A short introduction to the concept of Internal Disharmony

This is a part of a series that explains 5 Element Acupuncture by comparing and contrasting it to modern medicine. In this post we will take a look at the causes of disease. Because our ultimate goal is to come away with a better understanding of the assumptions that inform 5 Element Acupuncture, and the title promises this will be short, we are going to limit our discussion to the causes of disease from the Western medicine to germs and toxins.

Western medicine looks for outside causes of disease

About five years ago I was sitting in on a lecture on the coming epidemic of lung cancer in China. The darkened room was silent as the researcher went through his slides. It was like that moment in a horror movie when you know something really bad is going to happen and you are powerless to do anything about it. The researcher’s name was Tom Kensler, a Doctor of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

According to Kensler, (who by the way, is a graduate of Hamilton College) the main force driving this oncoming epidemic was not the huge amount of pollution in the newly industrialized cities of China, but the overwhelming number of men who smoke.

Dr. Kensler was hired by the Chinese to help them figure out how many more clinics and hospitals they would have to build in order to handle the coming wave of lung cancer.

Do you know what the second leading cause of cancer is?

Interestingly, the second leading cause of cancer worldwide, behind cigarette smoking is not environmental toxins, but viruses. Simply catching a cold can expose us to germs which can attack the DNA of cells and cause them to grow uncontrollably. In a distant third place are environmental causes like chemical spills and air pollution.

It seems our fear of getting cancer has been misplaced and we should be most concerned about keeping our immune system in high gear, which brings us finally back to 5 Element Acupuncture.

How internal harmony protects your health

In contrast to modern medicine, the ancient Chinese idea of disease was focused as much on the body’s ability to prevent getting sick as it was on what was causing the illness in the first place. The original acupuncture texts explain that if a person is in complete harmony, they are impervious to any disease and will never get sick and live to a very old age.

How shingles is cause by a lack of internal harmony

For example, most of us are infected with the herpes virus at a young age when we get chicken pox. In most cases, after we recover, the virus lies dormant for years occasionally coming out as a cold sore. For some unfortunate souls however, their internal harmony gets disrupted. They become weakened and the herpes virus fights its way through the body’s impaired immune system and the person comes down with a very painful attack of shingles.

It’s really a very simple concept. When the forces of the body are aligned and harmonious, we are much less likely to get sick. One of the beauties of acupuncture, and the 5 Element style in particular, is the focus it places on mental and emotional harmony as well as physical harmony.

How Western medicine is catching up to the concept of internal harmony

It was not until the field of psychoneuroimmunology developed, did modern medicine begin to take a close look at the link between a person’s mental state and their immune system. It turns out, to no one’s surprise, that unhappy people are more likely to get sick.

5 Element Acupuncture is based on internal harmony

In the 5 Element system, we almost exclusively look at a patients internal harmony. If a person is smoking we obviously council him to stop, but in treatment we do not concern ourselves as much with the specific damage smoking is doing, we focus rather on the internal disharmony that led to smoking in the first place.

Until the original disharmony is resolved, smoking on some level is balancing the person. That’s why quitting is so hard for some. Lighting up actually makes the person feel better and function better. The problem in this case is the cure is also likely to kill.

Why Aunt Sally never got lung cancer

Theoretically, a completely healthy and balanced person could smoke her entire life and not succumb to any sort of lung disease. In fact, we all have heard stories of some distant Aunt who smokes all her life and died peacefully in her sleep at the age of 101.

I’m not advocating smoking like Aunt Sally, but to simply focus on the cause of disease to the exclusion of the internal disharmony that allows it to take root, is folly.