Of Illness and Disease - A Personal Journey
Howard Chen, MD

These days, I work as a family physician in a multiphysician primary care group. In the course of my day, every day, I spend time with people who are seeking relief from their illnesses, the human experiences of their diseases. There are those who come in feeling helpless – at the mercy of their diseases, who are looking for a solution from the outside for their maladies. Yet there are others, with the same diseases, who seem to be able to shake the cobwebs of their illness away, and function through the discomfort that arises from their ill health. These are the ones whom I know who are on their way to conquering their “illness”, even though their disease may still be present.

In the course of my practice, I have come to the conclusion that what I was taught in medical school and residency was unfortunately, incomplete. In medical school, I learned many things – the newest treatments for disease, whether through surgical measures or through pharmaceuticals, and in some cases, the treatments for illnesses.

Over the years, however, I've come to realize, that no system of medicine (and there are many in the world), has all the answers. Western medicine, in its assured way of tackling any problem, and assigning diagnoses and treatments, is, in a way, the worst of the bunch. Certainly it has worked many miracles, but in its unwavering inability to accept other paradigms of healing, is its supreme weakness.

My History
(college)
I first understood this failing of Western medicine in college, and tried to branch my studies into other forms of healing at that time. My first organized attempts were to create “Group Independent Study Projects” on “Holistic Medicine”, a successful attempt, which soon segued into my efforts in creating a “Holistic Medicine” major, the first of its kind at Brown University. While this attempt ultimately failed and had to be reworked into another independent major entitled “Biopsychosocial Health”, I had learned something very precious in my studies, that my initial assumptions of Western medicine not holding all the keys to health, were right.

In the limited time between my college classes, I studied Reiki, a form of energy work, with a local teacher in Providence. I attained certification in Reiki Level 1 and Level 2, but while I didn't end up becoming a formal practitioner, the studies opened my eyes to the very real possibility of energy channels and energy movement throughout the body, and their connection to health. If nothing else, I found it very difficult to personally dispute the existence of an energy such as “Qi” when, through Reiki, I learned to feel it with my own hands.

(medical school)
The next step in my non-allopathic education came after my first year of medical school. After having spent hours upon hours learning seemingly unrelated facts, and trying to piece them together in the long term goal of helping people to heal, I realized that I was missing a part of the picture. Thus, I traveled to Taipei, Taiwan, to study Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and acupuncture. Over the course of several weeks, I learned a system of medicine completely foreign to that which I was studying in the US. Organized energy channels called “meridians” and elegantly construed paradigms of elemental interactions, came together to create an inherently logical “alternative” (to Western medicine) system of healthcare. Amazingly, the TCM system, seemed to have, in its application towards real-world illnesses, as many successes (and failures!) as Western Medicine.

I wouldn't have time to re-visit TCM and Eastern Medicine until the end of medical school, when I spent a month at the University of Arizona, following Dr. Andrew Weil and his program in Integrative Medicine. I finally understood how other physicians were using their knowledge and belief in multiple systems of medicine to achieve better outcomes than either system by itself. It was then that I realized that the true path to treating disease and maintaining health involved taking “all comers” - gleaning the best, most useful information from each medical paradigm, and applying it in a coherent, synergistic system, for the benefit of my patients. In other words, the act of combining both Eastern and Western methodologies created a system of treatment that was stronger, more effective, than either paradigm individually.

(residency and beyond)
Similar to the experiences of many physicians, the next few years of residency seemed a blur to me. Endless hours of Western Medicine, drilled and beat into my conscious (and unconscious) mind. Unfortunately for the Eastern Medicine side of me, there was barely time to eat nor sleep, much less the time to ponder the intricacies of combining the different paradigms that I had been exposed to. Much like the riding of a ship in a storm, you lash yourself to the deck (in this case, the mammoth vessel of Western Medicine), and concentrate all your energy on staying afloat.

After residency, I busied myself with the activities of a “newly released” man. I found a job in Reno, met the right person, fell deeply in love, and married her the first chance I got. In the midst of my daily work at the HAWC clinic, I realized that I again had time to pursue the integration of the Eastern and Western aspects of medicine. My first step was deciding to finish my formal acupuncture training. For my certification in Medical Acupuncture, I studied under Dr. Joseph Helms, at the HMI Institute of Medical Acupuncture, a course which has trained over 80% of the physician acupuncturists in practice today

In the midst of the Acupuncture course, I realized that I would soon have the tools to bring the first part of my dream into reality, that of starting a clinic devoted to Medical Acupuncture, which is the practice of solely the Eastern modality of acupuncture (and not Oriental Medicine as a whole), viewed from within the framework of Western Medical knowledge. By combining the two, in the fashion of Dr. Weil's pioneering work, I am able to draw from the best treatments from each modality, and to suggest and/or apply them to the benefit of our patients. These are the ideas and tools that I have put into place at our clinic, Dragonfly Medical Acupuncture.