that you are completely connected to nature. Changes in nature are always reflected in your body, so that would include the season, time of day, your age, your genetics, your geographical location, as well as your body’s health.  

The third principle says you were born with a natural self-healing ability. In the same way that nature has a regenerative capacity, so do you. It might be difficult to access that healing ability at times and sometimes it might appear to be lost, but it’s never totally gone.  

And the fourth principle It says that prevention is the best cure. Your body is continually revealing signs about the state of your health. And rather than ignoring them, TCM teaches you how to interpret them and know what your body is telling you.  

There’s a lot more to TCM. And a TCM practitioner, for example, is likely to look at your face when evaluating your health because they can read the overall health of your body by looking at signs on your face.  

Next, I’ll talk about Ayurveda. And I went to Wikipedia just to prove the point.  

“Ayurveda is an alternative medicine system with historical roots in the Indian subcontinent. It’s heavily practiced throughout India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, where as much as 80 percent of the population report using Ayurveda. The theory and practice of Ayurveda is pseudoscientific, and toxic metals such as lead are used in ingredients in many Ayurvedic medicines.”  

So, yes, we find the same story, the alternative medicine system that is pseudoscientific. Remember when I talked about that word science? It’s an example of dismissing something because it is not understood based on Western medicine principles.  

But what is Ayurveda, really? It’s a Sanskrit term that means the science of life. It is a healing modality that originated in India more than 5, 000 years ago and is often called the mother of all healing. At Ayurveda.com, it describes it this way.  

“Ayurveda places great emphasis on prevention and encourages the maintenance of health through close attention to balance in one’s life, right thinking, diet, health. lifestyle, and the use of herbs. Knowledge of Ayurveda enables one to understand how to create this balance of body, mind, and consciousness according to one’s own individual constitution and how to make lifestyle changes to bring about and maintain this balance.”  

In contrast, Western medicine searches for objectively underlying causes with scientific precision, not looking at the whole person at all, just a set of symptoms. But, Ayurveda looks at the whole person and seeks to bring the person’s body back into balance.  

Several years ago, I read the book, Quantum Healing by Deepak Chopra. He mentions Ayurveda throughout the book since he’s an Ayurvedic practitioner. He often mentions the approach he takes with his patients, sometimes asking about their life and how things are going because he knows that all of it can affect a person’s health.  

In his book, he talks about the difference between Ayurveda and Western medicine when looking at illness. He suggests first that illness is a sign that a war or conflict is going on. Ayurveda thinks of this conflict as being “in here,” meaning inside the body, which is contrary to germ theory, which tries to tell us that the war started “out there” by invaders.  

Both TCM and Ayurveda emphasize our innate healing ability, prevention, a holistic mind body spirit approach. I suspect many, if not most, traditional medicine systems took a similar approach. As well, they look inside to the overall health of the body, as opposed to looking for something outside the body for the cause of health issues. Which is more in line with the terrain theory that I talked about earlier.

Thanks for listening today. If you have any comments on this episode or on the whole NaPodPoMo concept in general, you can visit this page to leave comments either on this page or at SelfPoweredHealing.com/November2024. You can also find a listing and link for all November’s episodes on that same page: SelfPoweredHealing.com/November2024.  

By the way, Self Powered Healing is still looking for interviews with people who want to share a story of healing. Do you have a healing story? I would love to hear about it and see if maybe you could share it on our show. So if you’re interested in sharing, then visit selfpoweredhealing.com/share to schedule a chat.  

You aren’t committing at this point. You’re just having a chat with me to see what’s going on. It will be confidential unless or until you decide you want to share. And if you get there and there’s not a convenient time for you, send me a message because we’ll always find a time.  

And remember this always,  