Eight core words of traditional Chinese medicine health care

I have been treating senior Chinese medicine practitioners from different schools for almost ten years. When it comes to the core principles of health care, whether they are old Fuyang doctors who make good use of classic prescriptions, doctors who focus on regulating qi and febrile disease, or even folk Chinese doctors who have been doing external treatment in the community for half their lives, the answers they give are surprisingly consistent.—— Dharma is based on Yin and Yang, and harmonious with Shu Shu。

These eight words come from the "Huangdi Neijing Su Wen". They seem to be docile, but in fact they are all principles of living that ordinary people can put into practice. They are not some metaphysics floating in the sky at all.

It's interesting to say that different schools of Chinese medicine actually have different emphasis on the implementation of these eight words. Mr. Zhang from the Fuyang School is almost 80 this year. The most important thing in his life is the yin and yang of work and rest. He often says not to believe the absolute standards on the Internet that "not sleeping at 11 o'clock will damage the liver." If you are a night shift nurse in a hospital and force yourself to get up at 5 o'clock in the morning to "nourish your yang energy", you are going against your own body. As long as you have a fixed schedule, catch up on 7 hours of sleep after the night shift, and don't feel dizzy or tired when you wake up, then it is in line with your own yin and yang rhythm. Master Li of the febrile disease school pays more attention to the match between diet and environment. During the plum rainy season in early summer in the south, it is no problem to drink a few more sips of winter melon and coix seed soup to remove dampness. If you drink this every day in the dry summer in the north, and your lips peel and your stools become dry and sticky, then you have not touched the edge of "harmony" - there is no universal standard answer to health care methods, and you have to follow your environment and your own constitution.

A while ago, I came across a typical counterexample. A young girl in her early twenties worked as an Internet operator. She read Xiaohongshu every day to learn about health care. She always had wolfberry and chrysanthemums soaked in a thermos cup. She strictly followed a "healthy routine" of going to bed at 10 a.m. and starting at 6 a.m. As a result, after half a month, she developed three oral ulcers. She was still sleepy at work, and her mouth was swollen when she came here. After asking, I found out that she is a girl from the north. Her constitution has been dry since she was a child. Recently, she drank red bean and coix seed water with Chrysanthemum added. After drinking it for more than half a month, her spleen and stomach were hurt, and her weak fire was rising. Could it be that "the more I drink, the more I get angry"? Everything she did before was in line with the "standard answers to health" on the Internet, except that it didn't fit her own yin and yang state, which naturally had the opposite effect.

Someone used to argue with me, saying that many traditional Chinese medicine doctors now emphasize the need to exercise more and go out more often to fly kites to maintain cervical vertebrae. Isn’t this right? I have to mention the Aunt Wang who I know who does external surgery. She has been treating neck and shoulder problems in the community for half her life, and she never prescribes the "must exercise three times a week" prescription. There used to be a young man who worked in IT. He was in front of the computer for 12 hours a day. His cervical spine hurt so much that he couldn't lift it up. He went to a physical therapy center and held it for two days, but it relapsed after a while. Aunt Wang found out that he loved to stay at home and play games after get off work and didn't like to go out at all, so she gave him a trick: every day when he was waiting for the subway after get off work, he should relax his shoulders with his back to a pillar and bump his back against the pillar 30 times. Control the intensity until it doesn't hurt. The young man persisted for half a month, and most of his cervical spine pain was relieved. It was much more effective than forcing him to climb the mountain tube twice a week. This is the most practical explanation of "He Yu Shu Shu": no matter how good the method is, if you can't persist, it will not belong to you.

Of course, the interpretation of these eight characters in the industry is not completely unified. For example, one school of traditional Chinese medicine firmly believes that one must "comply with the yin and yang of heaven and earth", and must follow the sunrise and sunset. They must fall asleep before 11 o'clock and get up at 5 o'clock in the morning.； The other group believes that the pace of life of modern people is completely different from that of ancient times. In ancient times, there were no electric lights and no nightlife. They had nothing to do at seven or eight o'clock in the evening and of course went to bed early. Nowadays, many people work until ninety o'clock and do not go home until 10 o'clock. The two factions have been arguing for many years, but essentially they have not left the core of "the law of yin and yang". The former follows the rhythm of heaven and earth, while the latter follows the rhythm of the human body. There is no absolute right or wrong. It all depends on what suits you.

Really don’t underestimate these eight words. Nowadays, many people make health care too complicated. They buy health products worth thousands of dollars, sign up for health classes worth tens of thousands of dollars. They don’t dare to eat this or touch that. Instead, they worry every day whether they are “maintaining the right health”. Emotional internal consumption is the most harmful to the body. To put it bluntly, these eight words translated into vernacular mean: Don’t compete with yourself, don’t compete with nature, eat whatever feels comfortable, sleep how you feel refreshed, and find a method that you can stick to, which is more effective than any “standard answer”.