This is a YouTube video titled "Body Out of Balance? Bring it Back to Harmony with Chinese Herbal Medicine with Chloe Weber" containing a discussion from April 19, 2022. The content features Chloe Weber interviewing an expert about the principles of Chinese herbal medicine, its holistic approach to the body, and comparisons with other traditional systems like Ayurveda. The conversation explores the integration of ancient healing practices and their relevance to modern health and biohacking concepts.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. I want to go into just teaching people listening about the basics of Chinese herbs. So talk to me about what they are, what are the big categories and what's different from, you know, oh, I take American ginseng, I use herbs, you know, I take oregano, kind of what's different.
So in Chinese medicine, instead of looking at a silver, instead of having like a one to one correlation between a symptom and a cure, we're looking at the dynamic interplay of the body. So we sort of look at the body as a microcosm of the macrocosm. So everything that we see in nature we use to sort of describe the actions and what's going on in the body. So the same is with herbs. We're really looking at the whole plant and how it's interplaying with the body. And then instead of just doing one herb, we're using different herbs together to create a formula so that we can not only address the branch which are the symptoms, but we can address the root so we can really get to the underlying health issues while we're also addressing the symptoms that are causing you pain or insomnia or whatever that is.
If I was to summarize that, I would say kind of systems biology. The body is a dynamic system. And I look at tcm, the traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, as well as some of the weird Russian stuff that we don't know so much about, but the very ancient lineage shamanic root out of Mongolia and Siberia kind of things as some of the original biohacking, that's out there because they were looking at the system of the body and how do we influence it. So whether you're talking about things like different sounds of bells in each ear, you'll see that in China, you'll see that actually in many different cultures that setting up a standing wave between the ears, like, oh, they were hacking the brain to put you in a state. And then, oh, let's take these performance enhancing herbs that's happened in every society that's ever lived, whether it's coffee, tobacco, or many, many other compounds, adaptogens were invented, as far as we can tell, in China for military use. And so you go back like, okay, this is in us. And the cultures that have been studying these for the longest seem like they all go back to systems biology. But for you and me as Westerners, at least, when you put on your western hat, because you can go both ways with your brain, if you can think the way you can about Chinese herbs. We're going to look at the system of the body in a different hierarchy. Like we might look at it from a medical. Oh, there's organ systems and things like that. But then as soon as you put on your meditation thing, actually it's all about your chakras. And then you do your qigong, like Mantak Chia, when he was on, he's like, well, you have to put a breath in this order between your liver and your colon and your stomach and your lungs and your heart. And if you don't do it in that order, then the qi won't flow. I think he's probably right because he's 80 something and has been doing this for a long time and has amazing magic powers. But man, those systems don't seem like if I put them on top of each other. I'm not sure that there's a 100% correlation there. How do you deal with that disparate view where they don't always match?
Well, I think that they don't have to match. I mean, they're separate systems and separate ways of looking at the body. Like Chinese medicine, it's the only lineage that we can actually look based back at classical texts from 2,500 years ago, read them and understand what they were going through and how they were treating pathogenic factors of that time. So. But Ayurveda has a different way of describing things. And you know, I think that they all sort of interplay similarly and they're all working on the same systems. They're all honoring the fact that, you know, we have an energetic body, that we have a spirit, that we have a soul, that that actually affects, you know, how our body's functioning physiologically as well and how we're engaging with the world and our food and our diet, I mean, all of it. So I feel like they're all very complementary, but they're just separate ways of getting to the same end. So it's sort of the many roads to the top of the mountain phenomenon.
