Traditional Chinese Medicine
“The law of yin and yang is the natural order of the universe, the foundation of all things, mother of all changes, the root of life and death.” – The Yellow Emperor
A famous Newtonian physics law goes, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” And just as the law states, we live in a world of opposites, a world of duality. We have hot and cold, male and female, energy and matter, positive and negative, so on and so forth. Interestingly, according to Traditional Chinese Medicine, this duality is present right within our bodies as Yin and Yang.
According to an ancient Chinese medicine text, the concept of yin-yang originated from the observation of natural phenomena. Its philosophy eventually extended to our very own physiology. Within us, yin represents matter and yang represents energy. Yin represents our internal organs, blood and body fluids, whereas yang represents muscles and the skin. Yin represents lethargy, a feeling of coldness in the limb. Yang, on the other hand, represents excessive energy and hyperactivity with a feeling of warmness in the limb. Ultimately, according to TCM, when yin and yang are in a state of balance, we feel healthy. But when they are imbalanced, we feel sick and come down with illness.
Interestingly, it is not just our physiology but also illnesses that are represented as yin-yang imbalance. Ancient healers have in fact catalogued different illnesses with a variety of yin-yang nature and patterns of their imbalances. Thanks to them, most clinical diagnoses today are simplified based on yin-yang imbalances, and treatments are administered accordingly.
Homeopathy
“The mind and body are like parallel universes. Anything that happens in the mental universe must leave tracks in the physical one.” – Dr Deepak Chopra
Today, we have medicines for common cold, headache, depression, anxiety, and various other diseases. We treat each of these symptoms separately and do not necessarily interlink them with one another. So, whenever one symptom arises, we arm ourselves with the corresponding medication and strive to supress them. But what if common cold is somehow connected with our level of stress?
Homeopathy works on the principle that no illness—physical or mental—is isolated. For instance, a foot pain need not always translate to a problem in the heel. It could be due to something seemingly unrelated like an emotional block or stress. Going by this logic, homeopathy propounds that there cannot be one universal medicine to treat a specific disease or a symptom. Medicines administered must consider a person’s complete physiology as well as their overall psyche. For it is only by looking at a person holistically, that one can hope to identify the root cause of the disease.
According to homeopathy, symptoms are not what’s wrong with our body. Instead, they are the signs that our body sends when it is trying to ward off an infection or heal itself from stress. In short, the body only creates symptoms such as inflammation, fever, lethargy, mood-swings, etc while attempting to restore itself to a state of inner balance. Therefore, by supressing the very symptoms, we are essentially working against the body and its intelligence.