Here’s a quick listing of some of the best resources I found about Chinese medicine on the Internet this week.  Have other favorites?  Post them in the comments!

–

1. Discussion of the use of electro-dermal testing (like MORA) on the Deepest Health forums
2. A fantastic article about ecology and Chinese medicine by Dr. Leon Hammer
3. Medigogy (formerly known as TCM TV, among other names) an online webinar company who have hosted diverse speakers on Chinese medicine including Heiner Fruehauf have now made their online archives free.  You just have to sign up for an account!  This is an incredible resource!
4. A recent book getting a lot of advance praise from people I trust is Pulse Diagnosis in Early Chinese Medicine: The Telling Touch (University of Cambridge Oriental Publications) — I haven’t read it yet, but Elizabeth Hsu is someone I trust to do a good job.  If you’re interested in pulse, it’s definitely worth a look.  If you can’t afford it yourself, get your nearest school’s library to carry it!
5. A recent interview with my mentor Arnaud Versluys is in the European Journal of Oriental Medicine – definitely worth a read.

Interesting Internet Intersections #2 : Electro dermal testing, ecology, pulse and more!

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Hey everyone,

A very brief post by way of announcement.  We now have a Chinese medicine forum for discussion of anything your heart may desire.  There are other Chinese medicine forums, but let’s make this one the best.  :)

I wrote up a brief page of introduction and description, with links to the forum itself.  If you’re not sure what to do on a forum, or ever need instructions on how to get started – that’s the page for you.

Or maybe you would rather just jump straight to the Deepest Health forum?

Enjoy – see you there.

Eric

Deepest Health Chinese medicine community forum

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Hey everybody – Happy Memorial Day (if you’re in the US)!

We’ve sunk about 40 hours of work into the site in the last week, and hope folks are starting to see the results.  Aside from the cosmetic changes, and the previously mentioned newsletter and free report, be sure to check out:

1. Our newest writer and newly created forum Master, Mike Reynolds.  His bio is now up, so drop him a line and let him know how happy you are to see him here at Deepest Health!
2. Our constantly updating articles page.
3. Site use instructions for Chinese medicine students, Chinese medicine practitioners and patients/the general public.
4. Eric’s new bio with shiny contact form.

I’ve been busy fixing broken links, updating resources and more.  I’m particularly interested in making the site easier to search and navigate by making the categories and tags make more sense.   Hopefully, we can get that work done quickly and get on to the point of this site – providing great Chinese medicine content for students and practitioners interested in going deeper with

I’ve been working on the podcast as well.  If you haven’t listened to the podcast before, or are interested in revisiting it there are a few ways to access it.

• You can search for it at the iTunes store through your iTunes application on your computer.
• You can click this link (which will open the iTunes store directly to the podcast page.
• You can access the Podcast category page here on Deepest Health.

If you find any broken links or have any problems with the podcast, please contact the site administration – as we’re trying to verify the integrity of all our podcasting efforts before we move forward with more episodes.

If you read Deepest Health by RSS – please take a minute to come visit the site.  You’ll see all the cosmetic changes, as well as the new newsletter sign-up form (with free downloadable PDF report on herb learning) in the sidebar.  It only requires a couple of minutes, and will be well worth your time.

Deepest Health site updates, and reintroduction to the podcast

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Just a quick post to let you know about some changes on the site.  I’ll be updating you with a few more short posts in the coming days, and probably intermittently for several months.  Just showing you around the new digs!

I’ve done something that I was a bit frightened to do - I actually put some of my thoughts down on (electronic) paper and packaged it up for public consumption.  That may sound funny – obviously I do that all the time in blog entries.  But, there’s something very DIFFERENT about doing it as a PDF – something that someone can easily take away, share, and read in 20 years (!) if they so choose.

I’ve made this report free – with one caveat.  I want folks to sign up for our new, free Chinese medicine focused newsletter. To get the report, and sign up for our free newsletter – just fill out your name and email address in the form clearly visible in the sidebar.  If you read the blog via RSS or email, just navigate to our main page to check it out (http://deepesthealth.com).  We absolutely promise your information will never be shared with a third party, and you can unsubscribe easily at any time.

The newsletter will come out once or twice a month, maybe weekly during particularly productive times.  We’re working on making it as high value as possible – containing important site updates, round-ups of old posts and interesting links, as well as at least one high quality article about a topic in Chinese medicine that you won’t find anywhere else.  We’re focusing on LEARNING the medicine in our newsletter – so the articles will be helpful for those of you who are in school, or who are eternal students – like me.

I’m going to make the second part of this report sometime in June – the more advanced skill set with plenty of commentary and examples.  I’ll let you know when it’s ready for download.

The more advanced version will come with a (very reasonable) price tag. You’re going to see more and more of our own products coming out.  We’re still going to be providing plenty of free content, but we’re trying to find a model that can help us to fund further research and innovation that doesn’t rely on pitching tons of other companies’ products or plastering the site with advertising.

