Neutral and balanced state of health
01 What to believe
01 Choice of health preservation knowledge
As practitioners of life cultivation, we notice that there are more and more people paying attention to health preservation, and most of the older people prefer to follow the concept of traditional herbal medicine.
After the age of forty, the vitality of the body will begin to weaken, and after the age of fifty, the decline of bodily vitality will speed up. Most of the older people will notice it and they will be pushed to learn and practice health preservation for their own good.
At the age of fifty and older, it is not easy for us to get rid of invading evil elements which will lead to serious illnesses over time. There is a saying in traditional herbal medicine that says that there are no minor illnesses after fifty years old. If a fifty plus person is sick, it usually is not a minor illness.
Therefore, we must pay attention to illness once we past age fifty, as the vitality is weakened and the resistance is weak. At this point, it is even more necessary to prevent health problems before they happen. It is high time for us to understand health preservation, disease prevention and treatment of chronic diseases so that our body will rejuvenate and we will keep illnesses miles away from us.
02 Experts may not be right
However, we run into problems selecting the right knowledge in our pursuit of health preservation. Nowadays, there is a lot of health knowledge in the market. There are books, TV programs, and each has their own opinions.
Who is right? Which knowledge is correct?
No one can guarantee this. Our understanding of the human body is still very superficial. The simplest example is the salt we eat.
Everyone is familiar with the symptoms of iodine deficiency which is an endemic goiter, also known as big-neck disease. People used to think that everyone needed iodine supplementation, so iodine was added to edible salt for daily consumption.
However, scientific research in the last ten years has shown that the high incidence of some malignant diseases seems to be related to excessive iodine intake. This research result has not been confirmed, but it is highly suspicious. If this conclusion is confirmed, then we may now say that insisting on iodine supplementation is an incorrect choice.
There is another example of wrong advice for a medicine. There was a medicine called Furazide that Chinese often took to treat diarrhea when they were young. However, we do not see it around for a long time. What happens?
What Furazide inhibits is an important detoxification enzyme in the human body, monoammonium oxidase. Without it, the detoxification function of the liver will decline, which will lead to people being easily poisoned, and in severe cases, life-threatening. Long-term use of Furazide will cause irreversible damage to the body. With this discovery, the medicine was banned.
Thus, health knowledge may or may not be right. We have to be careful in our learning and application of such knowledge.
02 Schools of thoughts in traditional herbal Medicine
01 The Neutral School of thought
We have shown that even the experts are not necessarily right in health preservation, not only in science, but also in traditional herbal medicine.
For all fresh herbal medicine graduates from Chinese Traditional Medicine Universities, they were taught a hundred schools of thought. They read widely and they read all the classic medical books in history. The more they read, the more confused they become, and they do not know who was right.
Traditional herbal medicine is divided into many schools of thoughts.
In the Neutral School, herbal doctors emphasize the importance of the spleen and stomach, and they pay attention to the mechanism of the rise and fall of vitality. Most of the practitioners of herbal medicine belong to the Neutral School.
In addition, there are two other typical representatives of the extreme schools in herbal medicine, which are known as the Ziyin School and the Huoshen School. The concepts of the two schools are completely opposite, but both have produced master-level leaders, so which one should we believe?
02 The Ziyin School of thought
Huang Yuanyu was the leader of Ziyin School. He died early because the bitter cold medicine he took hurt the spleen and stomach which had shaken his health foundation. However, we cannot conclude that the Ziyin School is useless.
The Ziyin School has been passed down since the founding of the Yuan Dynasty, and it is the school of thought with the largest numbers of followers. At least half of those who study herbal medicine in China follow this school of thought.
The fundamental theory of treatment for the Ziyin School is based on nourishing the yin-energy.
Why are there so many followers? The answer is: fast result.
Let us look at an analogy. Our body is just like a bucket full of water. You will notice that pouring out the water is faster than filling the bucket.
The Ziyin School will cure a disease with ten doses of herbal medicine, sometimes the effect can be seen as soon as three or four days.
Yes, the medicine will do damage to the spleen and stomach, but it does have the effect of curing a disease in a relatively short period of time.
Most people want to see a rapid cure of a disease. They couldn’t care less about a health hazard that will happen a long time down the road. Thus, the Ziyin School has large followers by popular demand of patients.
Followers of the Ziyin School only saw that the patients were cured quickly, but they didn’t see that these patients would die sooner. Because of the quick results, there are naturally more people who admire it and more herbal doctors who use it.
03 The Huoshen School of thought
The Huoshen school of thought is at the other end of the spectrum of herbal medicine thinking. A very famous representative of the Huoshen School died a few years ago. The old man has practiced medicine for fifty years and he has rescued countless critically ill patients who were pronounced imminent death by western medicine. However the old man failed to save himself when he suffered a stroke for the third time.
This is a distinctive feature of the Huoshen School. They are good at saving lives, but not good at treating chronic diseases. Most of the critically ill patients they treat are sudden diseases, such as heart disease and cerebral infarction.
The treatment effect of the Huoshen School is equivalent to emergency surgery, allowing patients to temporarily escape from danger and death. However, according to the Neutral School of herbal medicine, once the patients are out of danger, they should be treated with gentle conditioning and treatment, otherwise, most of the patients will die from the original disease.
