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2-01-10 - The Root of Illness
Chinese medicine teaches that all chronic illness represents a decline in the body's vitality, or Zheng Qi. This results in a weakened immune response that is strong enough to challenge the pathogenic qi that has taken up residence within the body, yet not healthy enough to overcome and expel it. Therefore, the body become akin to a battle-ground where symptoms reoccur intermittently as the body alternates between the accumulation of resources and the active struggle to regain balance.
The body is divided into three main regions based upon their energetic composition and function, referred to as the upper, middle and lower burners. They maintain a complex relationship characterized by constant cyclic movement both horizontally within a single layer, and vertically through multiple layers. The root of illness lies in the breakdown of this movement due to two main factors: insufficient storage and transformation of essence in the lower burner and poor production and circulation of energy and blood in the middle burner. Therefore, treatment is focused mainly on these underlying problems to restore a natural state of energetic balance among the three burners. It is far less concerned with any given symptom, which is treated as no more than a localized manifestation of a much larger systematic problem.