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March 13, 2025 - Epoch Times
22:32
How to Heal People Instead of Just Medicating Them: Dr. Jingduan Yang
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Do you know how many people died in hospital due to medical error?
In the United States, it's over 100,000 people a year.
Dr. J.D. Yang is a specialist in psychiatry and integrative medicine and is a fifth-generation practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine.
A lot of things Chinese medicine emphasize is prevention.
It's the treatments before the problem becomes structurally damaging.
You should help people with high blood pressure before they're developing the stroke.
He's the CEO of Northern Medical Center and founder of the Yang Institute of Integrative Medicine.
If you ask a doctor today, what do you do every day?
Besides prescribing medicine, that didn't do much else.
So it's a shame.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellek.
Dr. J.D. Yang, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you for having me.
America is in an unusual situation.
Americans are very unhealthy.
At the same time, they spend incredible amounts on health care.
What's really going on?
Well, it's simply put that in America, we really don't have a health care system.
Even though we call everything health insurance, health care, and this and that.
But if you look at what we're doing for our patients, we're really trying to manage their disease and dealing with the crisis.
So as far as health, and nobody really...
Doing much about it.
For example, if you see a primary care doctor, they run tests, they check on you.
They say, well, you look fine.
They give you clean bills, so-called, and they send you home.
Come back next year.
What are they waiting for?
Literally, they're waiting for you to get sick, and they can find something.
They can do surgery or put you on medication.
Until then, doctors are not very useful for you.
But if that's the time, and then you already have lost your health.
Same with health insurance.
They don't pay anything to promote your health, prevent disease.
But once they begin to pay you, trust me, you have lost your health.
So really, it's a very misleading concept of we have a health care system.
That's why we're not very healthy as a nation.
Because we allocate all resources trying to deal with consequences of problems or disease rather than to prevent it and find the root causes that cause those problems.
So, well, tell me, you have a quite unique approach.
I've known you for quite some years, and you've been actually developing this approach, and I've been fascinated watching.
How these different elements of preventive medicine have come together in your work.
So tell me about that.
Yeah, when I come to this country, I heard so many new definitions about different medicine.
And we start with alternative medicine and complementary medicine, holistic medicine, mind-body medicine, functional medicine, regenerative medicine, anti-aging medicine.
And the one I like the best is called integrative medicine.
But if you ask 100 doctors what integrative medicine really means, they all give you different kinds of answers.
So I feel like we really need a medical model that provides a framework for education, for clinical care, service, and for research, also for self-care.
So people can take that framework, easily apply them, and like a checklist they can do every day and to take care of themselves.
So that medicine I called four-dimensional medicine because it addressed the fundamental four dimensions of human being.
When I was thinking about it, I keep going back to what human being is made of, right?
If you look at it, you really see four pillows.
First of all, most superficially, we are structural beings.
We have hair, skin, muscles, bones, organs, nerves, you know, all these structural parts of it.
I call it anatomy, right?
An atomic part of us.
And second, to support that, we have biochemistry.
Within our body, we fundamentally have a majority of our body has water, electrolytes, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids, and the proteins and fat and neurotransmitters, hormones.
all this biochemistry running inside us, that to make us the second dimension of human being.
But if I drop dead today, I would have my same structure I might have same biochemistry, but I'm dead.
Why?
Because I lost energy.
In Chinese medicine called the qi, in modern medicine, we declare somebody died because their heart, their EKG is flat.
That means they have no electronic activity in the heart.
Then the brain does not have brain waves.
That means no energetic activities in the brain.
So modern medicine does recognize and measure energetic level of human being at the same time as Chinese medicine always called the qi.
And when we say somebody died, we said he has stopped breathing or stopped having qi, right?
So same concept.
The third dimension is really the most important dimension is energetic dimension of human being.
And without that dimension, we don't have life.
We don't have...
We don't have activities.
We don't have feelings, thoughts, emotions, movements.
So all the signs of life is manifestation of the energy.
But we begin to see it, we measure it, and we're even trying to intervene energetically.
For example, today we have a cardiac conversion, electronic shock therapy.
The transgranular magnetic stimulation therapy, neurobiophieback, a lot of physical therapy using lasers and this and that.
So we're doing more than energetic intervention to human body.
But we don't understand what human energetic is about and what the human energetic physiology, psychology, and so on and so forth because the visual barrier.
