Journey to the West | Pathology Documentary | Full Movie | Chinese Medicine

(gentle music) - Epidemic of deadly opioid drugs based on natural or synthetic heroin. Addiction often starts with prescription drugs. - [Reporter] An increasing reliance on opioids. A review into the growing problem of prescription drug addiction. - [Reporter] Nearly 200,000 people in the UK will experience a migraine today. - [Reporter] Symptoms of fibromyalgia include increased sensitivity to pain. - [Reporter] A severe throbbing at the side of the head that can last for hours or days. - Is t

he UK facing its own crisis with prescription painkillers? - [Speaker] Long-term use of these drugs cause real harm and problems for the majority of individuals. (calm music) (calm music) - Chinese medicine has a different medical model, that's the best way to explain it. We have a biomedical model and it's fantastic, does great things, but there are other medical models and I think we need that. I think we're missing out on that in the UK. (calm music) - People ask you questions when you are an

acupuncturist, you know, and throughout my career I've had this, "Oh, you're an acupuncturist. Does it work?" - [Speaker] It's your view, is it that acupuncture is bogus medicine? - [Speaker] Absolutely, yes. - [Speaker] Along with acupuncture, you get a whole pile of mystic garbage coming in, which we just don't need. (calm music) - Chinese medicine in a general overview for centuries has been a primary medicine in not only China, places like Korea, Japan. - To be simple it's really to promote

your own healing power to heal yourself. Whether you use herbs or whether you use acupuncture, it's just to promote your own healing power. (calm music) - In China, Chinese medicine is called Zhongyi Chinese medicine. It's not called Chuantong Zhongyi like Traditional Chinese Medicine. It was invented as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), specifically for consumption in the West. Chinese thought that calling it traditional would make it more popular in the West, which they were right. But even

the term Chinese medicine like Zhongyi in China. Zhongyi came only into existence in the late 19th, early 20th century. Before that, it was just Yi, it was just medicine. So I think it's really important to understand that what we call TCM is not a 2,000 or 5,000-year-old thing. It's a version of Chinese medicine that facilitated integration with Western medicine. (calm music) - This is a traditional medicine based in its philosophy and it has this history of 2,000 years. But actually, Chinese

medicine isn't like that. It's changed over the years, over that 2,000 years. And so what's been useful is getting that history of China coming in to our understanding so we can see where the ideas of the medicine now have actually come from, which makes you more able to critique those medicines and to understand where they've come from. (calm music) (calm music) - I went to a Chinese medical college. All the teachers were Western trained Chinese medical doctors. At a certain stage, Mao actually

wanted to promote Chinese medicine so all these people decided to take Chinese Medicine as well as Western medicine so they all have a Western medical background. There was one description called walking with two legs rather than one, okay? If you only know West medicine, you hop with one leg and if you know the Chinese medicine as well as Western medicine, so you walking with two legs. The first two years was very solid Western medicine. It's only toward the third year we started to do Chinese

medicine. I didn't like it. And suddenly, you are introduced with the Yin and the Yang and the Qi and the Blood It's so much easier to take in Western medicine than Chinese medicine. I hated third year, you know, all this Qi business did my head in. Toward the fifth year, we all went into hospital in paediatric department. There were children on antibiotic, couldn't get temperature down with pneumonia. And the Chinese medical doctor was called and they gave children some Chinese herbs. The temp

erature went down. So I thought, "Oh, this is something." (calm music) What can I do for you today? - I suffer from regular migraines. I get them every week, sometimes more than once a week. - When did this start? - Seven years ago. I'd say 2014, yeah. - What happened in 2014? - I started working. I'm a producer. I work in broadcast. You know, if there's breaking news, I'm the person in what we call the chair. So, pressure, yeah. - Migraines are responsible for a huge morbidity in the community.

Acupuncture is the best treatment for migraine. Looking at the data, it's right up there, you know, in terms of its rates. So we should be treating at least half of our migraine patients. (calm music) - The best way I think I can come up with to describe my migraines is to have a hammer inside my head. Usually, the back of my head, base of my skull is where it starts. It usually travels to the kind of back of my eye. So I'll get it behind my eyes, around my temples. And the worst migraine is wh

en you get what's called an aura. So a bit before the migraine hits, I'll start getting white flashes. And again, there's a sadness to it because I know it's coming and I know there's very little I can do about it. I do take a painkiller in the hopes that it either numbs it or mitigates it somehow, and I go into a dark room. (mysterious music) I was essentially put on a medication that's considered an antidepressant, but it's widely prescribed for migraines. I did see a decrease in the frequency

of migraines and even the amount of pain I felt was also diminished, but I felt very lethargic, couldn't get out of bed and decided it wasn't worth feeling less pain. (mysterious music) - Chinese medicine is such a different form of medicine from biomedicine. It does see the body in a very different way. If you think back to more than 2,000 years, biomedicine comes out of the Greek culture and the Greek philosophy and Chinese medicine comes out of its Chinese philosophy. And if you think of the

Greeks, they really look at the body in that you think of their statues. The good man was a strong warrior. Their statues have muscles where muscles don't actually exist because they had to be so strong. If you look at the pictures of the Chinese, they are these willowy creatures with these lines of acupuncture channels traced through them. It's such a different approach. If you think of that different way and it sets up a different approach to the body. - I will start asking you a few question

s. Those questions might appear to be a bit odd. It's just to give me some idea what constitution you have. - Yeah, of course. - Okay, any trouble with your ear, nose, throat? - Yes, I have allergies, so I'm allergic to pollen and dust. - And any trouble with eyes? - I have a stigmatism, so I wear glasses, yeah. - Do you ever suffer from palpitations? You feel your heart racing? - If I'm in a very high pressured situation where I feel like my life might end if I, this doesn't happen. - Or have y

ou had that situation before? - Well, it's gonna seem so silly, but if we're interviewing someone on air, live, it's being broadcast around the world and we lose that person, we lose this, then I feel like palpitations and my heart is racing, but in general, no. I have been asked by doctors or recommended by doctors to take things like codeine and ibuprofen and other painkillers. I have also been told to quit my career and find something else to do. At least in my experience, neurologists are ve

ry interested in treating the symptoms and not the root cause. I just didn't find it very helpful overall. (gentle music) - While Western medicine is fantastic at your trauma surgery, at imaging and diagnosing, Chinese medicine attempts to treat the root of the disharmony as well as the manifestation. - The Chinese look much more at the harmony of our bodies with the natural world. So what they were looking at is the natural world with its rivers in its mountains, how that was manifest internall

y. So they see that relationship between the exterior and the interior. So it's understandable then that channels were sort of like rivers in the body, but in these rivers, there's rivers with blood flowing through them. And there's also rivers with this thing called Qi flowing through them. Qi is a major part of Chinese medicine. - The understanding of Qi is complex. You know, for me, it's the notion that things move. Whether it's through an actual fluid medium, whether it's through the nervous

system, none of those things exist in and of themselves by themselves, they all interact. And that Chinese medicine has found a way of just giving a stimulus to that movement. - Therefore, health problems are problems where this Qi doesn't flow properly. - It's the breath. It's the energy we get from food is Qi. It's the thing that makes us alive is the main thing. It's the thing that makes everything work. So you know, plants have Qi, people have Qi and Qi would be not there when you're dead a

t the end of the day. Qi can be too weak. And mainly, we'd know that through fatigue, being tired, too weak. Or it can be that the Qi of an organ isn't working well, so we're not digesting our food properly or we're not eliminating food properly or we're not breathing in, our lungs aren't working. The Qi of the lungs is not working, the Qi of the heart not working. It's not pumping the blood out through the body. And so what acupuncture is particularly and is about moving Qi, that's what acupunc

ture is all about. And you can do it through many things. You can either put needles in or exercise moves Qi. But the channels are probably best understood as networks where the Qi is focused and the points are of course, places where you can access the Qi. It's where the Qi comes to the surface and therefore, you can affect them by putting a needle in. - Difficulty comes if you get too stuck into what Qi is because it's usually translated as energy. But you can measure energy. How do you go abo

ut measuring Qi? - Acupuncture's been one of those things that's been moderately successful in the UK, but it's not got its correct place because it's difficult to measure. - Chinese medicine got established in this country primarily probably through the '70s. Although there is evidence that it started around the 50, '60s. There were a group of really key characters who all studied in France and then also went to Taiwan and studied. And they set up schools, training institutions of Chinese medic

ine. So the original training I had was one of those people and many of my colleagues trained with those original teachers as well. The course that I was involved in setting up was the second generation of it. Yeah, so we'd come through a training in the UK and then linked with the training in China. So then we start getting information from China as well. And this would've been going on the same in Australia, the same in the USA. There were these key people that I think had that real pioneering

instinct to bring something different out to the West. One key person was a guy called Ted Kaptchuk. He went to Macau and studied Chinese medicine, learned the language and studied Chinese medicine there. So he came back with some very interesting information from China. And I laugh when I think back to my original training. We were desperate for books, desperate for something to read. And there were these college notes that were coming out from the USA, from his course and you know, the photoc

opies of photocopies of photocopies that we were getting. Desperate for information, there was so little. - The first book I read about Chinese medicine was Ted Kaptchuk "The Web that has no Weaver." That Chinese medicine philosophy is so natural when you read it, especially by an author like Ted, it's a very basic philosophy which can be so precise as well. (calm music) - East Asian medicine has made a dramatic and unlikely migration. This movement of healing techniques, clinical skills, revere

d literature, traditional knowledge and distinctive philosophy has been unusually rapid. The swiftness has meant that thoughtful and critical examination can be in short supply. As a result, many Westerners have strange notions about Chinese medicine. Some of them see it as hocus pocus. The product of primitive or magical thinking. If a patient is cured by means of herbs or acupuncture, they see only two possible explanations. Either the cure was a placebo effect or it was an accident. Other Wes

terners have a more favourable but equally erroneous view of Chinese medicine. They assume that the Chinese system, because it is felt to be more ancient, more spiritual or more holistic, is also more true than Western medicine. Both attitudes mystify the subject, one by uncritically undervaluing it and the other by setting it on a pedestal. Both are barriers to understanding. - The language that Chinese medicine wraps itself around is difficult for the scientific community and the general publi

c to fully grasp. It will seem like mumbo jumbo. I've sat in meetings with doctors and physios. Where doctors said to me, "Oh God. Do we have to talk about this mumbo jumbo?" And that is, you know, I mean it was a few years back, but nonetheless that is sometimes how it is viewed. These terms seem unscientific. Yin and Yang is seen as fanciful almost. (mesmerising music) - The concept of Yin Yang is one of the basic principles of Chinese medicine and it's about opposites, Yin and Yang, but they'

re also entwined with each other. You can't have Yin without Yang, etc. The lightness and the darkness, the sunny side of the mountain, the shady side of the mountain and it changes and so the body can change as well. So it's a way of describing things. - Yin Yang theory is well illustrated by the traditional Chinese Daoist symbol. The circle representing the whole is divided into Yin and Yang. The small circles of opposite shading illustrate that within the Yin, there is Yang and vice versa. In

terms of the body, illnesses that are characterised by weakness, slowness, coldness and underactivity are Yin. Illnesses that manifest strength, forceful movements, heat and overactivity are Yang. They're used to explain the continuous process of natural change. - We're looking at the perfect circulation. Circulation of blood, circulation of hormones, circulation of nervous system and also circulation of emotion. And if everything is fluid and circulating, health prevails. The moment you start

having a blockage in any of the circulation, you create things happening that create disease. - Do you describe yourself a hot type of person or cold type? - I'm usually cold, yeah. - Which part of the body feels cold the most? The hands and feet or your body. - Hands and feet, yeah. - When you get those headache, do they start in the early morning or do? - Usually, it says the tension builds on, but sometimes, I do wake up and it's just there. (calm music) - So a patient gives you 50 different

symptoms, "I feel this, I feel that, I feel this, I feel that.." Chinese medicine I think is very, very good because it has both done this for so many years and it trains people in doing that, to pay attention. One of the reasons I'm here in in the UK is that at a certain point, the UK was a really very good place for Chinese medicine on many different levels. The Chinese, they called the UK, the paradise of Chinese medicine 'cause it was very easy to get in here and get a licence. But it was al

so easy to practise here. There was a big market, loads of people wanted Chinese medicine and if you look at the history, the UK is probably the first country in a Western country where Chinese medicine was integrated into education system. People from all over Europe used to come here and want to study here. - A group of us were getting together because there was a whole issue of the professional body going on. Yeah, like any new profession in a country, you have to get your professional body g

oing, you have to get your codes of practise, your codes of ethics. Part of that at the same time was actually looking at what the training was as well. There was sort of two key things. One, a group of us who'd been to China. So seeing a Chinese medicine as taught in China and as practised in China. And then looking at the professional body as well and how you would train people to that. Looking at things such as the ethics that you were teaching students, that you were learning as a practition

er, the patient practitionee relationship. And so a group of us got together and decided to form a school. (mesmerising music) - When I graduated in London School of Acupuncture, I was lucky to continue the clinical diploma in China in Nanjing. And we worked there for two months in a general hospital where we did acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine. Completely integrated in the general hospital, that is a system that they have in China. It's a normal part of your treatment in China to have n

eedle put in you while the doctors are having a cup of coffee and talking with people in the same room, big wards, full of patients. The initial consultation is very important and they have a treatment plan that you follow. So coming back to London, John Tindall was also trained in China. Already set up that kind of clinic in Lambeth Hospital in London for AIDS patients in the early '90s where London was actually suffering for the worst cases of AIDS crisis. (gentle music) - I originally caught

HIV in 1982, but there was no test around in those days. So both my partner and I took the test in 1984 and it came back positive. It was a huge, huge shock. They said, "You'll be lucky if you've got a year to live." Which was a bit of a devastating diagnosis. In the early days, people were dropping like flies. So my peer group of friends who I knew in the late '80s and early '90s, I would say that 90% of those people are now dead. Everybody thought that it was an American disease. So the rules

and was don't get involved with any Americans because you might catch this gay plague as it was being called at the time. (dramatic music) I think it was about 1984, '85, the government actually started the Don't Die of Ignorance campaign. Which actually was a really, really scary TV ad and wasn't very nice about the results of catching HIV. It was basically saying it's a death sentence. In 1996, I had a really bad fever. When I finally collapsed, I kinda knew that I was gonna go into hospital a

nd it was gonna be a bit of a rough ride. Having seen so many of my friends die of it, I guess I was resigned to the fact of what I was gonna go through. So I stayed in hospital for 3 1/2 months and I was offered AZT and I felt quite highly pressurised by the hospital to take this drug, but I'd had lots of friends who had taken the drug and I watched them die one by one and I was convinced that it was as a result of AZT and in retrospect, it's known that the dosage of AZT that they were giving y

ou actually was highly, highly toxic. So I went through a lot of different combination therapies because of various different side effects. Felt like I was walking on glass and also it felt like my feet were burning up. So in all there was about 14 different pills a day, having to take them at different times of the day. So it was a really, really tough regime to deal with. I went back to the doctors and said, I can't bear "the side effects that I'm getting from this." So I was recommended to se

e an acupuncturist at the Gateway Clinic and this is a free service for people with HIV. In terms of helping alleviate symptoms from having HIV itself and the drug side effects, acupuncture and Chinese medicine was one of the bright spots on the horizon. - What was interesting with the AIDS patient and the application of the Chinese medicine philosophy, with a virus, which was explained in Chinese medicine as a fire toxin, which goes straight into the blood level in Western medicine too as a vir

us. As a fire, you could see young patients in their twenties, thirties completely burning the essence of a person, ageing in front of you within weeks. And the fire toxins also represented a lot of herpes, shingles, poison coming out of those patients. So the combination of Chinese herbs and acupuncture in a pretty much dramatic situation was creating the perfect environment to basically apply the Chinese medicine. - The gateway clinic was a place where there were maybe seven or eight beds in o

ne room. - The patient was sent by the hospital to start with, but then GPs heard that Lambeth hospital clinic treated HIV patient and started sending the patient. Then word of mouth became very quick in that community. Seriously, in the morning, you had a queue of patients from eight in the morning till eight at night till the last patient was treated. Eventually, thanks to science, HIV became treated much better by Western medicine and so we started to treat all the side effect of the medicati

on that HIV patient were put on. - I found that having acupuncture helped my wellbeing and I actually felt listened to by the therapist. I felt they were treating the whole person rather than just the disease. I mean, I would never have believed in 1996 that I would've reached the ripe old age of 61 because the trajectory in the early '80s was that it was a death sentence. So it's been quite the journey. The gateway clinic's one of the few examples where you've got a traditional Chinese medicine

clinic operating within the NHS. They get referrals from GPs, but there's hardly anywhere else that operates like that in the UK. (gentle music) - In the '90s, we thought gaining statutory regulation for the acupuncture profession was important so that not anybody could call themselves an acupuncturist and it changes the perception of who you are in terms of credibility. - Statutory regulation for any profession gives a degree of credibility. So the profession gets an uplift in terms of its sta

tus. (gentle music) - The first complementary profession to get statutory regulation was in fact the osteopaths. And the osteopaths had been trying for this for years and years and years and I think that they got statutory regulation partly because of all the complementary therapies, it most resembled orthodox medicine and chiropractic followed shortly afterwards and of course, that led us the acupuncture profession to think perhaps we might be next. Most of the work throughout all this period w

as actually done by a very dedicated group of people who donated their time. It's a unique time in history really, that that level of dedication and that sense of purpose in terms of trying to develop a new profession was important to us as an endeavour. - We produced a report, all the framework for statutory regulation, but it wasn't taken up by the Department of Health or government. We tried again in 2007 and we produced another report, but again, we became very low priority. - We were nearly

there with statute regulation, but the powers that be and the time and just, you know, some of it bad luck as well. It just never quite made it. They're statutorily regulated in Australia, so if they can be statutorily regulated there, why not here? The USA have much more position, it's not quite statutory regulation, but it is recognised by the health authorities, etc. Statutory regulation is a much bigger political issue and Chinese medicine still doesn't have that power in this country. - If

the profession was regulated, that would increase its status would make it much easier for acupuncturists to be incorporated within the national health system. That's a big barrier, not having regulated status. - Another reason that traditional acupuncture is difficult to sustain in an NHS environment is National Institute of Clinical Excellence. (gentle music) - The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence is a group that was put together to create guidelines and advice for the Na

tional Health Service. And so it involved the evidence-based medicine, revolution. So all the best techniques and the use of statistics and evaluating research to put those things together to try to come up with the best advice for healthcare. Evidence-based medicine has changed medicine tremendously. A lot of the old medicines that didn't work, we no longer use, but there've been some casualties of real, real things, good things that have been lost because they can't fit the evidence-based medi

cine model. Physical medicine as a whole has changed. You go to a hospital and see a physiotherapist, it's very unlikely you'll be touched. You'll get advice and you'll get an exercise sheet handed to you because that's what apparently the evidence supports. It doesn't support a lot of hands-on techniques. It's very difficult to test because you've got that problem of what do you do trying to be inactive. And acupuncture is teetering on that. Sometimes, it gets recommended in guidelines and some

times, it doesn't. - There'd been trials going on that compared acupuncture to some kind of sham version of acupuncture, which was meant to be delivering a sort of placebo version of acupuncture in the same way that with drugs, you'd have the drug versus the placebo version of the drug. - The problem we have with many sham techniques and how they're performed in big trials is that they are like a gentle form of acupuncture. And so by just going, "Oh, we're not going on the point where it says in

the book. We're gonna go a centimetre away and put it in the same muscle." Of course, from a physiological point of view, you're stimulating the same nerves. So it's unlikely to be physiologically very different. And in these three-arm trials and there are several of these three-arm trials, this is typically what you see. Sham acupuncture is typically better than guideline-based conventional care, but the very rigorous approach ignores that. The question is does it have efficacy above what is c

onsidered to be a placebo and how big is that difference? And the problem there is you can look at both of them say, they're just a very good placebo and that's one argument. There isn't any effect. Acupuncture doesn't actually work there better than sham, therefore, it's all just a placebo. My argument to that would be, show me a placebo that's 50% better than guideline-based conventional care in any field you like, and I think you'll struggle. (mysterious music) - May I just feel your pulse an

d I'll do this one first? - Yeah. - Qi can be measured but it's what we would call a subjective measurement. It's not objective. You can't put a machine on the body and measure this thing called Qi. And when you feel the pulse, yes it is the radial artery that you're feeling. It's the same as in Western medicine, but you are feeling the qualities in the pulse. You're not just feeling for its fullness or its emptiness, but you are feeling for qualities. - Okay, can I see your tongue please? - Ton

gue diagnosis is another very developed aspect of diagnosis. All these different methods you combine together to form a picture of the person and make your diagnosis. The organs of Chinese medicine are the same organs as in Western medicine, but their function is wider in Chinese medicine. So for instance, the organs are said to control the emotions of the body and different emotions tie up with different organs and different parts of the body, the muscles or the bones with different organs. So

something that somebody will come in with that seems to be odd aberration of different symptoms. In Chinese medicine you can often hold them together and pull them together into one thing to then be able to treat. The Chinese will talk about invasion of Chinese word is evil Qi. Yeah, the Xieqi. It's invasion of pathogens. I prefer the word Evil Qi rather than using the word pathogens. But you know, we're modernised in a way. And so these things come into the body, but they will talk about in ter

ms of a wind pattern. So I think often, Chinese medicine is sort of dismissed as being what are these ideas? You talk about wind and cold and damp. But they're ways of describing symptoms. So wind is about a sudden onset things that come and go are wind. (gentle music) - So people will say, "Oh my joints ache more when it's damp." So Chinese medicine understands why. Why this is. Western medicine has forgotten that. - Damp is about turbidity and it's about the function of the digestive system to

separate out the clear and the turbid in terms of the food that we eat. And when the turban gets into the system, we get heaviness, we get a muzzy head, we get heavy body. Yeah, things become sluggish in the body and it's very much affected by damp weather. So particularly in the UK, it's a very damp environment so people suffer from damp because that dampness has this impact on the digestive function. We describe arthritic pain in terms of it being hot or cold or damp. So dampness would be an

arthritic pain that would be heaviness, it would be stuck in one particular joint. Heat would be inflamed, it would be hot to touch and cold is strong pain. - You know, you feel buzzy in the summer. You know, when the sun's shining and everything's moving and you don't sleep so well because everything is still alive even at night, you know, it's all kind of moving faster. We all have this understanding of ourselves if we stop and think. And yet Chinese medicine has a way of codifying that in a w

ay and being able to offer a stimulus that facilitates that. - Okay, so you probably want to know what I actually found out from you. - Please. - Okay. And at the beginning, it's like energy is blocked. Then the body want to overcome those blocks and then it's almost like it's push, push. This throbbing is almost like there's something behind, push, push. Then eventually, if they can't push it through the headache develop into migraine. In Chinese medicine because it's come suddenly, they call i

t wind affecting the head. You know, you're probably familiar with the word Yin and Yang, it's almost like a form of heat. So therefore you get too much of Yang energy, there is too much heat. So your body really don't like noise, don't like even smell. You know, you're sensitive and also the light. You say that it initially started when you were under a lot of pressure, stress. The stress would affect the organ called the liver. And the liver organ is quite important organ to deal with our ener

gy flow our body. In Chinese medicine, it's largely influenced by our day-to-day base coping with the stress. Life pressure, work pressure, that all will affect the liver. If the liver organ is strong, you can cope with all this. Or if your liver weak, even smallest stress, it will mess up your liver energy. But once the body relaxes and the liver recuperating, eventually, it overcome the blockage or the barrier and then the headache disappears. - The Department of Health put in some really good

money towards supporting research and development in Chinese medicine. And the first person was Hugh MacPherson who got a research position at York University. The research that Hugh did was really important because what he developed was the idea of the pragmatic control trial, which allowed us to be using Chinese medicine in the way it's practised. - What Hugh and his colleagues did was say, "Well actually, we don't believe that there is a suitable sham treatment that's going to operate as a p

lacebo in an acupuncture context. What we think is particularly important here is whether acupuncture is better than whatever else there is on offer, usual care wise. If you add acupuncture into the mix, on top of whatever else they may have access to, "does that make you significantly better?" And you found that it did. In no short measure due to that, NICE decided that they would recommend acupuncture. - [Speaker] Should acupuncture be available on the NHS? In its latest guidance on back pain,

the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has approved the treatment. If you're not keen on pictures of needles like these, "you may need to look away..." - So we all rejoiced and said, "Yeah, wonderful." But of course, we know that the story then fell apart some years later when they reversed that decision. (gentle music) - For a small clinic like the Gateway Clinic, it makes a huge difference when research comes out and is validated by the guidelines and so it gives us, you kn

ow, a huge relief of being able to just concentrate on our work. If we want to grow and to be able to offer acupuncture in the NHS, there is absolutely no option but to do more research. (gentle music) - I lived through all the good times of Chinese medicine in the UK, including the times when Chinese medicine was integrated into the universities and when there was research money available for Chinese medicine. I think on a certain level, that was a really fortuitous moment. And it created loads

of opportunities also for me. I got into UK University and had my own research institute in the UK university dedicated to the exploration of Chinese medicine. That's kind of like unique. I don't think that could have happened at that moment anywhere else. - The school I was involved with decided that we would move into a university. Which was quite controversial. We were the first ones to be doing that and at one time, there were seven degree courses in universities. And then slowly, they all

got closed down. - Because we don't have a professional development ladder within Chinese medicine. We don't have undergraduate, postgraduate, MSCs, PhDs, and so on. It's very difficult for us to get inside universities and then get the research funding for research into our own profession. - There are courses in private colleges, they're accredited by the professional body and some of them have degree status, but they find it hard to get the resources for research. - I'm probably one of the doc

tors in the UK who knows the most about acupuncture research because I've been devoted to that for the last 25 years. But I couldn't get research funding to run an acupuncture project because I haven't got a PhD. And I haven't got, I'm not associated with a research institute. - One of the reasons for the courses being closed down in universities was the argument that public money should not be going towards courses that are teaching something that doesn't have a scientific basis to it. It seems

to be particularly coming from a science lobby that you shouldn't be able to call what you do a science. - Normally, science means to have an open mind. One of the key factors of science is you know that we don't have the answers, that we're trying to explore. - We're told we have to do more research, that there's no proof that acupuncture works or Chinese medicine works and yet, how do you get your research money if you're now not even part of a university? How do you maintain a profession and

try and keep up standards when the very places that you have to be part of to maintain those standards aren't allowing you and in fact, are pushing you out. I don't quite know where we go from here in terms of that. I thought we'd done everything we needed to do to raise our stage, to show what we were doing and capable of doing and it still wasn't enough. (dramatic music) - When you come with a far eastern tradition and you say, "What about this?" It's going to be on the wrong side of the fenc

e basically. There's going to be a little bit of bias against it. - When you have Chinese medicine, immediately it becomes rhino horns and tiger bones and with the COVID, it is pangolins. Chinese medicine doesn't use any tiger bones, any pangolin scales, any rhino horns. They're not part of the Chinese medicine pharmacopoeia. Then there is an illegal trade, yes, but that has nothing to do anymore with Chinese medicine in the present. That's the same as blaming Western medicine for cocaine use. B

ecause Western medicine used cocaine as a substance or used heroin as a substance or LSD was developed as a medication. And then say, "Oh, we should actually get rid of medicine because you know, there's an illegal trade in LSD and heroin." Yes, that's the kind of logic. - At the moment, because of the pandemic, there is this sense that Chinese people are being discriminated against more explicitly and more anger directed towards them. - There has been an interest in acupuncture around in Europe

for hundreds of years and that interest in acupuncture ebbs and flows with how China is perceived. - The theory of Chinese medicine absolutely had a huge amount to offer as a response to COVID. I don't think I heard anything of that in the media whatsoever. And I'm not saying that people are blaming Chinese medicine, but there has to be some sort of alignment in terms of how people feel about it. This lack of understanding of what we are trying to do, of who we are, and what Chinese medicine is

about. And it's just a putting down always of other cultures. It's just another example that the biomedical approach is the only answer. There are other ways of doing things. We have to be open to other ideas. (gentle music) - The opiates are the key pain drug and they are tremendously effective. Opiates are by far and away, one of the best medications for acute pain. Acute pain. The problem we have is that when you use them long term, they stop working. Drugs like this, you end up needing bigg

er and bigger doses. After a short space of time, it doesn't do anything, but they're still on those opioids and they don't wanna come off them. So that creates a problem and that's the opioid crisis that was first really appreciated in the states. And the life expectancy in the United States started to curve downwards for the first time in history because a lot of young people were dying of opiate overdoses, most of which was prescribed. And so that's when it first came to attention and thought

, "Oh, we need to do something about this. This is the problem." - The medical profession has sometimes had to acknowledge that they don't have all the answers. In terms of acknowledging a weakness per se within their own belief, structures, and models, then they can make concessions to looking at things differently. And you know, I think the latest case in point is the use of painkillers for chronic pain and the recommendation in the new draught NICE guidelines that acupuncture should be consid

ered for the treatment of pain. - NICE guidelines are coming out saying. "You know, these things shouldn't be used. We shouldn't be using codeine and aspirin and paracetamol even for these things," and recommending acupuncture for chronic pain. So there's a real shift gone on. - It's no to gabapentinoids and it's no to opiates and it's no to paracetamol and it's no to a whole host of drugs that don't meet the same criteria, which is brave. (gentle music) - I was a very quick convert to acupunctu

re because of the way it slowed me down in a good way. Just I felt my body decompress in a way that I had never felt before and nothing has ever compared to that feeling. And the pain also being less intense. And ultimately, you know, just couldn't keep it up because it's not affordable. (gentle music) - In an ideal world, I think patients should have a choice to have Chinese medicine and acupuncture as a part of their healthcare because some patients do benefit from this care. They should have

that choice. (gentle music) - Chinese medicine has stood the test of time and distance and it's been able to do that because it's got a flexibility about it. Although it has a basic tenet of ideas, and philosophical principles that hold true throughout time because they're based in nature. And so for me, it has longevity. It has power in its understanding of the world. - There's some real ill health in this country and I think Chinese medicine has some good understandings of that. - Mental healt

h is a huge problem at the moment. Diabetes is rocketing. All these things that if there's support at an early stage, Chinese medicine has a real strength. - It might be useful to explore together with Western medicine. - The Western medical model could be very much enhanced if there were more direct collaboration. - Integrating the two model of health so they can work with each other because they work with each other very well and I think they can learn from each other immensely. - We'll carry

on because patients keep coming to us and that at the end of the day, is what it's all about. I guess we could be conning everybody. I'm not sure. That's a lot of people to be conning if it doesn't work. (gentle music) (mesmerising music)