Course Overview

Your key to unlocking the secret codes of Chinese medicine. A very literate Chinese speaker has no more idea what is meant by “Lung Phlegm in the Liver” than does the average English speaker. For that matter, the word “wiry” and the concept of “Spleen pulse” don’t mean anything to the average Chinese speaker. The words we use in Chinese medicine are not words, per se. They are code. “Liver,” as you well know, does not mean liver. For that matter, “Yin,” in the context of medicine, does not mean Yin. Damp certainly does not mean Damp. And Spleen Yang is present in the smallest, single-celled organism – an organism that does not have a spleen. Your patient might tell to you, “I know all about Yin and Yang. The moon is Yin, males are Yang…” But these Taoist meanings have almost nothing to do with the way these words are used in the Chinese medicine code. What does Yin and Yang mean to a Korean musician? To a traditional Taoist? To a Feng Shui practitioner? And all these different meanings are different still from what Yin and Yang mean to a TCM practitioner! If you understand the way these code words work in TCM, and what they actually mean in plain English – which is not what you think – the whole world of Chinese diagnostics will suddenly make a whole lot of sense. It will even become something you can explain to your patient, using simple, obvious English. Just knowing how the vocabulary actually works, something I never learned in my years of school, has made all the difference in my practice. I understand what I am doing. I am no longer just blindly following the dots. This first class covers material in the first three chapters of Hacking Chinese medicine, and will introduce you to some of the more common usages of the “secret codes of Chinese medicine."

Course Objectives

• Adding depth to an English-speaking practitioner’s understanding of the vocabulary and phraseology of Chinese medicine.
• Explaining cryptic aphorisms, mistranslations, and the error accumulations of centuries.
• Introducing the implications of channel theory from an electromagnetic, 21st century perspective.

Course Outline

0 hrs - 15 minWord-based communications between doctors versus talking with non-doctors and patients (translator confusion). Differences between historical use of code words and medical use of code words.

15 min - 30 minVarious meanings of Yin and Yang in different contexts.

30 min - 45 minDiscussion on how scholarly writing can be cryptic. Infinite possibilities: The example of Lung-Phlegm in Liver.

45 min - 1 hrsOverview of highly specific translations and meanings.