Consider a car as an example. Even though it has a body structure, oil, water, electrical circuits, and an engine—it still cannot move. It still needs a driver to get it going. The same is true for human beings, who need the soul and spirit to control the human body. Without those, one will not be a complete, valuable, and meaningful person in society. In that sense, the composition of human beings is indeed extremely complicated.

In fact, ancient Chinese medicine has a very thorough understanding of these things. In the “Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon,” there is a complete system and a good discussion of the spirit, ethereal soul, corporeal soul, intent, and will, which are all within the category of spirit and soul.

Based on this discussion, there exist some codes of conduct as required for the human spirit and soul. They are benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and integrity. Because of this, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) requires people to achieve peace of mind and believes that regulating the mind is the key to health. And through such regulation, one can really achieve a peaceful state of mind.

For example, we now realize that one’s suffering from mental stress can lead to imbalances and obstacles in the nervous system, which can lead to endocrine dysfunction, which in turn can also lead to immune system disorders. Under this situation, all kinds of physiological, psychological, physical, and mental diseases will come about. And modern medicine has now recognized this aspect very clearly.

More importantly, modern medicine has realized that possessing a disease-causing gene does not necessarily mean a disease. The results of modern medical research have found that each of us has thousands of various kinds of genetic potentials, or mutations, but this does not mean that they will cause problems. It is only when the mutation affects the structure of some larger protein molecules and functions that it will then have an impact. So even if people are born with a certain genetic defect, this doesn’t mean they are destined to get sick. That’s not how it works.

As we all know, a lot of environmental factors, such as nutritional status, various pollutants such as heavy metals, poisons, or infections, have all been found to affect the regulation of mutated genes. Mental stress also affects our genes. Gene expression can be turned either on or off. If you do a good job keeping stress down, eating well, exercising, and breathing properly, many bad genes that could have been turned on can be kept off.

So health is not just relying on the doctor and taking medicine; you can take a lot of initiative yourself. After all, you are quite able to keep yourself healthy and also responsible to do so. This is the very essence of how middle-tier doctors treat people.

Middle-tier doctors help people to improve their mental health, their diet and nutrition, their lifestyle, and their ability to reduce stress and/or resist stress.

This category of middle-tier treatments also includes methods applied in detoxification for some chronic infections and poisoning. So in our future talks, we will discuss this area in more detail. Since most of these approaches can be done by ourselves, this information will pave the way to be proactive about our health.

Middle-tier doctors treating people actually refers to practices that help a person elevate from a subhealthy state to a healthy state, thus preventing the subhealthy state from deteriorating into a disease state. This allows a person to avoid the lower-tier medical treatments necessary to combat the manifestation of disease.