By the way – web visitors will notice we’ve taken down a bunch of the advertising from the site. We plan to phase out all of the Google advertising by the end of June.  From then on, the only products that will be presented on the site will be our own or those of people that we know and trust.  Hopefully, you will all enjoy that change.

There have been a number of cosmetic changes to the site (sorry it’s a bit boring at the moment), and those changes are going to continue.  We’re also going to expand the resources section, add a forum, and much more.  It’s probably going to take the whole summer and a chunk of the Fall for the major wave of improvements to be completed – but it will be worth it.

Onward! (And hey – sign up for the newsletter and get your free report – tell me what you think!)

Eric

The Essential Herb Learning report – and the Deepest Health newsletter

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Happy Earth Day to those who are celebrating today.  I had planned to write a thematically appropriate post, but didn’t quite finish it.  Let’s have another kind of celebration….

Drumroll, please!

Congratulations to Jennifer McGrath of Illinois – the winner of the Deepest Health Reader Survey drawing!

Jennifer and her supportive husband, Matt!

Jennifer has been a reader at Deepest Health for a while now, and had some very nice things to say about how some articles helped her through the early parts of her education in Chinese Medicine.

The nice words aren’t why she won, however.  :)

Here’s what Jennifer had to say when I asked her to say a little about herself and what she’s passionate about these days:

I am a 1st year student at Pacific College of Oriental Medicine – Chicago Campus.

What am I Passionate about?   More and more every day I am amazed at the depth and breadth of this medicine.  The biggest thing that I could say is that Oriental medicine as a whole is great for mind, body and spirit.  It truly is holistic.

Many people know when something is not right with their mind or body go to their doctor only to hear that there is nothing the matter with them.  Chinese medicine catches disharmonies with the body in its earliest stages when something can be done about it.

Herbal remedies are tailored to each individual, three people can have the same disease or symptoms and the formula will be different for each person according to their constitution.  I think this is a key thing that sets it apart from western drugs.  It is not one size fits all.

Thanks Jennifer!  It’s always great to hear the enthusiasm of a first year student.  Welcome!  Enjoy your charts!

Winner of the Living Meridian Acupuncture chart set

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The responses are in, tabulated, and have been considered.  Over the last several days, I’ve pondered those responses as well as my own thoughts, and believe I’ve got the rough outline of a very exciting path forward for Deepest Health.

I want to share some of the survey results with you. On the Internet, sometimes everything can become a bit disembodied.  One of the most interesting things for me in the survey was getting a sense for the real people behind the comments and emails.  While it doesn’t compare to meeting you all in person, it does require considerably less time in an airplane.

Look for a post tomorrow announcing the winner of the contest!

–

Demographics

–

Respondents were overwhelmingly from the US, with a smattering from other countries.  This is relatively unsurprising – though I should note I do get significant traffic from Australia, the UK, parts of east Asia.  But not everyone who reads answered the survey, of course.

The majority of respondents (42%) were students in their first formal Chinese medicine program. The next biggest group (26%)  was practitioners of Chinese medicine with 5 or less years of experience.  About 20% were interested members of the public – though some of those were lay practitioners of herbalism, or people with significant amounts of holistic healing experience.  There were a few people who counted themselves among the authors and publishers in Chinese medicine, and several practitioners with more than 5 years of experience (I’m humbled!)

Regarding the use of technology - most respondents did subscribe using RSS/feed readers, with slightly fewer than that subscribing by email.  I was heartened to hear that.  I was also surprised to see how many people use Facebook – maybe a Deepest Health outpost on Facebook is in our future?

Satisfaction and interests

Most people reported that Deepest Health met their needs for a site of its kind most of the time.  Phew!

People like written content, and there is a slight preference among respondents for articles broken up into several shorter pieces. This was unsurprising.  However, I was surprised at the strong showing for audio content – it seems people like the podcasts!  Folks were interested in video, too, but it was the least preferred type of content.

Forum: The majority of people thought they would participate in an online forum dedicated to discussions of Chinese medicine provided that:

1. The forums were active, with plenty of interesting discussion
2. The forums were places where diverse opinions were actively discussed and openly explored.  No shutting people down, yet real scholarly standards enforced by the community.
3. Many people mentioned that there should be some way to restrict access, even a very nominal fee, to keep “trolls” at bay.

I think these are all reasonable suggestions, and I will be working out the details concerning this in the coming weeks.

Many people were interested in some kind of more detailed, in depth paid content. I received a lot of great suggestions about how to make Deepest Health pay for itself.  I’ve already started to actively explore these, and hope to test various strategies over the next six months.  What I DO NOT want is for the paid content to replace the free content.  I also don’t want to make the site some endless advertisement.  In fact, once I am able to pay for the site and at least some of my time with revenue from the site, I will remove the Google ads entirely.  I think we’ll all agree that will be an improvement.

