Investigating Errors and Adverse Effects - Grist for the Mill of Practice • Daniel Schulman * Qi053

10/09/18 • 68 min

Qiological Podcast

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053 Investigating Errors and Adverse Effects - Grist for the Mill of Practice • Daniel Schulman

Like hitting black ice, suddenly all sense of traction and stability evaporate into a gut wrenching vertigo. Adverse reactions of our patients to acupuncture can trigger this kind of disorientation. And this is when we have an opportunity to learn something that we didn’t previous know.

Adverse reactions could be due to a botched treatment, we were thinking one thing, but did another. Or our diagnosis was off. Or maybe it was on, spot on but the patient’s processing of the treatment gives rise to a frightening amount of discomfort and sends them scurrying for a quick pharmaceutical fix to calm their fear and anxiety.

It requires a certain amount of maturity the part of the practitioner to hold steady in a moment of deep uncertainty. And degree of personal development on the part of both patient and practitioner to not let unforeseen reactions stop what might be an important turn in a patients healing process.

In today’s conversation we consider adverse reactions to acupuncture, how to tell the difference between an uncomfortable healing process and an unskilled treatment, and how uncertainty is part of the game when practicing medicine.

Next Episode

054 Nei Jing Perspective on Life, the Universe and Acupuncture • Ed Neal

We trace our medicine back to the Nei Jing, but most of our actual practices come from a more modern perspective.

Going back to those roots is not easy. Even for native speakers of Chinese, reading the 文言文 wen yan wen, the classic Chinese is difficult. For those of us in the modern West, these ancient texts are challenging. They require not just language, but a minset that views the world from through a completely different set of lenses and prisms than Cartesian and materialistic science offers to us.

Immersion in this ancient material changes us if we allow it. Gives us hints at seeing how matter and energy interact in ways toward which modern medical science is blind.

In this conversation we listen into how the Nei Jing gives another way of approaching acupuncture, the 脈 mai, channels, and helps us to understand our bodies as fluid based ecosystems.

Head on over to the show notes page for more information about this episode and for links to the resources discussed in the interview.