modern osteopathy, acupuncture and integrated healthcare: towards an global understanding of health, not just a analytical reductionist understanding of dis-ease.

There is a Traditional Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture pattern of disharmony described as 'deficiency below and excess above', and any experienced clinician or acupuncturist may recognize this in many chronic diseases (e.g. chronic fatigue, hypertension, diabetes, heart-disease, etc) and in the older person.

There is the concept 'zang-fu' of paired organs in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture, and after all, in physiology, this also makes perfect sense: e.g. the relationship of the heart and kidneys in haemodynamics, and regulating blood pressure (as well as rate and force of the heart's contractions and suction) through the kidney's control of water and electrolyte balance.  

The traditional acupuncture concept of the heart-kidney shao-yin axis does of course go way beyond the mechanical and haemodynamic action of these organs, and suggests neuroendocrine effects, altering mood, emotion, and mental states.  For in the traditional acupuncture paradigm, emotions are 'visceral' and organic, and have a physiological basis.  None would argue with this perhaps. 

Even modern osteopathy (e.g. John Pierre Barral) sees the visceral component as highly significant, and the 'tissue memory' (as John Upledger put it) storing 'emotional charge' locked away in the body.  Or as John Littlejohn (who studied with Andew Still, the founder of Osteopathy) said: 'The body is the graveyard of emotion'.  Any experienced clinician has an intuitive grasp of these truths, I would hope.  The early Chinese acupuncturists wrote of this in pre-Christian times, when Aristotle and Hippocrates were leaving some the early written European records.  In traditional acupuncture the specific emotions relating to each organ system were identified, in their integrated body-mind continuum world view. 

For more on this, see:

http://www.christchurch-osteopathy-acupuncture.co.nz/acupuncture/acupuncture.html

http://www.christchurch-osteopathy-acupuncture.co.nz/osteopathy/visceralOsteopathy.html


http://www.christchurch-osteopathy-acupuncture.co.nz/osteopathy/principles.html