One Medicine for the Whole Person — The ACES Model of Health

Dr. Yang is a board-certified psychiatrist and fifth-generation practitioner of classical Chinese medicine. He's the founder of a four-dimensional approach to integrative care, combining Eastern and Western medical traditions. He's the author of the book, Facing East and Clinical Acupuncture and Ancient Chinese Medicine, and serves as CEO of the Northern Medical Center in New York. And he has a very interesting project he's working on, which he just began to tell me about prior to his coming here, and I think you're going to be very interested in hearing it. It's the first of its kind that I know of. Dr. Jingjuan Yang, please come. Well, first of all, I want to thank Yang to introduce me to this conference, and I want to thank Tess to invite me to speak. I couldn't really find a better conference to present the ACES model of health and medicine. And if you agree with me by the end of this talk, we might have found a better way for medicine, a new solution to health. And I would like to say when I come to the United States after learning Chinese medicine since age 13, went to one of the top medical schools in China, and studied all the modern medicine, and become a neurologist and psychiatrist for 12 years, during which I went to Sydney University, studied the child development and psychology, and Oxford for the psychopharmacology research. I list all that, not because trying to brag about my education. I have no idea. My life was arranged in such order until 1996, and I was a, I'm really tired of being a neurologist. No offense. I know one of the neurologists here, and I feel like being a neurologist, I just need half of my brain. But I do feel I needed all my brain to be a good psychiatrist. So I left China and come to the U.S. without knowing what life is ahead of me. So the first job presented to me was to teach Chinese medicine to a master's degree student in an acupuncture school in Minnesota. Well, I never thought that Chinese medicine could be taught in English, and I never thought it could be learned by people who were growing up from totally different cultures, different parts of the world. And I had to, I found myself having to constantly reconcile between the Western medicine concept and the Chinese medicine concept. And that exercise for three years really taught me a lot. And faster forward, I become a psychiatry resident at Thomas Jefferson University. Again, I have no idea why they're ahead of me, because I don't even remember I applied for it. Seriously. I mean, Philadelphia? No way. You know, I thought Minneapolis was the best place in the world at that time. But anyhow, very soon, I found, actually, I chose Thomas Jefferson. I liked it. It's because many of the faculty were trained in psychoanalysis, which I feel that was the gem of the Western medicine. But of course, these days, they all prescribe drugs, right? And my supervisor, Dr. Dan Monte, introduced me something I never thought I would have learned here, called the neuroemotional technique. And that technique literally is based on the three greatest minds of medicine. Freud, who recognized your early childhood trauma, how it affects you consciously, unconsciously, and in your adult life. And then Babalov, who recognized conditional operation, and affecting operational conditioning, how affect our behavior. That's why human behavior is so hard to change. So make America healthy again. Trust me, it's not going to be easy. It's not about the knowledge. Make any change, we have to bring our head, our heart, our gut on the same page. And most of the time, we can't even control our head. Let it go, we don't have access to our heart and our gut. But fast forward, I was exposed to so many different medicines. We have alternative medicine, complementary medicine, functional medicine, lifestyle medicine, natural medicine, you name it, the Chinese medicine. And I've been always asked by my patients, what kind of medicine I should pursue? My colleagues, what kind of medicine I should learn to have additional skills to help my patients? I feel very confused myself. I said, why do we need so many medicines? We're treating one human being, right? We just need one medicine, right? So we don't need so many different medicines. So that's why I began to formulate this idea. What is that one medicine like? That medicine has to be common sense-based, has to be based on science, has to be based on the wisdom, has to be based on who a human being is made of. And that's why I began to formulate the concept of ACES model of health and medicine. So you don't really need me to tell you that modern medicine is fragmented. And also there's different ideas. It's the same idea, people trying to supplement each other. That's why they created so many different medicines. For example, functional medicine, when I first time heard about it, I said, my goodness, the Chinese medicine has a whole book talking about the gut and the health thousand years ago. But now finally, we're catching up. Okay, that's great. So I see that happens all the time. But really, each discipline is only see one piece of human body. So what is human body made of? Very simple. We're made of body parts. That's a structure. That's anatomy, right? So body structures, everything we're good at in modern medicine. I'm not a big fan of it. When I was in medical school, I tried to skip my orthopedic surgery rotation because I couldn't tolerate the process of orthopedic surgery. I'm so sorry, no offense to the orthopedic surgeon here. It looked like a carpentry to a human body. But as we really look at the human anatomy, it's not just about gross anatomy. We really need to go down into the membrane of the cell. I don't know how many of you have ever heard concept of membrane medicine. It's really about if we don't take care of the membrane, the cell cannot function well. The membrane is made of what? The essential fatty acids. So that's why essential fatty acids become such important things in almost every medical condition and health care, health promotion, right? So that's the level you have to go to about anatomy. The chemistry, I had to say when I was in medical school, that was my favorite subject. I got higher scores on that, on the tests. But once you are in practicing, you throw them all away. You never thought about the chemistry anymore because you're only prescribed drugs, right? A high school kid can do that after six months of training, just following the book, you know. But the chemistry is more than that. It's not genetics. It's epigenetics. It's methylation. It's the conditions where people losing either not absorbing nutrients or losing nutrients. And if we do not recognize that and let it go, one infection, vaccine, everything coming from outside, the body, the individual body, who is vulnerable to those things, going to have all kinds of trouble and hard time. So chemistry is really what biomedicine should be. Of course, pharmaceuticals may have some role to play in the crisis in the most short term, but long-term use can definitely do more harm than good. That's why you have to read all small prints of the side effects. So medicine, unfortunately, no longer is no harm first. Almost likely you have to agree to harm before they can treat you. That's not really a good job or satisfaction for physicians like myself. So when I talk to my colleagues, I say, oh, I'm a cardiologist. I said, what do you do? And by end of the conversation, I said, you