Just like air.
You and I sit here, we think there's nothing between us.
No, we're buried in the molecules of oxygen, air, right?
But we don't see them.
The same thing with a lot of energetic things going on in our body, we have a visual barrier.
Imagine if we don't have x-ray machine today.
You know, we don't even know what your bone is like.
But today, if I scan you with an x-ray machine, I bypass your pies, your suits, everything.
I only see your skeletons, right?
So same thing.
If we have that imaging technology, can see human being at, let's say, quantum level, and we might be able to visualize.
All the energetic activities and structures and movements in you.
And that's what Chinese medicine was about.
Somebody, at some time, had a capacity, I don't know how, and was able to visualize that and describe the medicine at totally energetic dimensions.
So that's really the value.
of ancient or classic Chinese medicine for today's healthcare, because we're not there yet.
The last dimension is almost critical, is what a human being is really about.
I like the saying that a human being is a spiritual being or having a human experience.
So what does that mean?
That means really...
What lives in us is who we are.
It's our soul.
It's our spirit.
It's our mind or consciousness, whatever you want to call it.
So the dimension of the last dimension but most important dimension is how do we take care of that?
Because almost that part of the health determines the rest of it.
Human soul and spirit is almost like a human driver to a car, to a physical body.
So if we don't take care of that spirit part, that soul part, and no matter what we do with this body, it's not going to be enough.
So therefore, the fourth dimension has to be spiritual dimension.
You have to put all these four together because they're interrelated, interdependent on each other.
But with these four dimensions, it's very simple, easy to conceptualize, and easy to organize our learning materials, education, clinical service, and self-care.
So you really need to check every day.
What did I do for my...
You know, structural, physical health.
What did I do for my chemical balance?
What did I do for my energetic abundance?
And what did I do for my spiritual enlightenment?
Dr. Yang, we're going to take a quick break right now, and we'll be right back.
And we're back with J.D. Yang, CEO of Northern Medical Center.
Tell me a little bit about your background, because you're not just an acupuncturist.
You're not just a psychiatrist.
Really have been looking at medicine from a whole bunch of different vantage points.
Well, I have to say I'm very lucky.
I was born to a family that has carried a traditional Chinese medicine practice for many, many, many generations.
So all I can count, I can recognize is a fifth generation.
So people say I'm a fifth generation of Chinese medicine practitioner and a teacher.
And I started learning about it when I was 13 years old.
But when I had the opportunity to go to medical school in China, my father, who taught me Chinese medicine, insisted I should go to medical school to learn modern medicine because he believed at that time that the combination of it should be the most powerful one.
So I wanted to learn all the...
Modern medicine, of course, that's where the confusion starts.
Because, for example, Chinese medicine says the kidney is the way to determine the blood production.
And modern medicine says, no, it's the bone marrow that produces the blood.
And so, until later, I discovered it was a hormone coming from the kidney.
That stimulated the bone marrow, and that produced the blood.
Fascinating.
That hormone is called atheropoietin.
Today it's become a medicine for people after chemotherapy because their bone marrow gets inhibited.
They get anemic.
So they have to take this atheropoietin to stimulate the production of the red blood cell.
But you can see the parallel of the two medicines.
And I always thought, okay, well, that discovery was in the 1970s, 1980s.
And if people knew what Chinese medicine had been saying for a thousand years and took that seriously and studied that kidney, probably they discovered it's a hormone probably 50 years sooner, earlier again.
I'm just saying.
So that's why I recognize.
Maybe when we do research, we should not be using modern medicine methodology to test whether Chinese medicine works or not.
It's the opposite.
We should use Chinese medicine theory as a hypothesis to design modern medical research.
In this way, we probably will get...
One of the things you hear a lot today, especially among people who are in this Maha Make America Healthy Again movement, they'll say, aha, well, there probably isn't a lot of money in those sorts of studies.
You can't patent that, right?
And that's the reason it's not being studied.
There's a lot of suspicion that...
The large amount of money being made in the big pharmaceutical companies actually prevents cheap and preventative therapies from actually being the norm.
What's your take on that?
Well, there's truth to that.
Definitely people go into where they can generate profit, go where they can put their hands on.
Because if you think about modern medicine, they start from what?
Anatomy.
Dissect the dead body.
So everything has to be visible, touchable, right?
So everything starts from there.
