WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

• In the past 20-plus years of practice, I have often heard colleagues condescendingly speaking of systems they do not practice while suggesting that their system, training, and lineage are superior.

• A psychotherapist named Rosenzweig promoted the dodo verdict theory in 1936: As long as a patient received mental health treatment, regardless of the style, the patients had positive outcomes.

• If we accept the dodo verdict as plausible for our field, we no longer need to waste hours on social media debating colleagues.

“You cannot be tied down to one theory without also knowing that another surely exists.” — Wang Zizhong, Classic of Nourishing Life with Acupuncture and Moxibustion

One of the strong points of traditional Asian medicine is that it does not discredit or deny its existence when confronted with new information. Instead, it absorbs and assimilates the information into the rich tapestry of knowledge and tradition. Look no further than our materia medica for many examples of this. Frankincense, myrrh, and American ginseng are the first in a long line of borrowed herbs.

This openness to new concepts and practices applies to including modern technology in practices. Electric acupuncture, acupoint injection therapy, lasers, and even microneedling devices are great examples.

We know that traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is not one singular practice, but an attempt to be inclusive of various styles, systems, frameworks, and ideologies. This medical “stew” does not water down the medicine; instead, it gives a practitioner flexibility to adapt to the patient’s needs with a near-endless array of techniques.

The challenge is appropriately employing the correct techniques for the patient’s maximum benefit. With thousands of years of theory, method, and ideologies combined with modern research, new techniques, and an ever-expanding knowledge base, how is it possible to know which strategies and theories are the “best” for that patient at that moment in time, with that particular collection of signs and symptoms? Most of us, myself included, answer this question with our cognitive biases on full display.