“Maybe life was just a series of phases—one phase after another after another. Maybe, in a couple of years, I’d be going through the same phase as the eighteen-year-old lifeguards.”
Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Overview, Good or Bad?
The simple principle you will learn about today is perhaps the greatest understanding of the body that Traditional Chinese Medicine has to share. This is especially true for us in the western world where we so often swing between extremes of “good” and “bad”.
There is a tendency to belief that if a food, therapy, or activity has been shown to be “good” or “bad” for a specific person or dis-ease that it is inherently or always “good” or “bad.” As new research comes out and our perspective changes we move things from 1 category to the other. We talked about this earlier in regards to food on the page about relationship with food.
In a society where we change our opinion on what is “healthy” or “unhealthy” on a seemingly monthly basis we are never quite sure if we are helping ourselves or hurting ourselves.
2 examples to make this clear:
- We believed for many years that red meat is bad for us, raises our cholesterol, and causes cancer.
- These ideas were promoted by well educated healthcare professionals for many years and were backed up by solid research.
- Recently new healthcare professionals have done great research that shows that red meat has many great benefits, does not by itself raise cholesterol, and has shown to be very healing for digestive issues, chronic fatigue, and anemia.
- Depending on your perspective then red meat might be “good” or “bad” and the research supports it either way.
- Stretching VS strengthening continues to be an on-going debate in the healthcare field especially between chiropractors and physical therapists.
- Some excellent research shows that too much flexibility actually makes you more likely to develop chronic pain whereas other excellent research shows that too much muscle development in an area can cause a joint to develop arthritis and cause problems with range of motion.
- Depending on your perspective then stretching or strengthening might be “good” or “bad” and the research supports it either way.
Traditional Chinese Medicine offers a different understanding; The body goes through phases of different needs and the right treatment at the wrong time is still the wrong treatment.
Up Next: The 2 Phases of the Physical Body