There’s a good deal of irony in my heralding a terrific book about traditional
Chinese medicine. First, because it’s almost exclusively aimed at women and,
secondly, because I am far from an example of good health and fitness. But
I’m convinced that the alternative treatments I pursue, from Pilates to Thai
yoga massage and, in particular, the visits to a couple of great
practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, have enabled me to manage a
hectic transatlantic career that makes unreasonable demands on my stamina
and focus.
As a film director, it’s not unusual for me to get off a plane in another
country and start work as if no journey had occurred. The toll of these
schedules is hard to quantify but, without maintenance, the body soon
complains and fails. Typically, Western medicine is called on at the failure
stage. Other forms of healthcare can start earlier, at the complaint stage.
Xiaolan Zhao lives in Toronto. Her book, Traditional Chinese Medicine for
Women: Reflections of the Moon on Water, is constructed in chapters that
take women through the stages of their lives. She writes about how
traditional Chinese medicine began more than 5,000 years ago, 4,500 years
before the scientific traditions of the West, in a culture that forbade
human dissection. Practitioners relied on their powers of observation,
developing a different understanding of the body and disease compared with
the West. Dr Xiaolan worked as a surgeon in China, but also trained as a
doctor of herbal medicine and acupuncture. She champions an integrated
approach to health that is balanced between the traditions of the East and
West.
I suffer from a chronically underactive thyroid gland, a condition shared by
several members of my family. This results in a lack of the hormone
thyroxine which, among other functions, regulates the pace of our
metabolism. Thyroid deficiency affects many sites in the body, such as the
skin, joints and hair. It also contributes to weight gain, tiredness and
depression. None of these things is serious in itself; collectively they can
be disabling. I can monitor my condition by how much my hands claw in the
mornings, my joints ache, my waistline thickens or I am suddenly poleaxed
with exhaustion at almost exactly four o’clock in the afternoon.
Since my condition was diagnosed by my GP in the early Nineties, I’ve been
taking thyroxine in increasing dosages. Five or six years ago, on a visit to
Toronto, I heard about Dr Xiaolan from my friend Michael Ondaatje, the
author of The English Patient (Minghella directed the film). He spoke
of her as a great spirit, suggesting that she had saved many of his friends
from invasive surgery by using traditional Chinese medicine. I went to see
her. And I found her to be remarkable.
On my first visit, struggling in the snow to the house where she works, it
seemed as if half of the city was being treated by her, as she hurried from
room to room. She took my pulse in several places on my wrist, looked at my
eyes and tongue, and asked me if I had a problem with my thyroid. I was
astonished and asked how she knew. She explained that she was using the
standard four diagnoses of traditional Chinese medicine: observation, smell,
questions, pulses and tongue. Did I smell of thyroid deficiency? She began
to stick acupuncture needles in me. Using Eastern terminology, she diagnosed
low or deficient kidney energy, a problem typically related to the thyroid.
She also checked for digestive problems, based on her knowledge that low
kidney energy is often rooted in an imbalance in another organ. Dr Xiaolan
makes no distinction between alternative and conventional treatments; she
just uses a wider palette. Traditional Chinese medicine, alongside Western
medicine, is still an integral part of China’s healthcare system. Patients
seek out either depending on the nature of their illness, often using
Chinese medicine for maintenance and Western medicine for surgical
intervention.
Because she comes from this joint tradition, Dr Xiaolan understands the value
of thyroxine, and she wanted the results of my blood tests. But she also
believes that medication can’t cure every symptom associated with
hypothyroidism, and she uses other treatments to support the tablets.
Acupuncture is chief among these, but she also prescribes Chinese herbs to
“increase yang” in the kidney and to encourage spleen energy for the
promotion of qi, believed to be the energy necessary for proper digestion.
