Four Years on a Bed of Spikes or How I Learnt about Preventive Health Care …

I spent a prickly four years at uni, and I mean that literally. Imagine this: a room crammed with acupuncture students (read enthusiastic amateurs) practicing their new found skill on each other. Ouch! I was needled (read stabbed), pierced, stuck, speared, slashed, gored, and gouged on a daily basis. We were rehearsing the ‘gentle’ art of acupuncture, and we were violently passionate about it. We held those fine little needles in our rough little hands and went for it no holds barred. Right under the noses of our instructors, mind you, who looked on bemused by our incompetence and could do little more than rescue the bleeders. But did we eventually learn the subtle techniques of acupuncture needling? Oh yes, we did! And something quite extraordinary happened to us over those four excruciating years … we rarely, if ever, got sick J In its essence, you see, Chinese Medicine is preventive health care at its finest. It was an agonising lesson to learn, but one definitely worth the pain.

The following quote from the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon (Huangdi Neijing), an ancient Chinese medical text, illustrates just how much Chinese Medicine has traditionally valued preventive health care over curative and palliative interventions: “The sages of antiquity did not treat those who were already sick, but those who were not sick ... When a disease has already broken out and is only then treated, would that not be just as late as to wait for thirst before digging a well, or to wait to go into battle before casting weapons?” By and large, traditional Chinese doctors were retained to keep the townsfolk from getting ill. Sick folk can’t support a doctor as well as healthy folk, you see, so it made a great deal of sense for the doc to keep his patrons healthy. To be the Emperor's personal physician, however, was the ultimate honour. But woe betide he who allowed the sovereign to get sick. In imperial China, a physician’s skill in the art of preventive measures could literally save his own skin!

But back to the future: Now let’s contrast these ideas to our current concept of medical care. Health care in this day and age is mostly curative, that is, a restoration from illness to health. Just a cursory glance through the window of your friendly, local doc’s waiting room will highlight this. It’s packed full of coughing, limping, teary eyed, downcast figures just waiting patiently for their turn. We’ve all been there. And as for the Emergency Room or waiting lists of your local hospital, forget it, you don’t want to go there! Quite literally, if no one ever got sick, our health care industry would be mostly redundant.

Sure, our Western medical system also takes preventive measures of sorts, immunisation regimes, for example, are a case in point. So is early screening and the spate of blood testing that goes on nowadays. Public health measures to raise awareness of healthier lifestyle choices are also ongoing. There’s the stop smoking campaigns, the promotion of regular exercise as a means of keeping fit, and the call for weight management to prevent many of our, so called, lifestyle diseases. Birth control, come to think of it, is another form of medical prevention, as is the enforced fluorination of our drinking water to prevent tooth decay. But on the whole, our modern medical model remains mostly curative and palliative. We’ve become quite adept at managing chronic illness and helping people to quietly pass away.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing unethical about helping folk cope with crippling illness and imminent death. There’s a whole lot of good in our medical model, too. In the realms of emergency intervention and life saving operative techniques, Western medicine has no rivals. My own daughter, at the tender age of 13, recently underwent radical spinal surgery to correct a gross structural scoliosis. Had it not been for that intervention, she would have certainly suffered a lifetime of incapacitating disability. No siree, there’s definitely a brave new world of technological advancement out there in the heroic field of modern medicine, that I neither mean to refute or undermine. Trust me.

I’m simply saying there’s also another way, and prevention is better than cure, hands down. For those of us who have not yet succumbed to the wrath of our lifestyles, and are not suffering with ailments, like my daughter, that need swift, specialised adjustment, there is certainly help at hand. We can take good, natural measures today to prevent illness tomorrow, and in doing so, eliminate all of those niggly health complaints we hardly have words for: sluggishness, heaviness, fogginess, stiffness, aches and pains, mild anxieties and stress, fullness, insomnia, and just plain feeling out of sorts, felling a lack of well-ness. I learnt that the hard way!

I exaggerate of course. In reality, I discovered acupuncture as a preventive tool in the most harmless of ways. Our class was full of camaraderie and fellowship. We learnt together. No measly needle stick injury could stop the likes of us. Especially not when a couple of years down the track we all started to look around us and actually notice none of us ever got ill. Not really. No unexplained absences, bar a couple of pregnancies. No sniffly kid in the corner. No mysterious aches and pains. Our teachers never told us to expect this, we eventually figured it out for ourselves. How clever of them …

In my next few posts I will try to explain how acupuncture works to prevent disease and rid you of all those minor, hard to pin and eliminate health complaints that keep you feeling unwell. If you have an interest in remaining healthy or just plain want to feel better … watch this space!