How Does Chinese Medicine Prevent Infectious Diseases?
This winter, various infectious diseases have come on rather fiercely.
First sporadic cases of plague appeared in Inner Mongolia; then there was a brucellosis outbreak in Lanzhou; recently, the unexplained pneumonia in Wuhan has also set people on edge. And then there is the African swine fever that began last year and has not ended even this year, also affecting everyone's life.
Of course, the most headache-inducing is still viral influenza. Every winter and spring is the high-incidence season for flu. In modern society people are highly mobile, most people live in cities, and it is hard to avoid being in crowded places; so every flu epidemic always infects many people.
Chinese medicine has long recognized infectious diseases; both the Shanghan (Cold-Damage) school and the Wenbing (Warm-Disease) school of TCM are devoted mainly to the study of infectious diseases. From ancient times to the present, infectious diseases have been very common; the colloquial term "human plague" refers to the various infectious diseases.
TCM has two great principles for preventing infectious diseases: one is to avoid vacuous wind and thieves' evil at the proper time, and the other is that when upright qi is retained within, evil cannot assail.
The first principle means that one must evade all kinds of foul weather and sources of infection. The ancients long ago recognized that abnormal climate and various sources of infection are the two major triggers of infectious-disease outbreaks, and that one must avoid them.
Therefore the chapter on regulating the spirit according to the four seasons of the Huangdi Neijing advocates: in the three months of winter, the period of closing and storing, go to bed early and rise late, seeking warmth, and do not let the skin leak qi. This is the way of nourishing storage. Going against it injures the kidney; in spring this leads to flaccidity and reversal.
In winter one must keep warm and avoid strong wind and bitter cold. Do not do too much vigorous outdoor exercise and do not disturb one's yang qi, because TCM holds that the defensive-yang qi is the body's most reliable barrier against external evil; if you disturb your yang qi, you create an opportunity for pathogen-evil to slip in while the defense is weak.
The second principle means that one must raise a person's immunity. Once our immunity is raised, we can resist the invasion of various infectious viruses. When an infectious disease is epidemic, many people still do not catch it; the root cause is that their body's immunity is strong.
The key to raising immunity lies in a regular routine and, above all, sufficient sleep. From kindergarten until now, my son has rarely asked for sick leave. Every time there is a major flu epidemic, a large swathe of his classmates is infected, but he rarely catches it—and he does not even get the flu vaccine. The reason is none other than that I imposed a hard rule at home: the whole family must go to bed before ten o'clock.
Because of this hard rule, my son also developed the habit of not procrastinating; he always finishes his homework before eight or nine o'clock.
On top of that, whenever any family member feels unwell, I deal with it immediately. When a cold first begins, it is easy to handle; usually a dose of medicine plus a night's sleep solves the problem. So for many years our family has rarely been troubled by colds, and as for pneumonia, we have kept a zero record.
The reason I require my son to study medicine with me, regardless of whether he wants to be a doctor in the future, is precisely that I do not want our family, after he grows up, to be thrown into chaos over every little ailment.
I see many families around me; once the season of major infectious epidemics arrives, the household is in a frantic rush, old and young alike—this one has just recovered, that one has fallen ill again. All of this comes from not understanding the TCM way of health cultivation. If people knew a little about nourishing life, I believe things would be much better.