Over the past decade or so, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the growing acceptance of Eastern medicinal traditions in our society. There’s good reason for it – their physicians knew an awful lot! As I wrote The Last Four Doctors You’ll Ever Need – How to Get Healthy Now! I actually drew quite heavily on these Eastern healing arts, however much of it took place behind the curtains. But because of their influence on the book, I think it’s very important to explore the relationship between the Four Doctors and the Asian healing traditions, not only to help you understand the Four Doctors better, but to acquaint you with a body of knowledge that has been leading to genuine wellbeing for centuries.
As you probably know by now, the Four Doctors are Dr. Quiet, Dr. Diet, Dr. Happiness, and Dr. Movement. However, they can be broken down into two basic forces. In Taoism or Chinese medicine, we speak of forces called Yin, the female forces, and Yang, the male forces. The Yin forces in nature are the nurturing, cooling, moistening, creative, supportive, and anabolic healing forces. The Yang or the male forces are hot, fiery, and destructive. At they same time, they are also creative, but creative as expression of an idea, where the Yin forces are creative of the nurturing of the idea. We see this creative force in the woman as she is able to carry the fetus within her womb, mothering and nurturing it. So she creates the infant in her body. Then the male expression is the outward life. Once the child is born it goes into a Yang or an expressive cycle.
Everything in life has a Yin phase – the rest and recovery, nurturing, nourishing, healing, and rebuilding phase. In the human being, that happens predominately at night, which is the domain of Dr. Quiet. Then everyone has the Yang or the male energy phase, which is expressing oneself through movement and happiness. If you ask 100 people about what makes them happy you will hear things like, ”Well, I love to ski. I like to ride my bike. I’m happy when I’m playing with my kids. I’m happy when I’m jogging.” The grand majority of the time what makes people happy is some form of expression or outward projection of energy. This is why Dr. Movement is rightly understood as a Yang force. It tracks an outward expression of our energy, an expression that is necessary for us to keep our bodies healthy.
Dr. Diet, on the other hand, is a Yin force as it is an inward, nourishing aspect of our lives. Dr. Diet also brings us to another important line of intersection between the Four Doctors and Eastern healing traditions. Most of the things that people do during the day expend energy, whether it’s working on the docks, or in the garden weeding, stocking groceries or writing a report. These things are either mentally or physically expressive and cost us energy. So how do we come to gather the energy that we need to lead our lives?
Enter Dr. Diet. This doctor represents what is referred to in Chinese medicine as acquired chi. Chi is just energy. We acquire chi through drinking and eating. Whenever we bring any foodstuff into our body, we bring the energy of that food into our bodies. This is very important because so many people are eating matter that is impersonating food. It’s so heavily processed, and so full of synthetic additives, preservatives, colorings, emulsifiers, and stabilizers that it doesn’t really bring any chi into our body. Most people forget that whatever you put into your mouth must be converted into human tissue. The more dead anything you eat is the more energy it takes from your body to enliven it and turn it into a living being.
Most people just have this sort of fantasy that they can stick whatever they want in their mouth and it just comes out the back door like it was on a road trip through your body, like a car driving through a tunnel under a mountain. Just as the car never touches the mountain, they think their food just passes on through. They don’t realize, for example, that each human being creates about two million red blood cells a second. Some resources say that we turn over every cell in our body every year. One of the reasons we have so much disease today is because people keep on putting things in their body that are not appropriate to be turned into human tissue.
Eating these imitation foods tends to create disunity in the body. For example, Cancer cells are cells that do not see themselves are part of a community. They are like gangsters that move into an area and start strong-arming the other cells and taking the place over. They create their own population called a tumor and essentially spread throughout the body and eat it up.
The only way you can get cancer in your body is to not have adequate unity – not have a sense of community with in the body. When you eat things that are not part of a community, when you think in ways that are destructive to the inner community, when you don’t get enough sleep, you go into a Yang or destructive excess. You spend more energy than you are recuperating. When you look at what the Four Doctors are really all about, you’ll see that they are focused on creating unity or balance in the body through self-time, sleep, quality food, proper movement and living by your values.
So the Four Doctors are quite congruent with the ancient and very real principles of Yin and Yang. Your two Yin or nourishing doctors are Dr. Quiet and Dr. Diet. Your male expressive energies, the Yang, are Dr. Happiness and Dr. Movement. Life is most rich, most full, and most disease free when we balance our Yin and Yang energies, such that we are able to enjoy our lives without disease or pain. If you listen to your Four Doctors, this is precisely what they will do for you.