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Eastern Preventive Medicine:
“Treating what is not yet disease.”
What does this mean? The ancient text of the Suwen distinguishes three levels:
1) intervening before disharmony becomes a symptom;
2) treating the symptom at its earliest stages;
3) pursuing full-blown disease.
Only the first level is considered the true art of medicine.
In the classics, this “prevention” doesn’t mean performing check-ups: it means recognizing the subtle signals the body sends—irregular sleep, altered appetite, irritability, chilliness—and correcting the situation before a pathology takes hold.
Wang Bing’s commentary on the previous sentence in the text says: “The wise treated not those who were already ill, but those who were not yet; they did not restore order to what was already in disorder, but to what was not yet.” This is the root of Eastern preventive medicine.
What do you do for prevention?
Are you aware that movement, rest, and nutrition come before anything else?
“Waiting until an illness has manifested itself before remedying it is like waiting until you’re thirsty before digging a well, or waiting for battle before forging your weapons. Isn’t it too late?” – (Suwen, chap. 2)
#traditionalchinesemedicine #chinesemedicine #tcm #tuina #qigong
Hours of standing, hours in front of the computer, a cold day, a short night are enough. And in that moment, it arrives, not a sharp pain, not a twinge, but a dull ache in the loins, a profound tiredness that concentrates in that precise spot. The hand goes there on its own, as if to support what is failing.
Is it the chair? Is it the mattress? Is it a slipped disc? Is it because I’m sleeping poorly?
According to Chinese Medicine, no.
The Suwen, in chapter 17, tells us: “The loins are the palace of the Kidneys. When a person can no longer bend and turn, their Kidneys are wasting away.”
That area of the body is not just bone or muscle structure; it is the physical home of the Kidneys, the place where the deep root of our vital energy resides.
The Kidneys, in classical tradition, guard Jing (精): the inherited and accumulated essence, the energetic capital that sustains us throughout life. When Jing decreases, when Kidney Yang no longer warms the root, when Deep Water is scarce or cold, the loins are the first to speak. Not by shouting, but by sighing.
And in those with loins like this, it’s often not just this. There’s a constellation of signs that to the untrained eye seem to belong to different worlds.
Knees that get tired climbing stairs, a chill that won’t go away, hands and feet that never fully warm up. Urinating at night, once or twice, and accepting it as “normal,” a libido that has withdrawn without explanation. Hair that falls out or turns gray prematurely, a memory that no longer holds up, tinnitus that comes and goes.
For Chinese Medicine, these aren’t different worlds; they’re all parts of the same story. All signs that Jing, that precious material that the Kidneys guard and from which every other function draws, isn’t enough, or is no longer being supported as it should be.
The well must be filled before it empties completely.
“The loins are the palace of the Kidneys. When a person can no longer bend and turn, their Kidneys are wearing out.” – (Suwen, chap. 17)
#TraditionalChineseMedicine #chinesemedicine #tcm #tuina #moxa
Wind (fēng 風), in tradition, is not just moving air: it is the generic name for everything that comes from outside and tries to enter. A climate pathogen, a circulating virus, but also—metaphorically—the event that takes us by surprise, the unexpected news, the stress that falls upon us.
The classics call it the “origin of a hundred diseases.” The first to arrive, the most adept at penetrating, and almost always opens the way for others. Wind is above all a vector: wherever it enters, it opens the way.
Yet—and here is the principle—wind alone is not enough to make us sick. Two people exposed to the same cold, the same virus, the same stress: one gets sick, the other doesn’t. The difference is not outside, it’s inside.
Illness always arises from a void; this is a cardinal principle in Chinese medicine.
And there’s more: wind, in itself, is not the enemy. In its physiological form, the spring wind stirs energy, awakens biological processes, dissolves the stasis of winter. Wind is transformation, movement, change, and what prevents life from stagnating.
The problem, then, is not the wind, but resistance to it.
It is when we harden against change, when we cling to what was, when we oppose body and mind to what moves, that the wind transforms into xié (邪), a perverse breath. The symptom arises from the friction between the wind and that which refuses to yield within us.
This is why “clear and calm” (qīng jìng) is not a poetic image. It is a concrete state: the skin tightly closed, the interstices that resist, the wèi qì (the defensive qì) that flows beneath the skin, performing its guarding function. But it is also an internal state: the ability to let what passes by, without becoming ill with change.
Wang Bing comments: it is the state of those who do not let their eyes be strained by desires, of those who do not let their hearts be confused by excessive passions, of those who respect the seasons.
The wind blows and will always blow, the question isn’t how to stop it: it’s how much we’re willing to let it pass through us.
#TraditionalChineseMedicine #chinesemedicine #tcm #tuina #qigong
According to tradition, man is born from the union of two principles: Heaven (Tiān 天), immaterial, luminous, and Earth (Dì 地), dense, nourishing. Between the two, Man (Rén 人) is formed as a mediating space and meeting point. This is the triad of the Three Powers, sāncái 三才: Heaven diffuses, Man mediates, Earth condenses.
In the human body, this cosmological triad translates into a physiological triad, the Three Treasures, sānbǎo 三寶: shén 神 (the spirit, celestial plane), qì 氣 (the breath, human-medial plane), jīng 精 (the essence, terrestrial plane). The body is structured like the cosmos because it arises from the same process. Understanding the cosmos is understanding the body.
The chapter continues with an image that completes the picture: “If anyone is able to correspond to the four seasons, Heaven and Earth are father and mother.”
Being born from the union of Heaven and Earth is a unique act, it happens only once. But maturing, nourishing, and preserving oneself over time requires a continuous correspondence with the movement of the seasons.
The cosmos becomes a parent, an inexhaustible source of sustenance, only for those who know how to listen to its rhythm.
Wang Bing, one of the principal classical commentators on the Suwen, glosses the passage thus (in the words reported in Unschuld’s translation):
“Heaven lets its virtue flow; Earth produces transformations with its qi. When virtue and qi unite, man comes to life.”
#TraditionalChineseMedicine #chinesemedicine #tuina #qigong #tcm
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