How healthy you are – stage of health
Dr. Martin Wang, MD (China), PhD,
R. Acupuncturist, Chinese
herbalist
Millwoods Acupuncture Centre, Edmonton
How healthy
you are? It sounds a very strange question. Healthy is heathy.
It should mean no pain and body functions normal – most people
say so.
In TCM, we
say that there are different levels of healthy.
Stage I.
You are in true health. You have no pain, and anything that
affects your daily physical and emotional activity. In this
stage, of course, you do not need to go to a doctor, though the
doctor in the conventional medicine still needs you to come for
vaccination or for annual check for something like breast
cancer, for instance. In this stage, you do not show clear body
reaction to an invasion of pathological bacteria or virus. Your
body performs the defense reaction without your aware (you may
only feel a slight sneeze from time to time).
Stage II.
You start to have frequent physical troubles. You may have pain
here or there, lose appetite, gains body weight, have poor sleep
or feel tired. Your doctor may give you various terms that he
said it belongs to you as a diagnosis. You need various drugs or
healthcare in hospital. You are typical “patients”.
Stage III.
After medical treatment, short term or long term, original pain
went away. Some people return to the stage I. No pain or any
other health trouble. They seem as the same as others resisting
attack by bacteria or virus.
Some others
may also feel much better than in the stage II, since the health
problem in the stage II seems far away from them now. If some of
them who cannot handle their daily life in the stage II stage,
and they have visited so many doctors, and so many hospitals,
now feel no longer need any
help from a doctor. For those, they actually turn to the stage
III now.
In this
stage, people do not feel as much as healthcare problem as
before. They seem have “higher” body defense function, since
they even feel not easy to have a sneeze. The previous running
nose now running back to the throat. They do not feel fever as
before when they catch cold but only feel tired and want to have
a sleep. Their hands and feet feel cold and seems easy to have
more times of bowel movement with little intake of cold food or
beverage.
If this is
you, you are in danger! It means that your body has been so weak
so that it lost normal reaction to the environment. Your body
has even no ability to remove bacteria out of your body through
sneezing! Most life threatening diseases, say, cancer and AISD,
are developing in this stage. This is the stage we call it “Yang
deficiency” stage. This is the stage in which most doctor will
tell you that you are ok, since it is the common result after
conventional chemical drug treatment. No bacteria or virus can
be detected in your body. This is true. But you are not as the
same as people in the stage I. We also call it “sub-health”
condition.
People in
the stage III usually:
desire to
spicy food, such as hot pepper, garlic, onion;
prefer warm
or hot drinks;
easy to have
ulcer in mouth and have sour throat but no fever;
easy to have
diarrhea with little stomach pain, or easy shift to
constipation;
urine is
slow and clear as pure water;
cold in feet
and hands, but hot at night;
easy to
catch cold or flu but no fever;
frequent
onset of allergic reactions, such as skin rash, asthma, sinus
problem;
easy to have
sweat after mild physical or emotional works;
easy to have
palpitation, short of breath;
pale or dark
or black color in lips;
have purple
or black tint in the tongue;
have white
or black tongue covering;
feel chronic
fatigue, drowsy in daytime;
feel less
ambitions for work and life;
be sensitive
to temperature, hard to tolerate cold or hot; loud music or
smell;
tend to have
less talk, or have low voice in talk;
for women,
the discharge is more and white in color but without strong
odor.;
pulse feels
weak or deep;
Once people
live in the stage III, it means that their body defense system
is too weak to react to the
attack by a pathological factor. The bacteria or virus can just
come into the body to multiply; the dead tissue can just
continue to release toxin into the body; … the cancer cells can
just grow freely.
This is very
dangerous stage for us. Whereas most of us are now in this
stage.
Stage IV:
Without
proper treatment, people in the stage III might have following
strong clinic manifestations:
Sudden hot
feelings or sweat in head, hands, feet, mouth or any part of the
body;
Part of body
feels extremely cold or hot. For instance, patient may feel very
cold in the head and no way to stop it. Or he may feel extremely
hot, as hot as burning session, in the feet.
Sudden
swelling in the face with blue or purple color on the face.
Patient feels heavy in the body, feels whole body floating once
closing the eyes.
Feels very
colorful lights in the eye, with extremely short of breath;
Sudden
swelling in the eyes so that the eyes seem to protruding.
Extreme headache, short of breath, mouth lips being black or
purple;
Sudden
swelling on the back of the ear with very high fever, extreme
pink color on the check; not dry in mouth and tongue turning
purple;
Extremely
itch in the ear;
No stop of
running nose; sneezing;
Feels cold
every day on the noon, with heavy stomach pain, but turns easy
at middle night;
Not stop of
burping with extreme drowsy;
……
There could
be lots of extremely strange clinic manifest for people in this
stage. It is a life-threatening stage. The reason for this
clinic picture is that the Yang Qi in the body is to escape from
the body. Without the Yang Qi, the body is dead body.
This is the
stage in which conventional medicine most probably make wrong
diagnosis or feel hard to make a diagnosis, and an inexperienced
TCM doctor tends also to give a wrong treatment.
So much
stranger clinic manifests suggest that our body Yang Qi has been
dramatically exhausted (in Stage III) and followed by the Yin in
the body now (Stage IV). The Life energy, which is usually
stored in the body (kidney system) now tends to leave the body,
since there is not enough Yin in the body now. If it tries to
leave from throat, people feel sudden pain and swelling in the
throat; if it tries to leave from anus, people feel sudden
enlargement of the hemorrhoid or feel terrible burning feeling
in the colon. Without knowing this, doctors may misdiagnose it
as acute infection there and give anti-biotic (or cold herbs).
This will only speed up the death of the patients.
Change of the health stage under
a proper treatment
In the TCM,
there is a phenomenon that the healthy stage could reverse under
proper treatment. For example, the stage II can reverse to stage
I, to a complete healthy stage. This is not at all new to you.
But,
reversion from stage III to the stage I, people may feel that
they start to have pain here and there in the body, though the
current healthy problem has been solved.
For instance, a patient comes for TCM treatment since he suffered from
diarrhea for a long time. The TCM helped him and his diarrhea
stop. However, he starts to have headache which he did not have
it for a pretty long time. This means that his health stage
reversed from stage III back to stage II now. This is because
his overall body condition has been improved. He has more Yang
Qi in the body now, which starts to clear the old problem he
have had before. Usually the new illness that occurs after
stage III treatment is the same one the patient has had before.
So, if this happens to you, you should be surprised or
disappointed. We should congratulate you that your body
condition is better than before since it has more energy to
“clear” old and hidden problems in your body. No pain not gain.
Because of
the concept of the health stages, a healing crisis is also
regarded as the middle step towards true recovery of health.
Healing crisis means that one feels more pain or the original
disease seems worse after a TCM treatment. It usually lasts for
only several hour or half day to one day. After that, one feels
much better. Not everyone needs to pass such healing crisis. In
our experience, there is about five percent of people having
such experience.
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