reconciliation?

Being a student of something that has the effect to change people's lives and to make them feel better is exciting.  The ideas behind medicine are constantly evolving, and theories have been proved or disproved, depending on their foundations.  It was not so long ago that in Western medicine, the idea of the four humours was the dominating idea, with an imbalance leading to illness.  Now we scoff at those ideas, the idea that some herbs can help cure the body.


Growing up in a household that largely shunned Western medicine, apart from the ubiquitous cough/cold/flu medicines, always makes me reconsider medicine.  After all, now Western medicine is starting to look to traditional medicine, to see why exactly things work and can cure sickness.  I am eternally grateful that I have had this upbringing; it has followed me to university, where I have a half drawer full of Chinese medicines.  It is acknowledged that traditional medicine has many of the answers that western medicine searches for.. but the more.. let's say "traditional" methods are still queried.


For example, I have a medicine section of one of the drawers I have in the chest of drawers in my flat.  I do not use medicine much / often but it is there just in case.  It mostly consists of Chinese remedies, including aniseed stars to stave off bird/swine/normal/any flu, ginseng (which is real), a cream which is the cure - all for all external conditions and Kwan Loong, which is my most favourite medicine.  It has a strong minty smell, and cures pain.  I use it if I have bad stomach pain .. the smell of it is strong enough to make me cry because of the very strong mint / eucalyptus smell.  When I was young, my dad always rubbed it on my tummy, so it is probably no surprise that I like it so much.


The idea of the four humours is still prevalent in the ideas behind the medicine my parents use.  I use cupping, which I've written about before, but I can never really eloquently explain what I mean.  I am not sure if it works; the set my mum got a few years ago came with a DVD and one of the uses of cupping was apparently to lose weight.  I didn't really think it was true.  It feels nice though.  It looks odd to have your skin sucked into suction cups, but it feels strangely good.  I think it must mostly have a large psychosomatic effect, because I like to use it because it feels nice, not because I think it is the ultimate cure.  I am open to these ideas though, and perhaps they do play a small part.


I often worry about telling my parents that I do not feel well, as if I am home, they brew up some mixture of flowers/roots/seeds/plants or all of the above +/- some other strange looking things.  I always drink these things knowing that they do not taste good, yet they seem to work.  This then brings in the question of how much can the mind do to affect the body's status.


Once, I found a book at home which was talking about the pros of a vegetarian diet (It was called, Eat Green Lose Weight) and one chapter talked about an experiment where they split a group of participants into three groups.  One practiced shooting basketball hoops every day for half an hour.  One group thought about shooting the hoops for half an hour every day.  The third group did nothing different.  It was found that the second group did just as well, if not better, at shooting basketballs through hoops.  Perhaps it is a similar concept...