09.27 East - West: Medicine & Science - by Dr. Hao Liu, O.M.D.

Review:

Our bodies follow the rhythm of Mother Nature; they grow, expand, collect & retreat, as the four seasons dictate. So should we schedule the tuning of our bodies in concert with the four seasons. This concept could be a worthwhile practice to take home.

Dr. Hao Liu, O.M.D., was introduced as the 8th generation practitioner of Chinese medicine since his ancestor served the emperors of Ching Dynasty. At age 5, he was able to subscribe Chinese herbs to cure his grandmother’s mild illness. According to Shao-ying Chen, Hao’s announcer, he fixed a yoga practitioner’s spinal alignment problem with few sessions of acupuncture treatment, instead of the lengthy, painful, and time consuming process a standard physical therapy would require.

Using a live demonstration, Hao showed the basic process a Chinese medicine doctor uses to inspect and diagnose his patient: by observing the appearance of the physical, asking the right questions, and feeling the pulse. Hao explained that some basic daily habit adjustments, such as nutritional intake or sleeping schedule, could drastically improve one’s health. Weld, one of Café’s all time faithful attendees, recommended a book about Chinese medicine: The Web that Has no Weaver, by Ted Kaptchuk

Robert Porter introducing Hao Liu, September 27th, 2007

Hao Liu reading the health condition of a Cafe attendee, September 27th, 2007

Weld sharing the book info. of "The Web That Has No Weaver", September 27th, 2007

Preview:

This week, 27 September, will bring us Dr. Hao Liu to discuss the different concepts of science and medicine in the East and the West. We are all aware of the recent explosion in understanding of the body and disease that has resulted in the application of science, molecular biology in particular, to attempts to bring about a new age of health to us, if only we did not insist upon killing ourselves with hideous dietary obsessions. Nevertheless, we forget that a very sophisticated approach to healing has existed in Asia for many centuries before western science was hatched.

Chinese medicine employs concepts unfamiliar to western science. In California, especially some of these Asian concepts are becoming as familiar as "the little purple pill" of in-your-face and down-your-throat drug pushing on television. Yin-Yang is a concept of a sort of dynamic symmetry of opposite but necessary elements that pervade Asian medicine. Each requires the other in this dance of hot-cold, up-down, male-female that is a part of all life. Another system unlike any in our science is the five elementals: fire, wood, earth, water and metal, reminiscent of the old Greek fire-water-air-earth paradigm. In addition, of course there is Qi, that basic life force that surges through living things, a little like elan vital of earlier times in science or the Greek fifth elemental, the quintessential. Dr. Hao Liu will be able to explain the similarities and differences of these systems that attempt to answer that age-old and profound philosophical question, "Doctor, can't you make it better?"