Core Differences Between Eastern And Western Medicine

Alright folks, last blog was a hit from the perspective of not only being about a hot topic but also that people could share it with others that might not see where we are coming from. So I wanted to provide you with another blog that could open people’s minds a bit further. As I thought about what it could be, I was watching a show that portrayed the parent that eats clean (no gluten, dairy, soy and all that other GARBAGE) to be a weirdo which subconsciously programs viewers to start believing this when you come into contact with these health conscious people in real life. So I thought, maybe explaining the different between western and eastern medicine would be a valuable blog. This is another topic that when I start typing out the points I want to get across, I think you will have a lot of aha moment realizations. So lets get started…..I am going to try my best to keep this blog less than 10.5 pages long like the last one!

First and foremost, you don’t have to be anti-western medicine to utilize eastern medicine and vice versa. In this blog when I say eastern medicine, I am referring to chiropractic, acupuncture, homeopathy, eating properly, yoga, meditation, hypnotherapy, Ayurveda practices, exercise and functional medicine etc. So you can utilize both in your life but where my community comes from is that western medicine is not utilized properly. Where western medicine shines and should be utilized is when lifesaving surgery or medications are essential. It should be used in emergency cases and for good reason. However, when you over utilize both and label it as healthcare, you do an INCREDIBLE disservice to humanity and lead them into a chronic diseased population. The use of drugs and surgery is what most people think of if you say the word healthcare, but when you logically think about it, it should be known as disease care. Because that’s exactly what it is….methods to get you out of a diseased state. And you can’t use these same methods of disease management to build your health. A healthy state has to be achieved/built through lifestyle choices and proactively working on yourself and body.  This is the first core difference between eastern and western medicine. Eastern medicine is proactive whereas western medicine is reactive. Western medicine gets you thinking that if you are asymptomatic then you are healthy. Now as I have said in blogs previously, having no symptoms does not mean you are healthy it just means that you are asymptomatic. A dead corpse is asymptomatic…do you think of corpses when you think of health?

So this concept that having no symptoms equals health blindly leads our population into chronic diseased states over time because your doctor tells you they can’t find anything wrong with you and you are perfectly healthy. They can’t find anything wrong with you because you are not in a diagnosable diseased state…..yet. So you live your life thinking you don’t have to do anything to build your health. You are not educated on the foods to eat, if you have any food sensitivities that lead to inflammatory states in your body, what exercise to do, how to deal with stresses of life, our toxic environment, risks of v@$$1n35 etc etc. So when you come into contact with someone like myself who practices eastern medicine and lives a lifestyle that actively builds my health each and every day, it’s so foreign to you because you have had no guidance from the doctors who should be educating you on all of this. This makes you think we are weird and “don’t follow science”. When in reality, we are following principles of universal truths that have been around far longer than any drugs or surgery.  See humans in general tend to fear things that we don’t know anything about which is why western medicine doctors tell you eastern medicine is quackery…it’s because their schools, who are funded by drug companies, only educate them on what will make them a profit. Anything that truly cures someone doesn’t have as much value because a patient cured is a customer lost in the eyes of pharma. And remember, money is at the root of everything, especially medicine.

So if you are not living a proactive healthcare lifestyle, then you are living in a reactive disease care lifestyle. This means that you only tend to your health when you have a symptom or a diagnosis instead of proactively preventing issues from arising in the first place. The only thing better than curing a disease with western reactive medicine is never having the disease in the first place. And one thing that really gets to me is all these commercials on TV for things like breast cancer and they say “detection is prevention”….which is one of the most ridiculous slogans ever. PREVENTION IS PREVENTION AND DETECTION MEANS YOU ALREADY HAVE IT AND IT HAS BEEN THERE FOR QUITE SOME TIME…THINK ABOUT THAT. So in conclusion on the first point of proactive vs. reactive medicine, proactive means you build your health and prevent diseases as best as possible whereas reactive is to wait for you to have a disease and then treat it…which one sounds better to you?

