Being an acupuncturist, I know that energy medicine is not a new concept. When we treat, we treat the whole person each and every time using the energetic system mapped out by the Chinese (as opposed to looking at just one part of the person, e.g., the knee, head, back, etc., as typical Western medicine does). In Traditional Chinese Medicine, we may put a little more emphasis on a particular problem area but we always treat the whole system. This is very different from typical Western medicine today.
In reading the book, PEMF: The 5thElement of Health, I learned not only more about PEMF, but also how our reductionistic thinking and science all began.
Everyone is familiar with Sir Isaac Newton’s gravity discovery following that fateful apple drop on his head. But Newton did much more than discover gravity. He was actually the founder of our reductionist philosophy on which Western science is founded. The Newtonian model of the universe depicts a well-behaved, deterministic world with a fixed set of rules. This means that we have no control over what happens to us. Things happen in a pre-determined way, one thing leading to the next and the next and the next and so on. Our fate is basically sealed!
He also believed that, to understand the inner workings of anything, we must deconstruct it. Once we discover the very last and smallest sub-particle, only then can we understand everything there is to know about the object we are studying and be able to make predictions about its behavior. Thus, our body is tagged and labeled, and diseases are tagged and labeled as a malfunction of the various parts of the body.
Let’s put that into perspective: How many times have you heard that your genes determine your health and you can’t control them? Or that germs cause disease? Or that a certain nutrient will do this or that to your body? The first two statements are deterministic statements and the last one is what we say when we have broken things down to its smallest component and start making predictions about what will happen.
Later, Albert Einstein disrupted the finality of Newton’s laws with his theory of relativity and his Nobel Prize-winning paper on the “Photoelectric Effect,” which became the basis for quantum field theory and quantum mechanics. Without getting into all the details of quantum field theory, one of the key take away was that fields (think electric fields and magnetic fields) are the essential elements in nature, not particles (think something solid). In quantum field theory, fields get excited like a mattress being jumped on by kids. This excitation creates a wave that propagates through, in our example, the mattress. These waves create mass. Therefore we, our bodies, are actually excited waves of energy!
As it relates to the body, quantum field theory has not yet fully taken hold, and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of its implication in the field of medicine. As a result, Newtonian worldview still stubbornly persists in medicine, biology, chemistry, geology and many other sciences. We continue to concretely believe in if-then statements in medicine like those above, as well as totally ignore the energetic side of our body and our health.
In Chinese Medicine, as in quantum physics, there is never merely one path to follow. One thing does not naturally lead to another, and a bit of ‘thinking outside the box’ is required. A malfunction of the spleen, for example, can be triggered by many events and, in turn, cause various symptoms. Looking at the body holistically instead of as individual parts allows us to determine the root cause of the problem and the best course of treatment. We not only look at the physical structure, but also at the energy fields (e.g. waves, acupressure points, or meridians) that are creating that structure, and treat those fields. Anyone who has experienced relief from something that a traditional Western doctor couldn’t treat, or for whom no medication would work has experienced the effect of this line of thinking.
Imagine a healthcare culture guided by quantum physics and addressing the energy fields first rather than as an afterthought (if at all). It would be one where the doctor is interested less in prescribing and more in tune with questioning. It would be one where the steps taken to resolve one problem inadvertently lead to benefits in other areas, too. By asking the right questions, we find clever and simple solutions to even the most complicated health concerns.
Newton’s reductionist paradigm has given us much valuable information and many life-saving procedures, but it’s time to break away from this simple and deterministic view of the world, specifically as it relates to medicine. The unfathomable complexity of our bodies can hardly be explained by it. There is rarely only one outcome to every set of reactions, and the dominos in a particular cell rarely fall in one particular way – the same situational factors in a cell could trigger cancer or manifest as pain, whereas in other cases be perfectly well-functioning. A drug with only one active* ingredient in it is hit-or-miss in really resolving the symptom it was designed to but it will never resolve the underlying problem!
After all, we are made up of approximately 100 trillion cells, each consisting of organelles and approximately 100,000+ complex macromolecules which perform an estimated 400 BILLION or more chemical reactions each SECOND! According to engineers at Washington University, there are 100 trillion atoms in just a single ordinary cell! Just to put this in perspective, it would take you 33,000 lifetimes to count from one to 100 trillion! How could all this be happening every second if every process was executed one-by-one in a single thread? Rather, wouldn’t it make more sense that these reactions are actually riding waves of energy in our bodies?
With all the complexity of the human body we have really only uncovered the tip of the iceberg into how it all works. As EF Adoph suggests, reactions in our body occur along a number of criss-crossed pathways; it’s not just a one-way route. Our body works more like the electronic equivalent of a computer; not a toaster!
Thus, I believe we must move away from this paradigm and take back the view of the human body maintained by many ancient cultures; the Babylonians, Greeks, Hindu, Chinese, Japanese and Buddhists, whereby the body is an energetic system that responds to energetic frequencies that can change and evolve. James Maxwell was the first to study the unified electric and magnetic fields. It is not static. We are not victims of germs or bugs, nor our genetic heritage. Not everything can be explained by double-blind, placebo-controlled studies.
I encourage you to think about all of this and see what makes sense to you. It may make you question many of the things we see and hear about health today, especially how you think about your body and how you address your health concerns, in particular. If what you hear about health and the human body from your physicians, read about in articles and hear on the news just doesn’t sit right with you any longer, I encourage you to think about how energy medicine like acupuncture, PEMF, reflexology, acupressure, Tai Chi, Reiki, Qi gong, and homeopathy may help you improve and maintain your health in a more holistic way by treating the energy waves instead of just the physical structure! More on that to come next month.