should be called a cardiopharmacologist because you do nothing but prescribing drugs. Same thing can be said for psychiatrists. So it's no more fun to be psychiatrist anymore these days. But energy. When I was 13 years old, my father put me aside and said, son, you have to learn Chinese medicine. Otherwise, you can't survive the hardship in the countryside. Because in 1970s, during Cultural Revolution, Mao sent all these potential troublemaker high school graduates into remote countryside. And life was horrible there. Anyway, so I did. I learned the Chinese medicine. And something strange happened. He insisted I learn English. I didn't know why. 1970s, communist China, a father never went to university, never had interaction with any foreigners except fighting Japanese during the Second World War. But anyway, I did. Then he said, you got to medical school to learn modern medicine. That's where the confusion starts. So we had arguments every time with me. He taught me something about the kidney is responsible for blood production. I said, no, that's bone marrow. And he said, well, high blood pressure and mood disorder are the same things, all have something to do with the liver. I said, no, this belongs to two departments. But energy was something I began to think more and more. The Chinese medicine is a medicine about human energy. And modern medicine recognizes energy. If you go to your primary care, there's vital signs, EKG, EEG, EMG, NG, all these Gs. And you're complaining about pain, headaches, fatigue, constipation, diarrhea, heart palpitations. Most of them are really energetic manifestations. There's no structural or biochemical evidence to support why you have that. So without addressing energy, we are like car shops without electronic engineer. So that's what I told President of Jefferson, Dr. Stephen Klosko at that time. I said, you're running a car shop without electronic engineers. So that's still not enough, because what affects the energy the most is our thoughts, our emotions, our behaviors, our lifestyles, and our relationships. And what affects that? What determines that? I didn't know. I was wondering, and nobody ever told me. Coming from a communist China, you have an idea about the universe. I have to thank a biochemistry professor who happened to give a lecture about Christianity and the science, so I began to understand there's higher lives, higher powers. But still, I was struggling to which discipline I should have followed. Buddha or Tao or Christianity. There were so many different. I was very confused. I was just basically traveling from one church to another to see which one I feel comfortable. But until I run into something really special, called the Falun Dafa or Falun Gong, it took away all my troubles. He says, the teaching is like focusing on being truthful, being compassionate, being tolerant. That's it. Let go your attachment that prevents you from doing those things. That's it. I feel like, okay, wherever I belong to, if I do that well, I will be there. Okay. But that really, really got me into the ACEs model, I think the critical part. I feel like the medicine, what's the medicine for the soul, right? So that's the concept called life cultivation. So whatever people do, that helps you have a positive thinking, a stable mood, a peaceful mood, and a healthy behavior, good relationship, and healthy lifestyle, whatever that is, follow it. Okay. So that's the ACEs model. But that's the things I want to go back to talk about the health care, medical care. This is a totally two different concepts. I think the trouble is we confuse health care with medical care. Medical care, the responsibility is the doctor. They're treating people who have lost the health, so the sickness. So the doctors are trained, incentivized, and rewarded by treating the sickness. In the way that sick you are, the profession become more significant, glorious, and important. And so therefore, that's the medical care. On the other hand, the health care is your self-care. You prevent yourself from getting sick. So therefore, it's all personal responsibility. That's why the health care, and anybody, family, friends, workspace, and community, government, they are responsible to facilitate. But the primary responsibility is ourselves. If we don't understand that, if we outsource our health care to anybody else, whoever they are, and we are losing the way. So that's very important. This is the time we build real health care, but we should not let medical care call themselves health care. We should not let medical insurance call themselves health insurance. We should not let the government give health care money to medical care industry, and hoping they're going to promote health. Trust me, if anything, they're going to try to make us sicker. So health care is our responsibility. The one thing I want to emphasize, I know my time may be up, individuality. I feel like we are talking so much about what we need to do to a people, for a person, but we really need to pay attention. Each individual, they're structurally different. We all look different, right? They're biochemically different. They're energetically different. They're spiritually definitely different. So therefore, they have to be individualized. There's no one thing fits all, and if we do not start doing that, the patient's story is the evidence. So the question is not evidence-based medicine, it's what is the evidence. So as a doctor, my evidence is each patient's story is the evidence, because they're all going to be different. So we want to emphasize that. Anyway, I could give a lot of stories, but I think what I really want to say is today, I feel like my life is kind of a manifestation, which I never planned. I've become a resident. I've become the director of Chinese medicine at Jefferson. I've become an integrative medicine fellow with Dr. Andrew Weil. I wrote two books, and I opened my own clinics, practiced four-dimensional medicine. Three and a half years ago, I was asked to help open a new medical school in Middletown, New York. Then I asked myself, why do I do that? Why do I want to do it? Why do we need another medical school? We don't need another medical school, do we? But we really need a new medical school, not produce three doctors in one person. The doctor who knows how to heal the nation, the doctor who knows how to heal the person, and the doctor who knows how to heal the sickness and the managing crisis. We need all three doctors. If you look at yourself, you look at the people in this room, you belong to each one of those categories, even though you're not carrying necessarily a doctorate degree or title. But that's what we need. We need to produce a doctor who can compose an individual a health plan, because each individual's life and health is like a beautiful symphony. But we need someone to compose that. More than that, we need someone to conduct it. So we need to conduct physicians who can coordinate and all the specialists and to produce the best healthcare for the individuals. I'm here really to say I'm so honored, so happy to be here to share this with you, because I believe this new medicine, the new healthcare, has to be just like the government we wanted. It has to be of the people, by the people, and for the people. And the manifestation today is that everyone here, I would ask you to join me on this journey and to create it. We have this great opportunity to produce the best medical care and healthcare system on the planet. Thank you so much.