In Chinese medicine, the kidney is the organ connected with the element of
water. In this interpretation, people with low kidney qi retain water and
have a tendency to bloat and gain weight. Dr Xiaolan told me that low kidney
energy related to water meant that it couldn’t put out fire, which is the
element connected to the heart organ, the base of sleep. This meant I wasn’t
sleeping correctly and contributed to my exhaustion.
It’s easy to hear this as mumbo-jumbo, or to prefer the comfort of scientific
jargon, which describes our medical problems in Latin. But the acupuncture
helped, the visit certainly helped and the herbs seemed to help. Part of Dr
Xiaolan’s method is to treat the person in a holistic way, recognising that
the mind and the heart play some part in health and that maintenance can
prevent more serious problems. She talked about lifestyle changes, about how
to be kinder to myself. I found myself telling her more than I have ever
shared with a Western doctor, and I found myself making a great and lasting
friend.
It’s impossible, of course, to live in London and have a doctor in Toronto,
although I consult her by phone and e-mail. She sends me teas and herbs, and
she listens. For her and for all practitioners of Chinese medicine, mind and
body are inseparable. Her book maintains that disease is an expression of
the whole person. I think that it is this mixed economy, of maintenance
through a variety of alternative practices — yoga, Pilates, massage,
acupuncture, vitamins — coupled with the powerful methods of Western
medicine, that works best for those of us caught up in the madness of modern
living.
My wife Carolyn and I also visit another traditional practitioner, Nguyen Tinh
Thong, a fantastic Vietnamese doctor in North London. He works in a
multidisciplinary practice, Medical Alternatives (medalt.co.uk), which he
shares with a Western-trained GP. They often collaborate on complex cases
and Dr Thong recognises that there are different strengths in both
traditions. He respects Western medicine for its abilities to quantify and
then to treat what has been manifested as illness.
Carolyn comes from Hong Kong, and was born and brought up in a Chinese family
of Western-trained doctors, including two ear, nose and throat specialists
and a neurologist. Ironically, none of them has much faith in Chinese
medicine, but Carolyn was always intrigued and we have experimented with
many kinds of healthcare. So I’m aware that there’s been considerable
opposition to traditional medicine, particularly from some doctors, but I
believe that herbs and acupuncture and the whole package of traditional
medicine offer something that pharmacies can’t.
I don’t believe it’s just the placebo effect: people have operations using
acupuncture as an anaesthetic. And it’s clear that Western medicine has also
grown from a culture in which herbs were gathered for their healing
properties. We want certainty in our healthcare; something’s broken and it
must be fixed. The body is not a machine. Our health is connected to will.
People collapse after a race, not during it.
I’ve also had wonderful treatment from GPs and my doctor, Dr Gundkalli, at the
Park End practice in Hampstead, is among the best of the younger generation
of medics. She takes the trouble to communicate, but her compassion is a
kind of miracle given the time that the health service can allocate to
non-emergency care. And time is perhaps the defining characteristic of
alternative medicine.
Too often there seems to be a confrontation between the two approaches.
Complementary medicine can be defensive, conscious that it’s a field
occasionally populated and damaged by charlatans, but also critical of
Western medicine’s dependency on drugs and surgery. And conventional medical
practitioners can be dismissive of alternative medicine because they feel
threatened or doubt its efficacy.
But it shouldn’t be a war between the acupuncture needle and the hypodermic
needle. There’s a middle way where both approaches can be integrated
successfully to give people the broadest possible care. That’s my
experience, in Toronto with Xiaolan Zhao and in London with Nguyen Tinh
Thong. And I look forward to the days when their holistic, integrated and
caring approach is available to everybody.
Traditional Chinese Medicine for Women: Reflections of the Moon on Water
(Virago Press, £12.99) is available from Books First at £11.69 (p&p
free). Call 0870 1608080 or www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy.
Anthony Minghella was talking to Simon Crompton.
His latest film, Breaking and Entering, is in cinemas now
- To find a qualifed Chinese medical practitioner phone the Register of
Chinese Herbal Medicine on 01603 623994, rchm.co.uk