The second core difference in the medicines is that eastern medicine treats the body as a whole whereas western medicine treats the body as a compartmentalized being. These days we have a specialist for everything. The more specialized you are the more money you make in this day and age. Here’s the biggest issue with specialists…they tend to know a whole lot about a whole little. If you are diagnosed with a GI issue, a heart issue, a thyroid issue, a kidney issue and an autoimmune issue, this means that you have to see 5 different doctors. Each doctor will put you on some type of drug that will have side effects which causes you to see even more doctors to deal with those side effects with even more drugs. Do you see how this is a vicious circle (more like a rabbit hole)? Do you think that all of these organs have an affect on one another? Do you think that they could all be having issues due to a common cause? And just as importantly, do you think these specialists even consult with one another? Those last 3 questions were rhetorical if you didn’t pick that up. Now eastern medicine looks at the body as a whole because there is a saying that goes “anything can cause anything” in the human body. We strive to get to the cause of the patient’s issue or issues at hand. When a patient presents with an issue, we take a systemic approach first before we go in and only treat in that specific area. Because what if your migraines are due to toxicity in the liver which is due to a yeast infection in the gut that you are feeding with toxic foods and alcohol? A migraine drug won’t ever get to this type of cause. You see what I am saying? To be fair, I should note that not all eastern medicine practitioners start like this, only ones that practice properly (yes there are eastern practitioners that are not great just as much as there are western practitioners that are not great). So not only do we want to prevent you from having any issues in the first place, but we also want to use critical point analysis and take everything into account to get to the root of your issues when the time comes. I really believe that turning western medicine into a medicine of specialists has contributed greatly to the United States having the worst “healthcare” of any developed high-income country in the world. We are going against the principles that the human body runs on. Everything is created exactly as it needs to be. The human body needs no help, just no interference to be healthy. And it is the proactive healthcare that works on reducing this interference. Reactive medicine deals with the product of interference that has gone unchecked/completely missed for far to long.

One thing I want to mention here before I move on to the next difference is that since eastern medicine is proactive based, it requires you to get treatments proactively. If you are not getting adjusted by a chiropractor or doing something like acupuncture at least monthly, I can promise you that you are not functioning at your optimum. That’s a guarantee. And piggy backing off of this point, everyone has heard that when you go once you have to go the rest of your life. Well yeah, you don’t just go to the dentist for a teeth cleaning once and then your set for the rest of your life…so why would getting one adjustment last you a lifetime? Again, people who bring up this point are conditioned to think reactive medicine is normal while proactive medicine doesn’t register to their brain. Here’s a scary statistic for you, the average person spends more money on their “health” in the last 2 weeks of their lives than they do during their whole life span. Sad isn’t it? Hopefully this clears all that up for you.

The next difference is western medicine blames everything on genetics whereas eastern medicine blames everything on epigenetics. Genetics is what you inherit and epigenetics is what causes your inherited genes to express themselves or not. An example is breast cancer. If you have the breast cancer genes, western medicine believes that’s all that matters and you will get breast cancer at some point in your life with no way around it unless your “lucky”. Epigenetics says that it is toxicity from the environment that CAN turn on your breast cancer gene at some point in life. The analogy is that genetics are like the loaded gun, and epigenetics are the factors that have to pull the trigger in order for the gun to fire. Eastern medicine is concerned with what those factors are. These consist of environmental toxins (all my other blogs cover these found here). It is these toxins or triggers that turn on certain genes and allow them to express themselves. So when those friends of yours are eating gluten, dairy, soy, caffeine, and egg free, maybe try not to judge them but realize that they are limiting the toxicity in their bodies so that they keep their inherited bad genes in check. All the tastiest food allergens in the world aren’t worth cancer and heart disease at the end of the day. Now you can live life and cheat here and there but that’s like once a month, not every weekend like the standard American. Remember what I always say…if you live the standard American lifestyle you get the standard American Diseases.