Finally, the results concerning topics was very interesting indeed. Looking back, I would have done the survey differently – making people rank between the various options.  I’m quite sure many people clicked “Very Interested In Seeing” on almost all the categories.  That’s great, but it didn’t quite give me usable direction.

What I did learn is what people overwhelmingly do NOT want.  Reflective/poetry pieces and other types of stories, news and reviews and report backs from conferences came in dead last among the choices.  Looking more carefully, I found the following 8 categories to be the most preferred among respondents:

1. Advanced information about diagnosis and treatment strategies
2. Advanced information about points and acupuncture
3. Advanced information about herbs and formulas
4. Basic information about points and herbs
5. Classical texts translations and discussion
6. Information about practitioner cultivation (Qigong, meditation)
7. Basic information about CM pathology and physiology
8. Case studies

This obviously reflects the student and early practitioner status of most of Deepest Health’s readers.  I was a little surprised about the “basic” information, as I figured people would consider that adequately handled by other websites.  Apparently, I was wrong.

Ultimately, the topics we cover here at Deepest Health will be guided by our own interests and passions, of course, but because we just LOVE CHINESE MEDICINE most any topic gets us excited to write.

And, yes, I did say us/we/our.  Stay tuned for announcements about some new faces here at Deepest Health.

All in all, the survey confirmed for me a lot of what I already knew.  I appreciated all the great comments from folks – and will take them all under advisement.  I hope that together, we will be able to build a vibrant community online for the research and discussion of Chinese medicine!

Deepest Health Survey Results : Forging a path into the future

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I want to thank everyone who has already answered the survey. To those of you who haven’t – I want to ask for your help again. Please visit the post linked below and answer the survey. It will take, at most, 5 minutes of your time. If you enter your email address in the demographic information, you will NOT BE SPAMMED, but will be entered into a contest to win a set of excellent acupuncture charts.

Our medicine is in a state of flux (as always, I suppose) and somehow – here in Portland – I feel that we are on the edge of something new. Either a new synthesis, a resurgence of something old, a new place in contemporary society, something else or a combination of all of these. In my small way, I have tried to be a place on the Internet where we can explore that – somewhere to come and have topical discussions with people who share our enthusiasm for this medicine. I’d like to move forward with a real sense of who Deepest Health readers are, and what they want or need. It may seem like a small thing, but it has the potential to be a building block of something much greater. A movement, perhaps? Perhaps.

Just five minutes. No spam. Let your thoughts be known!

http://deepesthealth.com/2010/deepest-health-reader-survey-let-us-know-what-you-want/

Note: I will be closing the poll at the end of the day Sunday and reporting on the results. Time is of the essence!

Shape the future of Deepest Health – answer our survey today!

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Hey everyone,

As my last post would suggest, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the future of Deepest Health. I realize that I need information to keep moving forward. First, I’d like to hear back from you, my loyal readers, about what you are interested in seeing on this site. I’m also interested in finding out more about you as a group of people! Who are you who continue to walk with me on this journey? To satisfy both curiosities, I’ve developed a reader survey!

Click here to take the Deepest Health reader survey

To encourage responses, I’m going to run a little contest.

I have some superfine Korean loose moxa and a set of Living Meridian acupuncture charts for the contest winner.

How to enter? The first question asks for demographic information – if you are interested in entering the contest, make sure your correct email address is entered. I will not put you on any list or sell your email address – I will use it ONLY to:

1. Notify you if you won the contest.

2. Contact you about your survey responses. The ONLY WAY I will contact you about your survey responses is if you specifically request it in the comments of one of the questions. Write something along the lines of, “I would like to talk to you further about this, please contact me by email.” Otherwise, I will not use your email for this purpose.

After a week, I will gather all of the emails onto slips of paper, put them in a hat, and draw one. I’ll then contact you to get your mailing address and to ask if I can inform the rest of DH’s readers about your glorious victory.

NOTE:  You do not have to enter the contest or provide your email address in order to take the survey. If you’re not interested in the contest, simply do not enter your email address.  Simple!  I still want to hear what you have to say!

Edit (4/5/2010 7pm PDT)- ANOTHER NOTE! YOU MUST COMPLETE THE REQUIRED QUESTIONS ON BOTH PAGES OF THE SURVEY TO BE ENTERED INTO THE CONTEST!  Thanks!

Edit (4/6/2010 5am PDT) – One more note : the survey was set up wrong in one of the last questions.  It’s fixed now.

Contest aside, I hope everyone participates. The feedback will really help me developing new content. If you have any problems with the survey, or any questions – please contact me in the comments to this post.

Thank you!

Deepest Health Reader Survey – LET US KNOW WHAT YOU WANT!

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