 to it through my father, who was a famous doctor, as well as through other Chinese classics. And he, of course, read Chinese and read these classics in Chinese after an education and apprenticeship in Chinese medicine and philosophy. I ventured on to study Western medicine, psychology and physics pretty well rounded through the Western science, I gained an understanding.
For the pertinence of the wisdom outlined. In Chinese medicine, very interesting that it was the Western medicine that drove him back into studying the book.
Furthermore, after I began my clinical practice of Chinese medicine, I became profoundly impressed by what the agent ancients had already understood thousands of years ago.
The observations of the Naging were stunningly scientific. Its contents are as relevant for life in the 20th century as they were two millennia ago. Now when we’re looking here at discoveries and breakthroughs, I have a book called The Genius of China, which I’ve mentioned before. And in that book, it’s chapter by chapter. Different areas of study done by the ancient Chinese, and one of those is on medicine and in the section on medicine.
There are drawings of the circulatory system, right the heart, the arteries, the veins, the blood vessels that were done about 2000 years ago. Not those things were not understood until 15 16 hundred, depending on how you want to give credit in the West. Right. So the Chinese were fifteen hundred years, at least ahead of that. The Chinese were making human growth hormone and testosterone supplements.
Fifteen hundred years ago, I actually have the recipe. You take a certain amount of young pubescent boys urine. You put it in a cauldron, you heat it at a particular temperature, which was the temperature was understood by the color because they didn’t have thermometers. But it was the color of the heat. And you cook that down until you end up with a pasty like substance. You mix that with honey and date honey, and you give it to old men and they suddenly get regenerated.
Well, what was happening? These pubescent boys were just overflowing with testosterone. They were overflowing with human growth hormone. And the Chinese learned how to to cook off the heat, the urine and the water off of it, while preserving the enzymes of the testosterone and human growth hormone perfectly. So what they were making 1500 years ago is actually better, more authentic than what you could get if you go to your doctor today.
So this kind of stuff, they were incredibly advanced. It’s very difficult to even understand how they could have known what they what they knew. OK, now this is the important part. The neighboring of the Yellow Emperor is one of the most important classics of Daoism. So Daoism, Taoism or other spellings the is really manifesting ideas about the universe and going with the flow of nature and of life.
 It doesn’t separate external changes geographic, climate, seasonal, for instance, for internal changes such as emotions and our responses to them. That’s very interesting. This is completely foreign to most Western medicine. It tells how our way of life and our environment affect our health. Now we’re seeing massive amounts of work being done on environmental issues and how they affect our life.
Now again, the Chinese were doing that thousands of years ago. We’re just kind of catching up, and we are becoming very aware how these environmental toxins, these environmental influences are either helping create good health or destroying our health. OK. Without going into fine detail, the Naging articulates a treasure of ancient knowledge concerning the natural way to help. Implying that all phenomena, not phenomena of the world, stimulate to unify, subdue or depress one’s natural life force.
OK, so I’m going to start with that. And now I’m going to talk about why we act like barometers. So the Chinese and other cultures too, but the Chinese did the most writing and their writing has been carried forward. We’re very clear that what occurs on the inside of our bodies is exactly the same type of change that’s happening on the outside of our bodies. And they developed a system which is often called five elements, which is a misnomer.
It’s really the five phases or changes that we go through and how the different organs of the body are related to those changes. Well, one of those elements or phases has to do with dampness. And so when dampness prevails, which it does at certain times of the year winter, there’s a lot of dampness out here right now. It also affects the dampness internally in the body. Now there’s good research that’s happened over the last decade or two, showing that when the barometer changes, right, so the high pressure comes in or a low pressure zone comes in, that the death rate increases. Either way, goes up or down.
The death rate increases because those changes cause changes in our bodies and then the very cellular structure and tissues of our body. So just think about it. So all organisms, all organisms are sensitive to pressure, right? Some organisms can only live on the surface of the planet above water. Some can live in the water at certain depths and some can live it very, very deep depths. It depends on how they’re structurally, structurally created to deal with that pressure.
Well, humans are designed to live at the pressure at around sea level and a little bit above it. And if we’re in good health of a very good health and we’re properly moving fluids in our system, then those systems, those fluids don’t tend to build up excessively in any particular area of the body. They’re just moving freely, moving freely. But most of us aren’t in that level of perfect health. The fluids do not move freely.
And in Chinese medicine and also in diabetic, they use different terms. But it’s the same idea dampness, congeals, dampness, collects. Now you can see this certainly if someone has edema where there’s swelling of their ankles or swelling of their knees, et cetera. But on a less obvious level, we are still congealing those fluids. Now, when the barometer, when a high pressure comes in, OK, that high pressure puts more pressure on our bodies.
And so the tissue actually gets compressed. Now, if you have swelling in the knee and you get compression around that knee from the exterior, you’re going to have pain. There’s not enough room for that fluid to move. Your blood’s not going to move properly because the dampness is impeding the flow. The tissue swells, which presses on the blood vessels, so then the blood doesn’t flow as freely as it would otherwise. And if it’s a low pressure, it’s exactly the opposite.
And the tissue swells because there’s not as much pressure on it. And that then puts pressure on other body structures as the tissues actually swell and cause more pressure in the joints, et cetera. So that’s why people feel like barometers. They actually are no different. It’s basically the same thing that makes a barometer move, right? The atmospheric pressure makes their body functions change according to the amount of dampness and other elements that are occurring there.
So it’s a really much bigger deal than people make it. In fact, this morning I’ve had some pretty significant knee swelling for the last couple of weeks, been a little hard to walk, even I overworked at the gym. You know, I forget that I’m not 30 anymore. Overall, the my leg got small in my knee got swollen, and now I’m particularly at the effect of barometric pressure. And today was a difficult day in the Bay Area. We have again, we had rain, we had more changes in pressure.
And so I’ve been limping around a little more than usual today. So that’s why you feel like a barometer now. In Chinese medicine, dampness is considered a pathogenic factor. So if I sit down to diagnose somebody and I detect significant dampness, that’s one of the first things I would treat. Because that dampness untreated will cause diabetes, it will cause high cholesterol. It will cause this whole range of illnesses as that dampness congealed because human beings by nature are warm.
We’re hot, right? Well, what happens if you get a lot of dampness and you apply some heat to it, right? It becomes a Fleming substance in Chinese medicine. Phlegm is created by the juncture of heat would often inflammation is a form of heat. Infection is a form of heat being alive as a form of heat so that. Combination of heat with excess dampness will cause phlegm.
And so we will, as Chinese practitioners, medicine practitioners will want to clear the phlegm.
Excuse me. There’s that phlegm again. OK, so anyway, thank you for that question. That’s a great question.
Great question, because if listened to beyond just the kind of fun stuff of it starts moving us into how to live our lives. So if you want to be healthy and you have excess dampness, don’t ignore it. Take steps now in Chinese medicine that’s often caused by spleen chi deficiency. So there’s a lack of energy in the system, a lack of motive force to move that amnesty. So on a western side, that could be congestive heart failure.
It could be some other form of heart failure. It could easily. And one of the more common causes of that from a Western standpoint, is a thyroid difficulty. And always remember that while I don’t remember, but as an example