Even someone like myself or perhaps someone with even more experience than myself can fall into the trap of Western thought patterns. And, this is not to say that it is irrelevant, surely it isnt. However, fundamentally to practicing this medicine, one must heed close attention to the rules of Chiense medicine in order to practice it succesfully.

I myself made a huge mistake in treating myself for just a cold! And unbelievably in a period of two hours I turned myself around from feeling like I had a fever and wanting to crawl into bed to OMG-lets go out and do something!

I was over-thinking. I felt I had to head off a more serious infection in my throat, not paying attention to the fact that I had no signs of serious infection and in fact my cold had nearly just begun. But, I treated it more seriously anyway because I was in my Western brain. When I stopped for a moment to consider what I was doing wrong, I switched gears, and low and behold--a huge turn around. In Chinese medicine, we don't look at the common cold or an infection just as is. We look at  what level it is, what kind of "attack" it is and then go from there. If you treat too strongly, you can draw things inward, which can make you feel much worse than you are, even make you much more sick than you are. This was one of the many things that really interested me when I first started studying Chinese medicine. 

Sometimes I laugh at the simplicity of Chinese medicine and how it is so easy to fall into these traps because of how we have been conditioned to think. So much comes from our subconscious mind that we do not realize how we are operating.

Anyway, I thought I would share this humurous story. It was funny, at least to me.

Dr.M