*FDA definition of an Active Ingredient: Any component of a drug product intended to furnish pharmacological activity or other direct effect in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease, or to affect the structure or any function of the body of humans or other animals.
In reading the book, PEMF: The 5thElement of Health, I learned not only more about PEMF, but also how our reductionistic thinking and science all began.
Everyone is familiar with Sir Isaac Newton’s gravity discovery following that fateful apple drop on his head. But Newton did much more than discover gravity. He was actually the founder of our reductionist philosophy on which Western science is founded. The Newtonian model of the universe depicts a well-behaved, deterministic world with a fixed set of rules. This means that we have no control over what happens to us. Things happen in a pre-determined way, one thing leading to the next and the next and the next and so on. Our fate is basically sealed!
He also believed that, to understand the inner workings of anything, we must deconstruct it. Once we discover the very last and smallest sub-particle, only then can we understand everything there is to know about the object we are studying and be able to make predictions about its behavior. Thus, our body is tagged and labeled, and diseases are tagged and labeled as a malfunction of the various parts of the body.
Let’s put that into perspective: How many times have you heard that your genes determine your health and you can’t control them? Or that germs cause disease? Or that a certain nutrient will do this or that to your body? The first two statements are deterministic statements and the last one is what we say when we have broken things down to its smallest component and start making predictions about what will happen.
Later, Albert Einstein disrupted the finality of Newton’s laws with his theory of relativity and his Nobel Prize-winning paper on the “Photoelectric Effect,” which became the basis for quantum field theory and quantum mechanics. Without getting into all the details of quantum field theory, one of the key take away was that fields (think electric fields and magnetic fields) are the essential elements in nature, not particles (think something solid). In quantum field theory, fields get excited like a mattress being jumped on by kids. This excitation creates a wave that propagates through, in our example, the mattress. These waves create mass. Therefore we, our bodies, are actually excited waves of energy!
As it relates to the body, quantum field theory has not yet fully taken hold, and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of its implication in the field of medicine. As a result, Newtonian worldview still stubbornly persists in medicine, biology, chemistry, geology and many other sciences. We continue to concretely believe in if-then statements in medicine like those above, as well as totally ignore the energetic side of our body and our health.
In Chinese Medicine, as in quantum physics, there is never merely one path to follow. One thing does not naturally lead to another, and a bit of ‘thinking outside the box’ is required. A malfunction of the spleen, for example, can be triggered by many events and, in turn, cause various symptoms. Looking at the body holistically instead of as individual parts allows us to determine the root cause of the problem and the best course of treatment. We not only look at the physical structure, but also at the energy fields (e.g. waves, acupressure points, or meridians) that are creating that structure, and treat those fields. Anyone who has experienced relief from something that a traditional Western doctor couldn’t treat, or for whom no medication would work has experienced the effect of this line of thinking.
Imagine a healthcare culture guided by quantum physics and addressing the energy fields first rather than as an afterthought (if at all). It would be one where the doctor is interested less in prescribing and more in tune with questioning. It would be one where the steps taken to resolve one problem inadvertently lead to benefits in other areas, too. By asking the right questions, we find clever and simple solutions to even the most complicated health concerns.
Newton’s reductionist paradigm has given us much valuable information and many life-saving procedures, but it’s time to break away from this simple and deterministic view of the world, specifically as it relates to medicine. The unfathomable complexity of our bodies can hardly be explained by it. There is rarely only one outcome to every set of reactions, and the dominos in a particular cell rarely fall in one particular way – the same situational factors in a cell could trigger cancer or manifest as pain, whereas in other cases be perfectly well-functioning. A drug with only one active* ingredient in it is hit-or-miss in really resolving the symptom it was designed to but it will never resolve the underlying problem!
After all, we are made up of approximately 100 trillion cells, each consisting of organelles and approximately 100,000+ complex macromolecules which perform an estimated 400 BILLION or more chemical reactions each SECOND! According to engineers at Washington University, there are 100 trillion atoms in just a single ordinary cell! Just to put this in perspective, it would take you 33,000 lifetimes to count from one to 100 trillion! How could all this be happening every second if every process was executed one-by-one in a single thread? Rather, wouldn’t it make more sense that these reactions are actually riding waves of energy in our bodies?
With all the complexity of the human body we have really only uncovered the tip of the iceberg into how it all works. As EF Adoph suggests, reactions in our body occur along a number of criss-crossed pathways; it’s not just a one-way route. Our body works more like the electronic equivalent of a computer; not a toaster!
Thus, I believe we must move away from this paradigm and take back the view of the human body maintained by many ancient cultures; the Babylonians, Greeks, Hindu, Chinese, Japanese and Buddhists, whereby the body is an energetic system that responds to energetic frequencies that can change and evolve. James Maxwell was the first to study the unified electric and magnetic fields. It is not static. We are not victims of germs or bugs, nor our genetic heritage. Not everything can be explained by double-blind, placebo-controlled studies.
I encourage you to think about all of this and see what makes sense to you. It may make you question many of the things we see and hear about health today, especially how you think about your body and how you address your health concerns, in particular. If what you hear about health and the human body from your physicians, read about in articles and hear on the news just doesn’t sit right with you any longer, I encourage you to think about how energy medicine like acupuncture, PEMF, reflexology, acupressure, Tai Chi, Reiki, Qi gong, and homeopathy may help you improve and maintain your health in a more holistic way by treating the energy waves instead of just the physical structure! More on that to come next month.
*FDA definition of an Active Ingredient: Any component of a drug product intended to furnish pharmacological activity or other direct effect in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease, or to affect the structure or any function of the body of humans or other animals.