Where Have I Been?

I realised this week that its ages since I’ve updated the website or posted on the blog. There’s always so many other things that seem more urgent. But lots has changed in that time so I probably need to make some changes to the website but I thought I might start with some blog posts – in fact its actually been a few years since I last posted to the blog.

At the time I last posted I had just started trying to get a community clinic off the ground and shortly after that I injured my back which upended all my plans (and I even stopped writing). In fact I wasn’t able to do much of anything for a while and its been quite limiting. But what it has done is given me a much greater understanding of what some of my patients are experiencing, which is a good thing. Its also led me to really explore how exercise can be used to aid healing and rehabilitation. So that’s certainly something I shall be writing about. I enjoy treating musculoskeletal problems and while acupuncture can play an important part in their treatment its often only part of the puzzle.

Treatment of musculoskeletal issues is often quite focussed on symptoms which is very different from how classical Chinese Medicine thinks about the body, which is much more of a systems approach. Nassim Taleb has this to say about systems:

The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in way not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters is the interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules.

I thought this summed up very nicely how classical Chinese medicine works. I sometimes joke with my patients that the theory of Chinese medicine can sound simplistic, like it was written by child. The paradox being that from this apparent simplicity emerges the complexity of health, disease and the human condition. I think Taleb summarises this paradox very nicely.

The 5 Element tradition within which I initially trained certainly took a systemic (as opposed to symptomatic) approach to treatment. I have to say I struggled to put this into practice. Perhaps partly because I never felt entirely confident with 5 Element diagnosis but also because patients, unfamiliar Chinese medicine’s systemic approach, seemed somewhat baffled by the treatments. I think this led me toward a more symptomatic approach to treatment. But I never lost my belief in a more systemic (holistic) approach to the body, health and healing and I’ve continued to study and explore a number of approaches to acupuncture. What I’ve kept coming back to and now mostly practice is a Korean style of acupuncture called Saam. Its simple (it only uses 4 needles), direct and powerful and it deserves it own introductory blog post.

So now I’m back hopefully there will be more here on the blog but also some changes in my practice. For the past few years I’ve only been working from a single location. I’ve kept things small because I wasn’t always sure just how much I could do and sometimes I’d find myself unable to do much at all for weeks at a time. Now I feel like I’m able to take more on again and so I’m looking for a second location to work from and to take on more patients again; something I’m feeling quite excited about.