But health doesn't start from something visible.
Health starts from something.
Life starts from something invisible.
Starts from the soul, right?
Then you have energy.
Then you have chemistry.
Then you have a body.
Okay, and so therefore it's hard.
So people do not get on the health part is because health is difficult and nobody really knows how to take care of health.
If they're getting information from pharmaceuticals, from the private sectors, they educate that every disease has a drug for it.
And all you need to ask your doctor to give you medicine, that's it.
Nobody get educated about how to eat, how to make choices in the food, how to sleep, how to exercise, and how to manage stress, how to recognize stress, and how to keep your energy flows.
You know, if your doctor aren't paid only to prescribe medicine...
Only to talk to patients for 15 minutes.
And only paid for doing surgeries.
And they're not motivated to do anything else, health-wise.
And today is really bad.
As you mentioned, I'll give you some specifics.
So we think people sick should be hospitalized.
Okay, great.
But do you know how many people died in hospital due to medical error?
Medical error means it's just by accident somebody made a mistake.
That person died.
That's called medical error.
And in the United States, it's over 100,000 people a year.
100,000 people a year is the fourth leading cause of death, almost equivalent.
But if you combine that with the infections in the hospital, contaminations and other...
Side effects of treatments.
On top of that, there's called a adversary reaction of medication.
And that's another thing.
Another 100,000 people would die from that.
That means patients didn't do wrong things.
They take the medicine as prescribed.
Doctors didn't do anything wrong.
They prescribed the medication according to the guidelines.
It's just the...
Out of bad luck.
There are three million emergency visits are caused by adversary drug reactions.
Among them, 100,000 people would die.
The current model of medicine heavily dependent on pharmaceutical products and surgical interventions is really not contributing too much to the health of the population.
Which really means they don't get into this point.
They need this kind of intervention or need this kind of medication.
So we have to define what really health is.
Without that, we can't really transform our system from disease care to health care.
Something that strikes me as we're talking here, again, it all comes down to this preventative or community medicine or preventative medicine.
Oh, there's this whole sort of dimension.
And there seems to be an interest in changing that in this new administration that's coming in.
What do you think they should be doing?
We really need to allocate funding to study health.
So that's one thing.
It doesn't mean you have to spend more money.
It just means you have better ideas, better focus, and a better organization, utilization of existing infrastructure and talents.
In integrated medicine, we can do very vigorous research and produce the strong evidence and to support that.
On the other hand, on the medical side, We need to establish exemplary medical centers, inpatient, outpatients, and everything between, to show how integrative health and medicine are practiced, applied to them.
As an example, not also as a training centers or teaching facilities.
So that will be, I think we need that.
Yes.
We need to change everything else, but can we just build something, set a prototype, you know, show it works, show the outcomes, show how it saves money for the government and for patients, how it gives access to everyone, and how it actually generates better health outcomes so the United States is not at the bottom.
When we compare with the health status of other advanced countries, developed countries, I would strongly recommend to restrict or design different incentive system that make the surgeon to operate less, make the use of expensive imaging system less, and so that people can really Utilize that when it is absolutely needed.
And particularly not use it as a primary tool of diagnosing patients, but assistant tool.
The primary tool should be doctor.
And that will save a lot of money.
And we should have a real health care insurance that reimburses health care.
Providers like nutritionists, the UGAR teachers, acupuncturists, herbalists, lifestyle counselors, stress management specialists, we should really pay them to help the patients to stay healthy.
And primary care doctors should be paid to prevent the patient from getting sick, not just checking them and treating them when they're sick.
And I think we should really limit pharmaceuticals to advertise directly to the general public.
We should limit, restrict their access to the governments and to save money on the lobbies.
And they should not allow to fund research to the public institutions or universities.
They can do all the research in their own labs or something like that.
There should be more regulation on that.
Everybody, we don't need to increase our healthcare spending.
We already overspend than any other countries.
We just need to reallocate them so that patients can become the benefits and become healthier.
Otherwise, the current system It's patients, in the way, become a consumer of a medical system, or whatever you call it, or establishment, and at the cost of their health.
That's a really bad system.
Well, Dr. J.D. Yang, it's such a pleasure to have you on.
Well, thank you for having me.
I'm glad to have the opportunity to communicate with you and your audience about four-dimensional medicine.
Thank you all for joining Dr. J.D. Yang and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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