 People often ask what is the difference between traditional Chinese medicine and conventional medicine? Now obviously there are many many differences but as I see it the big one is the fundamental philosophy of health disease and healing. Now in this video I want to share one of the very very interesting philosophies that you can use to apply to your own life to live a healthier better life. You could even apply it to conventional biomedical approach to medicine. So let's jump in and I want to share this simple philosophy. Hey it's Alex Hine, author of the health book master the day. Now I've included down there the first link in the description is for a free pdf on five daily rituals that can potentially help you add 10 years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. You can check it out right there the first link in the description. Now the first thing to me that's really obvious that is a big difference is that traditional Chinese medicine has never been done on animals. So the actual understanding of herbs and toxicity has always been done on humans. It's never been done on animal testing and it's based off of understanding these patterns in nature. So let me make this a little bit more tangible and clinical. In California there's a really intimate relationship ecologically with otters, sea urchins and kelp. Now the problem is right now there are not enough sea otters there are too many urchins and their urchins are killing all the kelp. Now obviously we're running out of just general vegetation and plant matter on earth to counteract the human activity and so these scientists these biologists are trying to figure out what do we do? Too many urchins not enough otters not enough kelp. If you were a scientist how would you approach solving this problem? Right you could say well maybe we can somehow plant or seed more kelp maybe we could keep removing urchins all the time or maybe we could add in more otters. But this fundamental question is just like in Chinese medicine. What is the bleed domino? What is the most important thing that you affect in the body that affects the other organ systems? So in this case maybe the most effective thing is that we add more otters. We add more otters they're more of like in this little ecosystem they're more of the apex predator so they'll eat the sea urchins their favorite less sea urchins more kelp. Boom. But we could have approached it from different parts of the food chain right we could have altered the urchins altered the kelp or the otters. The same is true in the body when a patient has both digestive problems and anxiety and insomnia well what do you treat first? Do you do two different formulas? Do you do two different medications? One medication that hopefully has the widest umbrella. What do you approach when and how? These are really fundamental questions that these ancient physicians thought about and they observed that in their research certain organs share fundamental relationships. In Chinese medicine the liver and the stomach and spleen so when people have a liver functional disorder let's call it it overacts on the stomach and spleen and a person may have acid reflux but you don't necessarily treat the stomach to heal it you treat the liver you're treating the otter not the urchin. Now the second thing is we treat patterns and not individual symptoms now this is something anyone can apply to their life a physician that's a biomedical practitioner can absolutely apply this for better results too but let's say a patient comes in with digestive bloating, SIBO, looser stools, low appetite and anxiety. The Chinese medical physician the goal is not to look at just the bloating or just the anxiety to look at the correlation because when you find the midpoint with these symptoms you begin to understand a systematic approach a systems biology approach to what's gone wrong. Now this is a thousands of year old medical philosophy that is observed to be more clinically accurate because it's based off of the ultimate of evolution which is nature that idea of nature abhors a vacuum well in nature when you change one thing you cannot change one thing without almost everything else shifting right you remove all the wolves we see problems with deer and then disease everything is related so you tug on the web here something else gets tugged up here you pull down here something else gets tugged down but what is it it was the job of these ancient Chinese doctors to observe what those relationships were so back to our patient with anxiety and bloating what is the commonality and then these ancient physicians realized there is a connection there is a link wow a certain percentage of these patients with bloating and low appetite also experience anxiety that's interesting and they came up with a correlation for that so now we have formulas that can both treat anxiety and SIBO and digestive bloating all together all at once nowadays it's easy because we can say you have the enteric nervous system that produces what 80 percent I think of your serotonin is in the gut that's a new finding but that's not new Chinese medicine land that's been observed for thousands of years so inherently when you look at patterns you actually get a more accurate grasp of the truth than if you look at individual symptoms because rather than it's like getting coordinates on a map it's triangulation well I just have a latitude so it could be anywhere here on earth or anywhere here on earth but once you add a longitude now you know wow 30 degrees and then the other degree now we can really figure out where we have to go to find the treasure so how can you apply this in your life the big thing is again to look at patterns so let's say you're experiencing a lot of stress and it's to the point where it's causing you health problems can't sleep you're developing some symptoms of anxiety or depression and you're having bad digestion what is the pattern it's not just I have stress so I'm running to an anti-anxiety drug or some kind of sedative it's I have stress and what else do I have I have stress and some stuff going on in my career I have stress and stuff going on in my love life I have stress and I don't feel like I have a lot of close friends I have stress and I'm having some digestive dietary problems so then you can look at what is the intersection so then stress okay I'll do some specific general things for stress but then I need to work on my career that's the intersection I need to work on my love life that's the intersection I need to develop friendships that's the intersection when you find the correlations the patterns you can really unlock a solution to some of your personal problems so I hope that helps to kind of simplify a really really important concept in Chinese medicine that could be applied to any other kind of medicine and even a person's life and before you go check out that free download the first link below the five daily rituals that can possibly help you add 10 years to your life with Chinese medicine and then before you go I also have two related videos on this topic right over here