Greetings Deepest Health readers.
My name is G. Michael Reynolds, DOM and this is, officially, my maiden voyage on DH. As you may have heard, I’ve recently joined forces with Eric so that with our combined efforts we might be able to accomplish significantly more than we could going it alone. I am the author of the soon-to-be-retired Chinese medicine blog The Life-giving Sword which will be absorbed into DH as a weekly column by the same name, still written by yours truly. My column is scheduled to appear here on Wednesdays with a shorter blog post likely to appear on Mondays for now. I’ll get to what sorts of things I’ll be talking about in a minute.
First, let’s talk about the name. The Life-giving Sword is actually the name of a book on philosophy, strategy, and swordsmanship by the famous Muromachi-era Japan Shinkage-ryu master Yagyu Munenori. Munenori was famous not only for being the military adviser for two Tokugawa shoguns, but also for being the chief rival of Miyamoto Musashi, probably the most famous swordsman of all time. The book is very poetic in its treatment of strategy, code of conduct, and philosophy of war and governance. The metaphor that struck me the most was the one that gave the book its name. Munenori says essentially that the sword is not necessarily a weapon of killing and death, but can be looked at in an entirely different way depending on the effects of its use. The use of the sword to cause the death of one oppressive tyrant can mean life for 10, 000. This then was the life-giving sword: effort or force placed in such a way as to benefit the needy.
Now, TLGS started as a martial arts blog for me a good year or so before I ever discovered Chinese Medicine. Once I got into school and didn’t have time to train or much access to my teacher, the emphasis of course shifted to medicine. After a while I realized that the name now took on a different metaphorical significance, being that of the acupuncture needle. If you look at an acupuncture needle (especially one of the 5″+ monsters) you’re reminded of nothing so much as a weapon. If you look at the ancient nine needles, this becomes even more appropriate. I used to stand in the hallway at school and look at a display of the nine needles on the wall and think to myself “Ok, that’s a sword…that one’s a spear….that looks like some kind of cavalry weapon…” If you really take the time to think about it, acupuncture really is one of the strangest phenomena we’ve ever come across in our history. By taking what is essentially a weapon in miniature and plunging it into the flesh of a patient, we can work vast and sweeping changes in every sphere of their existence. Through the use of this little weapon I’ve witnessed physical pain relief, dramatic shifts in psyche, the removal of emotional hurts that have been present for years, even deep personality traits inherited from previous generations that were maliciously controlling the patients behaviors expelled. The Life-giving Sword, indeed.
So in this new column I plan to explore Chinese Medicine out loud and in the open for others to see, passing on things that have occurred to me and how they presented themselves. I will primarily be speaking to students and practitioners, hoping to pass on things I see and point them in different (and hopefully correct) directions. I plan to cover the whole gamut, from diagnosis to treatment, usually with an emphasis on herbology but also touching on other subjects. Ideally this will be a sort of teaching column, with the Monday blog posts to be a bit broader in scope and hopefully also useful for the layman as well. One of my great loves is strategy and you’ll get a lot of that perspective from me as I feel it does a world of good to consider the medical problems we are faced with from the perspective of a general.
I will be speaking especially to students and practitioners trained via TCM schools. As a graduate of a TCM school, I feel I have the most to say to this group, primarily in the form of helping to answer the ubiquitous TCM questions of “Why doesn’t this work like its supposed to? Why isn’t this medicine anything like it seemed to be when I first got into it? Why don’t my patients have anything to do with the textbooks? Why don’t I know what I’m DOING?” If you find yourself asking these questions, you are most assuredly in the right place. There is a big and exciting world for you to explore in the form of the Classical medicine, one where things do what the books say they will, treatments work, and the actual medicine is even bigger and more beautiful than you thought it would be first semester.
Finally, I’m also the chief administrator over at our new forum and am a very frequent poster, so if you’re looking for conversation, I’m your guy. Come on over and get acquainted.
Tags: Chinese medicine, Acupuncture
