Medicine – Bob Quinn Seminars

Posted on September 27, 2019 by Bob Quinn

Patient As Koan

A Blue Poppy blog post by Bob Quinn

“If [man] thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.”
David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980

R. Buckminster Fuller is a known name to most of my generation. He was on the cover of Time magazine; he traveled to hundreds of campuses lecturing; he was said to be the only person over 30 that the hippies trusted; he was called the first poet-saint of technology. Fuller was a pioneer of what might be called a whole systems approach to life on earth. He advised us in every endeavor to start always with the whole. What might this mean for us in Chinese medicine?

Posted on September 27, 2019 by Bob Quinn

Whither Our Profession?

A Blue Poppy blog post by Bob Quinn

I came across an article recently in which I read surprisingly that the number of practicing acupuncturists in the US is rather flat when measured over the last few years. It seems that with 3000+ students in the tube in our various schools we would be growing at a steady rate, not holding at a standstill. Apparently, we are losing as many as we are gaining. Not a good situation, obviously, and one that invites speculation.

Posted on September 27, 2019September 27, 2019 by Bob Quinn

Treating The Cause?

I often hear it said in Chinese Medicine circles that we focus on the “cause” of the patient’s problem, but biomedicine focuses on the symptoms. This is not of course accurate. There are a lot of pages in our tradition devoted to getting this or that symptom to change, e.g., giving ban xia for insomnia in the Nei Jing to give just one simple example. I want to share some thoughts on this issue. It seems simple enough on the face of it, but it deserves a deeper scrutiny.

Naturopathic medicine as well talks of treating the root cause, i.e., Chinese Medicine is not alone in this claim. It is in fact one of their foundational guiding principles. But do we (or the NDs) really arrive at a “root” cause. The word “root” would to my mind imply we have discovered the core of the issue. The root of a plant is foundational; cut off the root and most plants will die.