One of the characteristics of the Huoshen School of herbal medicine is the heavy use of aconite, which is extremely hot by nature and highly toxic. Modern medical research shows that fifteen grams of aconite extract may poison a cow, but Huoshen School often administers two to three hundred grams of aconite to patients.
The principle underlying the Huoshen School of medicine is to first increase the yang-energy of a patient during a crisis and emergency, so that the patient will keep on breathing, and then ways will be found to treat the patient. Therefore, the Huoshen School is a good rescuer.
This is in direct contrast to the treatment of chronic diseases which requires adherence to neutral and balanced principles. These are at the core of traditional herbal medicine.
03 The Neutral Treatment
01 The balancing act
The origin of traditional herbal medicine is very early, even earlier than the rise of the nation called China. According to historical records, a nation called China originates from the Han Dynasty. However, in the classical medical book Huangdi Neijing, the term Chinese medicine has already appeared, and Huangdi Neijing has already existed in the Warring States period, way before the rise of the Han Dynasty.
Thus, in classical books of medicine, the word Chinese (zhong 中) does not refer to the nation （Zhongguo 中国), but to the fact that medicinal herbs (zhongyao 中药) follows the principle of getting the body to the middle state (neutral state or balanced state).
The reason why traditional herbal medicine is called Zhongyao is because herbal medicine practitioners believe that human beings are born with the energy of Heaven and Earth, and other animals get incomplete energy. Therefore, there are cold-blooded animals such as snakes, and relatively hot animals such as dogs or cows. The human body is balanced, neither too cold nor too hot. Thus the herbal medicine used to balance the human body is called the neutral medicine, or Zhongyao in Chinese terms.
If there is a deviation from the neutral state, a person will get sick such as catching a common cold or in a heated (inflammatory) state. For treatment, he must follow the dictum: “When cold, use hotness to warn it. When hot, use coldness to cool it. “
If the person is hot, let him recover to the neutral state, and the illness will be cured.
From the point of view of the Neutral School of thought, the Ziyin School and the Huoshen School will make the body either too cold or too hot, without considering the fundamental balance of herbal medicine.
Therefore, if we were to follow these two schools of thought in herbal medicine, it is necessary for us to supplement the prescribed medicines with other medicines that invigorate the spleen and nourish the stomach, so as to achieve the effect of neutralizing the properties of the prescribed medicine and protecting the spleen and stomach.
02 The importance of yang-energy
No matter what the disease is, we must pay attention to this balancing act. With respect to chronic diseases, which need to be adjusted slowly, we should not treat them with drastic medicine.
To adjust the human body to a state of balance and neutrality, the most important thing is the balance of yin and yang energy. When it is time for the vitality energy to go up, let it go up. When it’s time for the vitality energy to go down, let it go down. The movement of vitality energy in our body is like the rising and falling of the sun, that we should let it take its natural course.
“The most precious thing in the sky is the sun. The most precious thing in our body is the yang-energy.”
The yang-energy is very important to the human body, just like the sun is in the sky and the earth. All things grow depend on the sun. The health of the human body depends on the circulation of its yang-energy which must be balanced.
If we have sufficient blood and vital yang-energy in smooth circulation in our body, then we are in a balanced state which is a healthy state.
The next question is, why do we balance our yang-energy?
03 The importance of the stomach and spleen
The largest contribution of Huang Yuanyu is his discovery of using the stomach and spleen to achieve this objective of balance. Once the spleen and stomach are in balance, the circulation of vital-energy will naturally be in balance, and we will not be sick.
The most popular herbal medicine used to achieve the balance of stomach and spleen is called Wuxingjianpi Powder. It has been used for a long time so it is now a counter-the-counter herbal medicine. The Powder has simple ingredients, but it is very effective in making our stomach and spleen to be in a healthy movement, leading to a balanced stomach and spleen.
It is considered to be a basic maintenance, which is used to strengthen the health foundation and to cultivate the vitality to improve the body constitution. When the vitality is enhanced and the flow is smooth, the body will have a basis for curing the disease.
For most common chronic diseases in life, the prescriptions for treating them are basically yin-nourishing prescriptions, so we remind everyone every time that they must be taken together with medicines that invigorate the spleen, nourish the stomach and warm the body.
If those prescriptions are used alone, although the effect can be seen in the short term, first, the effect will not be very stable, and second, the spleen and stomach will definitely be seriously damaged.
The correct procedure is to first strengthen the spleen and nourish the stomach, enhance the vitality, and then use some small prescriptions for treatment. This will not hurt the root cause, but also treat the symptoms of the disease, and the body will naturally be healthy.
04 A brief summary
There are many ways to treat a disease, depending on the school of thoughts we follow. For health preservation of chronic diseases, the best way seems to be the Neutral Way.
We should first seek to bring our physical body to a neutral and balanced state before we seek to treat a particular disease. The shortcut to bring our body to a neutral and balanced state is to bring our stomach and spleen to a balanced state. This can be achieved by using an over-the-counter drug which has proved to be effective for hundreds of years.
Once the stomach and spleen is in a balanced state, it will follow that our physical body will be in a balanced state too. Then we can take a small dose of prescription drugs for a particular disease that we try to treat.
This is the ideal course of action keeping ourselves in a healthy state.
In future articles, we will focus on the classification of body constitution into nine types and the methods of adjusting each type into the balanced type.
End of part two, and to be continued. If you wish to be notified of a new publication, subscribe below: