Why is there a different Chinese medicine paradigm that’s labelled “traditional”? Why do people in the West only tend to discover it when they’re confronting chronic illness? Does it ask us to adopt an alternative metaphysics?

Allie Tao is a Chinese Medicine practitioner in Portland, Oregon. She didn’t set out to join the healing professions like the rest of her family, but her own journey of cultural analysis and engagement, illness and recovery conspired to lead her there.

I was fascinated to talk to Allie about how human health is conceived in Chinese Medicine - being constituted of mind and matter, patterned in ways that reflect all of nature, and accessible through symbolic thinking. What I learned doesn’t seem at odds with Newtonian causality or the principles of biomedicine. But it is broader, and incorporates more of the experience of consciousness.

Like most of my excursions on this podcast, this is a short and amateurish glance into a big topic. It was some unusually helpful and challenging grist for the mill.

Outro: “Cutting up an Ox”, by Chuang Tzu, translated by Thomas Merton, read by Allie Tao

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