The testing methods between the two medicines are vastly different although some may look similar to the untrained eye. The main issue is that western medicine standard testing is not sensitive enough meaning it misses issues all day long. How many times have you heard of people say something along the lines of “ I’ve been to multiple doctors and they can’t figure it out” or “my blood tests all look normal and good but I still feel awful”? This is because they run your blood tests and next to your blood numbers you will see a range. This range tells your doctor what range your numbers “should” be in. Here’s the issue with that. These ranges are comparing you to the rest of the population. And if you have looked around lately, we aren’t exactly the pictures of health. A virus known as rona has highlighted that for us although people still think we have a viral issue and not a sick population issue (thanks media). So your blood numbers are compared with cancer patients, heart disease, diabetics etc. This leads to the doctor telling you all is good even when you feel like absolute trash because you don’t have the blood work of a full-blown cancer or heart disease patient. It takes 40% dysfunction on that blood work before you’re in the pathological range, which alerts them that you now have an issue. THAT’S A BIG ISSUE in my world and I think it should be considered negligence. In eastern medicine, we read blood work from a functional standpoint which has a much more narrow range which we called optimal ranges. For example, your white blood cell count range on the standard blood tests is 3-11. But the functional range is actually 5-8 and if you are lower than 5 or above 8 then there is an issue somewhere. So if you are at 4 then the standard western med practitioner will say you are all good when in reality you are not because you are outside of the 5-8 optimal range.

On top of these range differences, there are so many more valuable blood tests that are never ran on people because there is no drug to give at the end of the rainbow for those certain tests. For example, everyone knows about cholesterol due to people telling you it’s bad for you and causes heart attacks. This is one of the greatest lies ever told and it has been told because cholesterol meds are a moneymaker. There are far more important tests to run for blood markers that contribute to heart disease like homocysteine levels and genetic clotting factor tests. But there are no drugs for these so you never hear about them or never have them ran on you.

There are also many other types of testing that eastern medicine uses to ask the body what is going on. These consist of muscle testing (see blog here), pulse diagnosis, fingernail and tongue diagnosis, and countless machines from countries all over the world that can read frequencies of the body. I am sure that you would be more familiar with these if the CDC and WHO owned the patents on them. The tests that you are used to hearing about are things like colonoscopies and mammograms….how are any of these health promoting or disease preventing? Anytime something somewhat abnormal is found on these tests, this means they have been there for a while and 9 times out of 10 their advice to you is to keep doing these tests to monitor it in case it gets worse. It never leads to a health promoting action plan. Just a hope for the best assume the worst type scenario. You are told to get these tests at certain ages, which never made any sense to me. Why would it only be required after a certain age? It’s because after certain ages things are common in sick populations and just like asymptomatic is thought of as healthy, common is confused with being normal. Normal and common are totally separate terms and we have been conditioned to think otherwise. Things like headaches, sleep issues, polyps, and hemorrhoids are common but they are far from normal. They are the body’s cry for help. They are symptoms letting you know that you need to change something in your lifestyle.

The last difference I want to talk about is how we view acute disease. Eastern medicine views acute diseases as our friends and they build up our immune systems whereas western medicine views acute diseases as bad and medical intervention is required. The issue with western medicine’s view on this topic is that suppression of acute diseases leads to chronic illness because many chronic diseases are the outcome of wrong treatment of acute diseases. In the eastern medicine realm, we don’t fear things like chicken pox, the measles, the common cold, the flu, ear infections and strep throat. We are not a fear-based model like western medicine. Western medicine is a hope for the best expect the worst type mindset and model whereas eastern medicine is expect the best when you build your health properly and if you get anything troublesome then we adjust our approach appropriately. We utilize western medicine when something is life threatening and beyond our scope which is how it should be used in the first place. There is a saying that goes “the cure should not be worse than the disease” and lots of the cures we use in western medicine like antibiotics and steroids for issues like common colds and sinus infections violates that saying. Medications are synthetically changing your body mechanisms. I am going to list some examples that I think will get the point across.

First example, giving antibiotics for the common cold that last longer than 7 days. The common cold can get pretty annoying to people who are not healthy individuals and so many times they call their western medicine doc for an antibiotic prescription. So antibiotics basically kill all the bacteria in your body that it can which leads to yeast infections and chronic gut inflammation. This in turn depletes your immune system, which sets you up for inflammatory diseases in the future like cancer and arthritis etc. So is that quicker relief from the common cold worth it in the end? Is the cure worse than the disease? The next examples are proton pump inhibitor and cholesterol meds that are two of the most commonly prescribes meds in the world today. Proton pump inhibitors are for acid reflux and what they do is make your stomach stop producing acid. Even though 99% of acid reflux is actually too little acid not too much but they are still given anyways. So what this low stomach acid level does is create a less acidic environment in your stomach, which is a huge issue because minerals that build your bones are only absorbed in an acidic stomach environment. This sets you up for osteoporosis later in life, which it even says on the medication label if you read the fine print. Is changing your lifestyle to get rid of the acid reflux not worth it or would you rather be guaranteed osteoporosis? And the next meds are cholesterol meds. Cholesterol is what makes your hormones, your brain tissues, your heart tissue and every single one of your cells in your body…do you think it’s a good idea to deplete a substance that builds all of these for you? How many people do you know with hormone issues, brain issues like Alzheimer’s and heart issues? Seems like everybody right? Next time you see these things ask them if they are on cholesterol meds. Remember, THE CURE CANNOT BE WORSE THAN THE DISEASE. And then later in life when you get these issues you rely on the same system that got you there in the first place. Einstein told us that you can’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used to create it. Make sense?

