Introduction

Hi, and welcome to what I hope will be an ongoing observation of aspects of Chinese medicine that are not always discussed very explicitly in the standard literature.

My name is Par Scott. I am on the faculty of the New England School of Acupuncture and have a private practice in the Boston area. I have been specializing in the treatment of sleep disorders for a while but I have been starting to explore men's health issues recently, both psycho emotionally and physically.


I would like to state some caveats here: my understanding of this material presented here is a test balloon, and not meant to be authoritative. It is a playground for ideas. I aspire to develop a deepening of cultural context for Chinese medical ideas so we can better utilize them in our culture. The culture bound aspects of Chinese medicine can make it challenging to engage with, and I think this leads to many practitioners looking to western medical diagnosis and relatively bland prescriptive treatments. When we apply Chinese medical thinking to problems outside of the medical context it helps us improve our diagnostic thinking and expands the scope of our practice more deeply into the lives of our patients.

Another thing I want to make clear is my ability to translate Chinese is somewhat limited. I post translations here as a way of getting the material that I work with out in a forum for constructive criticism and to illustrate my points, but I would not advise you take my work as any sort of gospel truth. That said, I do not suck at it either, and I won't post something I don't think has any merit. My rule of thumb has been to be a literal as possible in translation, which often leads to somewhat stilted sounding language. I tend to use Wiseman's terminology, but I am not very rigorous about it.

Lastly, I tend to frame arguments rather loosely. While I would like to think this is a reflection of the Chinese mode of loosely structured discourse that leads one gently to the truth, however it is more likely a manifestation of my laziness, so if the connections between things are a little vague you were warned.