Amazing Chinese Medicine

One of the most amazing things happened yesterday. Here’s some background.

I’ve been working pretty hard lately. Three-hour sessions of kua squats, lots of Chen style, sword cuts and form, xingyi, bagua, etc. have become the norm for me.

After practice Monday, I was sitting here in front of my computer and I shifted a little in my seat. I felt a stab of pain near my knee, but it went away and I didn’t think more about it. Two hours later, it started to hurt. By the end of Monday night, I was limping a little.

Tuesday morning I woke up to find that my right leg was really stiff and I had a dull, throbbing pain just above my right knee. I had lost about 75% of my ability to walk. But I’m stubborn and I decided not to go to the doctor that day.

I woke up on Wednesday to find that my entire right leg was locked up — it felt like I didn’t have a knee at all since I couldn’t bend my leg even a bit. And the pain had become really intense. A couple of hours after I got up, the muscles in my right thigh started spasming because they were apparently trying to protect the injured area just above the knee. The pain was horrible and I couldn’t take it anymore. We rushed to the hospital.

The doctor said that I most likely had exercised too much and had inflamed my quad where it connects to the knee just above the kneecap. She recommended no exercise for a month, meds, and physical therapy sessions to begin immediately. I went straight upstairs where the physical therapist iced my thigh for 15 minutes and then used a suction massage device to supposedly relax my thigh muscles for 30 minutes. I’m supposed to go back for 5 more sessions at least.

Problem is, I left the hospital feeling only a little better than when I got there. The muscles in my thigh had relaxed a little but that was because I laid down for 45 minutes. The therapy and medication didn’t address the issue.

So a Chinese doctor friend on my wife’s family (I talked about him before here) came over that afternoon to look at it. He scoffed at the diagnosis the Western doctor had given and told me to roll over. He then applied some strong, Ben-Gay stuff to some points on my back and proceeded to do some trigger point therapy and tuina. His fingers felt like steel as he pressed into my back.

Let me say something about that. He has worked on me a little before and it is VERY painful. His fingers bore into you like drills. Also, his grip sometimes felt like it was about to tear my skin. There are stories of Hong Yi-xiang being able to rip flesh, and a lot of people don’t believe those stories. But I do because my experience with this type of tuina shows me that some of these guys have this power. It’s scary.

So he worked on points on my back, right buttock, right calf and foot for about ten minutes. At the end of those ten painful minutes he asked me to stand up and see how I felt.

I stood up and the pain was gone! All of it! I couldn’t beleive it. The only thing I felt in my thigh was a sense of weakness. The area above my knee was totally relaxed and I could walk again like normal.

I was obviously shocked and he told me that maybe I did overwork my thighs but what had really happened was that the muscles in my back had tightened up and pinched some nerves. That was why the pain got worse and worse. He also said that Western medicine was too indirect compared with his direct methods. Western med treats the symptoms, not the cause of the problem sometimes, he said.

He recommended that I take it easy this week and let my thigh recover. But I won’t need to take anywhere close to a month off.

So I’m still shocked by all this. When it comes to physical therapy, I believe that there is a huge amount of info that Western medicine doesn’t have access to. This Chinese doctor hasn’t even gone to medical school — he learned from his dad after graduating from art school, of all things. But the techniques worked even if I didn’t believe in them. I say that because, in general, I’m highly sceptical of Chinese medicine and even my wife wasn’t sure that this guy was good.

This gentlemen may be looking for an apprentice in the near future as he has no one to pass his skills down to. His kids aren’t interested. If I can do it, I’m thinking of trying to become his apprentice next year.

This type of therapy is awesome. I can’t say enough about it. Learning it would be a true honor and those of us involved with athletic training could greatly benefit from it.

But I can only imagine would I would feel like now if this guy wasn’t available to me or if I was back in the States. I would still be in intense pain. That’s a pretty unsettling thought.

So in the end, I also learned that I need to be more thankful that I live here.