In Chinese Medicine, is ‘energy’ the pathogen?

Today, I treated myself for hay fever. I don’t have ‘hay fever’ as such, but I had the symptoms: sneezing and some irritation, or soreness, in my eyes.

I do not have the underlying cause of hay fever. My ‘Kidney’ energy has always been good. But because I had recently been treating a lot of patients with hay fever, I had started to adopt the symptoms. This phenomenon happens again and again with myself; I am prone to adopting the symptoms of the patients I treat. I seem to connect very readily with a patient’s energy. This happens particularly when I read a patient’s pulse. When I ‘connect’ to each pulse, I can often feel symptoms in my body, which are usually the result of a problem with the particular whose organ I am reading. Also, I seem to adopt the energetic pattern of the person I am near to; I only have to be in a person’s company, on a one-to-one basis, and I will start to feel some of their symptoms.

This made me wonder. When someone is ill, is it the fact that it is the ‘energy’ that is the pathogen inside them?

Certainly, in my own case, in the scenarios mentioned above, this seems to be what is happening. The patient is ‘ill’. This causes the ‘energy’ in their body to flow in a particular way. This pattern is transferred to me (or, I ‘reflect’ that pattern, however the transfer happens; it is certainly true to say that my energy adopts the same ‘pattern’ that their energy has at that moment). I then produce the physical symptoms that the person has, though the symptoms are usually weaker and less permanent in myself. I seems to me that in this particular scenario, the pathogen inside me is pure energy. It is not a pathogen that has transferred to me from the outside world.

This makes me wonder whether all pathogens, when inside the human body, are pure energy. How might this work?

This energy ‘represents’ the outside world, is a ‘model’ of it, in the same way that a groove in a vinyl record is a representation of a sound, but is not really the sound itself. This ‘representation’, then, is adopted by me, even though I have not been exposed to the external pathogen. And this is they way that I ‘pick up’ the ailments of my patients.

As an aside, on how acupuncture works: You could say that, in some situations, our body ‘models’ the outside world, and this ‘modelling’ is the illness that the person is suffering. This model is held within the person in the form of energy. And acupuncture works by manipulating this energy, to modify this model.

My hay fever treatment

The treatment that I gave myself consisted of a single acupoint: SJ-5, and only on my left side, which is my weaker side.

( I think I needed it on my left, because the pathogens had been able to penetrate me due to a deficiency in myself—albeit that the pathogens were only an energetic representation of the pathogens from the real world—there is a weakness in my Lung energy, which makes me vulnerable to such things, the Lungs being largely responsible for defending us from attack from external pathogens.)

In the first minute or two of needling this point, I could feel the ‘pathogen’ releasing from my face and left ear. This was an interesting insight into the effectiveness of this point for clearing hay fever pathogens. I had always felt that this was the single most important point to use for hay fever patients, and have always had great results using it. It was interesting, and valuable, to have this personal insight into feeling the point working.

Sound is also a pathogen

The previous night, I had spend a few hours in a club with very loud music playing. I always wear ear plugs in such places. It is the only way I can bear to be in that environment. The next morning, I noticed that I was Spleen deficient: I had a tender abdomen and loose stools. When I read my pulses, my Spleen was deficient and my Lung pulse was floating and wiry, indicating that my Lungs were fighting off a ‘wind invasion’. The loud, pounding, sound had had the same effect on my body that a strong wind does. This ‘wind’ had penetrated into me and I was fighting off a ‘cold’ (in biomedicine terms).

The reason that this had produced Spleen deficiency in me, was because the Lungs and Spleen share the same energy, and my own Lung/Spleen energy is usually low anyway, so the energy in that ‘circuit’ was all being drawn to the Lungs, to fight off this Wind Invasion, and there was little left for the Spleen, so this produced in me the symptoms of Spleen Deficiency.

I needled the acupoints LI-4 and Lu-7, and this restored my pulses and made me feel normal again. The Spleen pulse restored immediately and the tender abdomen cleared. And I no longer felt that I was fighting off a cold. I felt comfortable, all in the space of a few minutes.

It further occurs to me (continuing the previous topic) that such a quick transformation could only take place if the pathogen inside me was pure energy. These acupoints ‘released’ the pathogen, and it was no longer in my body. This ‘releasing’ is a literal thing. I have often noticed with needling certain points on patients, that when I place my hand over the needle, I can feel the pathogenic energy venting from that acupoint. It often feels warm and ‘angry’, or ‘agitated’, and rises ‘wind-like’; it is like a stream of energy rising from the needle.

In this way ‘pathogens’ are released from the body by using acupuncture.

 

16 June 2008