The Pink Elephant "QI"

Let me try to talk Qi, no I’m not suggesting its delirium. I’d argue that you can see it as a concept in many culture/civilizations to varying degrees, however like most things relations, lexicon, and misrepresentations that convoluted the subject. Enough on that let’s make it relatable and establish a bridge of understanding. The character for qi 氣 the chunk at the lower bottom that looks like a bunch of sticks is “grain” while the upper aspect that looks like a waterfall is known as “breath/air”. This is a very basic and under-performing translation as some words in their native script are an entire concept. Think of words such as “energy” for instance. That’s a big word with so much nuance that it spans many sciences, chemical, electrical, physics, ect. Examining qi from the qualities we can see from grain a substance and air a force that we can experience, see its influence, but hidden from direct observation. In the case of eating food(grain) and it being digested for its many parts to be energy and material for the body’s function (the air). This should demonstrate that our understanding of qi is relatable to our scientific study of energy in many forms, and in this case from the prospective of the body and digestion. Our bridge, later ill expound on this as it’s a cool subject, with my primary objective to provide an understanding to why its related to the qi of Chinese medicine.

Qi from the Chinese medicine model is the understanding of the body as a system that is seeking homeostasis. This is the qi of the body as state of being, that the CM (Chinese Medicine) physician aims to help rectify and moderate. The rice in this case is the body and its function qi. Rice is the porridge of life and Goldilocks in this is health, overcooked/under-cooked, too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry; makes for a sad Goldilocks.

One of the methods that Chinese Medicine uses to understand the body’s state of being is the eight principles (internal/external, hot/cold, excess/deficient, yin/yang. Internal such as sclerosis of the liver, external the common cold/flu, hot such as inflammation like rheumatoid arthritis, cold hypothermia, yin (under-active thyroid) Hashimoto’s disease, and yang (hyperactive) graves’ disease. These were used to elaborate on what points the CM physician is examining for your diagnosis, however any one of the examples are composed of many of the eight principles. Rheumatoid arthritis usually displays as hot ie redness in joints, face, inflammation, “burning of fluids” and tissues. This causes the yin deficiency issues that present such as the ruined cartilage between joints, decrease in fluids like tears and salivation, inadvertent taxation of the immune system to between bouts of inflammation. It is an internal disease arising from inside that has external issues, ie the inflammation presents like that of an external injury like a sprained ankle. Inflammation is managed by anti-inflammatories, R.I.C.E., and the internal mechanisms of the disease are managed by things such as immunomodulators/immunosuppressants, so it requires treatment both internally and externally even in western medicine. All this just to demonstrate the 8 principles and disease have a lot of nuances. The CM physician takes these into consideration and uses the tools they have developed to affect these dis-harmonies.

So that poor vital energy (Qi) that gets scoffed at is more often due to a lack of understanding even what the words vital energy means even in our own language. Vitality and its energy (big word here means a lot) are used to maintain, therapeutic influence or even bolster it.  I hope this bridge provides an appreciated commonality. As health and welfare in both Chinese medicine and Western medicine are large subjects, not all that indifferent but parallel paths to the same goal of life. That qi is misunderstood because its relation to our lexicon has been largely mismanaged not due to maliciousness but because its a large subject. Its hard to take the philosophy of health and encapsulate it into a single word, especially when the word in-question covers so much intellectual ground. In later article I’d like to expand on the character and idea of qi as its much deeper than rice and air.