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Growing numbers of Canadians are embracing traditional Chinese medicine and its ideas about prevention.

It’s a system that has kept the Chinese people healthy with an enviable history of longevity without drugs.

“The treatment of chronic ailments is the forte of Chinese medicine,” says Albert Fok, an importer of traditional Chinese herbs and product supplies in Vancouver’s Chinatown. Yet chronic ailments often baffle Western medical orthodoxy as they plague our population.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), more than 3,000 years old, is based on a system of vital life energy and its flow through the body. Largely unrecognized by conventional Western medicine, TCM’s preventive strategies and treatments are attracting more and more Canadians.

We are learning to balance the body’s opposing forces of yin and yang with subtle changes in diet, exercise, environment, and lifestyle throughout the seasons. Herbal medicine is central to TCM practice and provides remedies for a wide range of ailments.

TCM preventive strategies derive from the concept of “wholeness.” The body is a whole and all parts operate in interdependence through channels of energy, often referred to as chi. When energy is blocked for some reason, it must be restored. A doctor of traditional Chinese medicine can tell what’s wrong without asking. Your pulse, complexion, and tongue reveal all she needs to know - based on her knowledge of the working of the body’s energy systems: nerves, lymph, and blood circulation. The TCM practitioner prescribes traditional herbs, acupuncture, acupressure, and other modalities to unblock these systems to allow energy to flow once more.
Traditional Chinese medicine views the body as a reflection of the natural world. Flows of energy and fluids in the body are spoken of as channels, rivers, seas, and reservoirs. The liver is the “father of all organs” and the kidneys are the “mother of all organs.” When these organs, and others, do not have the raw materials to function, the result is disorder and deficiency.

But TCM is not folk medicine. It’s a professional discipline, based on a system of understanding that is totally alternative to the Western concept of disease. The World Health Organization supports its study, having established seven collaborating centres of traditional medicine and pharmacology where specialists and scholars meet to observe and learn.

The centuries-old method of education for Chinese herbalists was to apprentice to a master. One generation passed on to another its wisdom, empirical observation, knowledge of anatomy, and common sense. It’s a system that has kept the Chinese people healthy with an enviable history of longevity without drugs.

Albert Fok is a fourth-generation owner of the Kiu Trading Company and operates two herbal stores in Chinatown employing four registered herbalists. The company has been in business for 130 years. The use of the herbs themselves dates back for centuries. Yet these herbs are both unknown and unrecognized by the Drug Directorate of Canada’s Health Protection Branch (HPB). Because of restrictions imposed in recent years, Chinese herbalists have difficulty importing many herbal products that are vital to traditional Chinese medical practice. In a series of meetings with HPB he has conveyed his “concern for the proper survival of ethnic practices.” He was subsequently invited by the federal health minister to sit as a member of the newly formed Expert Advisory Committee on the Natural Health Products Directorate, now passed into legislation.

“We trust the process,” Fok explains optimistically, “and are here to dispense our herbs within the present regulations. New regulations will come in, but there will be a period of grace in order for practitioners to meet requirements.”

He explains, “The face of TCM in Canada is inevitably changing.”

Of BC’s 450 practitioners of TCM, about 300 of them practise in Vancouver, with perhaps two dozen in Chinatown. Some herbalists operate from the corner of an herbal shop in the traditional way but the majority have independent clinics.

Solomon Yeung, for instance, an acupuncturist and acupressurist, operates a busy Vancouver clinic that treats nerve and muscular problems, migraine and other headaches, sports injuries, smoking addiction, and other chronic problems, all without drugs. He may have learned his expertise in the traditional way through working with a “master”, but he practises in the Western way. Yeung and other TCM practitioners are bridging the past and the present in a way that will help the unfamiliar feel comfortable about giving TCM a try.

Is Your TCM Practitioner Certified?

Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) are regulated only in British Columbia, where they must hold a professional licence issued by the College of Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners and Acupuncturists of British Columbia.

Regulation of TCM practitioners is still pending in Ontario. Since much of the education behind TCM traditionally is learned in apprenticeship, Ontario considers that the profession’s educational requirements for entry still only partially fulfill government criteria.

In most provinces, however, TCM practitioners earn credentials through programs available at various private institutes. These often require between three and five years of training, depending on the specialties learned, and admission requirements may include some post secondary education or relevant work experience.

To choose a qualified TCM practitioner, consider training, length of practice, areas of specialization, language ability, and word-of-mouth referrals from satisfied patients. Formal TCM training should include at least three years of full-time study.

In BC, look for the following titles, which the BC College grants after an applicant with the appropriate educational training passes the associated licensing examinations and safety courses:

• Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine (DrTCM),
• Registered TCM practitioner (RTCMP),
• Registered TCM herbalist (RTCMH) or
• Registered Acupuncturist (RAc).

Rhody Lake is a professional researcher, journalist, and former editor of alive.

Source: alive #255, January 2004