So by now, you may be thinking that this is a chiropractor vs. MD type of blog. However, it is not for multiple reasons. First, is that the majority of chiropractors don’t practice the way I think they should be practicing. It is for that reason that if you lined up 10 random chiropractors the chances of me referring my family to one of them or letting them treat me is virtually 0%. Always go through word of mouth. And next, I actually treat many western medicine practitioners consisting of MDs, DOs and nurses. Many of them get it and think along the same lines that I do but the problem is they make up the vast minority of their field. There are lots of great functional medicine MDs out there so this blog is more about the majority of western medicine practitioners who don’t think outside the box like many have. Before Rockefeller coming around and funding medical schools, med schools in this country taught eastern medicine type concepts. Fun fact, the first class of chiropractors was actually majority medical doctors getting their doctorate in chiropractic medicine.

One last thing that I want to say is that whenever people talk about going to their general practitioner I always ask them what they think about their doc out of curiosity for what they will say. What I have noticed is the first thing people usually say is “he or she is nice”. All I am going to say is be careful with this, you want a doc who is great at their craft regardless of how nice they are. You pay them to “manage your health” (or your insurance company does) not to just be nice to you. Look put it this way, Joe Biden might be a nice guy but I have zero trust in his competence…don’t feel this the same way about your general practitioner. Make sure you find yourself a think outside the box great doc if that’s the route you want to take.

In conclusion, my hope is that this blog opened your eyes to some of the key differences in eastern and western medicine. I obviously couldn’t list every single difference but thought that these were some of the most important ones. The main take away in my opinion is the misuse of both eastern and western medicine. Eastern type medicine should be first and foremost where western medicine should be last case scenario. The way we use western medicine currently is like calling the fire department to put out your burning candle. It’s an intrusive emergency medicine that is viewed as a system that builds your health, which is false. However, if you’re in need of a life saving medication or surgery, there is nothing better than what western medicine can offer us. Just stop getting it twisted with the word healthcare and see it for what it is. So share this with whoever you think needs to hear this info because I know it can be frustrating when you try to proactively build your health using nature’s principles and people view you as some mystical weirdo trying to live in ancient times before things like medications and v@$$1n35 were around LOL. Too often people will bring up the debate of we live longer now than any other time in history etc etc. Well my question to that is is life about the quantity of years or the quality of the years? As Benjamin Franklin said, “most people die at 25 but are buried at 75.” Wishing you balanced thinking, have a great weekend!

This is the way,

            Dr. Charlie

Short bonus section:

            One more key difference is that in western medicine, the approach is that the human body heals from an outside in approach whereas eastern medicine approaches the body from an inside out approach. See the power that made the body also heals the body and as I said earlier, the body needs no help just no interference. Think about when a kid scrapes their knee and starts to bleed. Is it the Band-Aid that heals their cut or the power that made the body? A perfect example is inflammation. Whenever there is pain and inflammation, western medicine prescribes NSAIDS and steroids, which is an outside in approach that interferes with the bodies healing ability over time. Eastern medicine wants to get to the cause of your inflammation starting with what you fuel your body with and lifestyle decisions. It starts from within or what we call an inside out approach. This approach goes along with the principles of nature, which is what the human genome has preferred since the beginning of time. The more we live through nature’s principles, the better our epigenetic expressions are. I will leave you off with one of my favorite quotes ever from Dr. Bruce Lipton, a molecular biologist. When talking about genetics and epigenetics he says, , “Your children’s genes reflect only their potential, not their destiny. It is up to you to provide the environment that allows them to develop to their highest potential”……goosebumps.