The 3 Tiers of Doctors Forum: Spirituality Influences Development of Diseases, Prevention Is Better Than Treatment

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Modern life is exhilarating—but living in a fast-paced rhythm also brings worries, stress, tension, anxiety, and even mental exhaustion. People’s desires for personal health within the chaos of life are becoming more prevalent.

Dr. Yang Jingduan, a well-known psychiatrist in Philadelphia, launched a series of lectures titled “The Three Tiers of Doctors Forum” to share insights into spiritual and physical health. The following is a transcript of his talk.

The lower-tier doctors treat diseases, the middle tier treats people, and the upper-tier doctors treat the country. Health is a business for everybody. Welcome, everybody, to the Three Tiers Doctors Forum. I am Dr. Yang.

In the last talk, we spoke about the concept of lower-tier medical treatment. This form of treatment deals with disease that has manifested fully and is threatening the patient or causing significant distress. Most medical treatments in common use reside at this level.

Today, we will focus on talking about our understanding of how middle-tier treatments work. Middle-tier treatments must deal with the fact that a human being is an extremely complicated entity with vastly different genetic potentials and other characteristics. Middle-tier treatments contend with the reality that people not only have a physical structure, but also an extremely complex, intricate, and individually varied biochemical system.

Human Beings Need the Soul, Spirit to Control the Body

During our life, we are constantly exhaling and inhaling, ingesting and expelling. There is a set of energy structures and circulation systems in our body that is constantly moving. This is what allows people to maintain good physical and psychological function. But even so, human beings are not yet complete.

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.

Emotion is a kind of strong energy. When the emotion is not at peace, the energy system in the body will become out of balance, causing various dysfunctions in it, and various biochemical reactions in the body will also be affected. Over time, various physical diseases will come by themselves.

Scientific Basis Exists for Wisdom, Legends of Chinese Medicine

The development of modern medicine has gone through a short process, with a history of just over 200 years. Its progress is extremely fast. However, various modern medical research studies have proven repeatedly that the wisdom of our ancient Chinese medicine is also valid and scientifically sound.

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.

In other words, even though one has a genetic weakness or defect, it does not necessarily cause disease. Modern medicine calls it environmental genetic medicine, formally called epigenetics. Of course, we also talk about precision medicine nowadays, which means determining a person’s health status and treatment plan based on his genetic characteristics and genetic status. In fact, TCM has long recognized this point. People have different constitutions and possess very different innate factors.

Middle-Tier Approaches to Health

Medical science today has realized that various methods of relieving our mental stress, improving our mental health, improving our nutrition, as well as the effects of exercising, all have a profound impact on the occurrence, progress, and worsening of diseases.

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.

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