Dave explores how Chinese medicine practitioners diagnose patients through pulse and tongue examination, and why these intuitive methods resist scientific validation. Experienced practitioners develop a feel for what works that numbers alone can't capture.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. Let's say you're looking at me, and if you were to examine me and say, ah, Dave, you need these herbs, how would you know? Like, what would you do to know?
So, typically, we'll take your pulse, we'll feel your pulse, we look at your tongue, we talk to you about your past medical history, what's going on. And with Chinese medicine, we're really looking for underlying patterns of disharmony. We're not looking for a disease state. We're really focused on trying to prevent disease from forming. So we're looking at where is your system weak? We might talk to you from your pulse or from your tongue or from something you say. We might realize that Dave has a past medical history of mold exposure and has weak digestion. Then from there we look and create a formula that's going to support the digestive functions and that's also going to support cognitive function. If you have mold exposure, that's something that you want to do. Maybe also look into ways to help detoxify. So it's really sort of finding where the body is out of balance and then working to bring it back into harmony and into homeostasis.
And the definition of balance is when you feel the pulse, it's even or. I've been mystified by this. So let me just go into that a little bit. I was CTO of one of the wristband companies, intel bought us for $100 million called basis. And we're the first company to get heart rate from the wrist the way your Apple Watch does now. But for some reason, what we could do then and even what the Apple Watch does now isn't enough to replicate what a Chinese medicine practitioner does. When they put a finger on your wrist, what are you doing that's so different there? I mean, I've read a few things about this, but seriously, it all looks the same to me. Like, enlighten me.
So we're feeling for the quality of the pulse. So we have different, three different places where we feel the pulse when you're on your wrist. And then from there we see, like, sometimes the pulse feels wiry or choppy or floaty. So that sort of gives us an indication of what the internal organs are doing. It's sort of like the tongue is, you know, also showcases sort of what's going on in the inside of the body. It's a way to look at what's going on actually on the outside. So, like, if you have a tongue that's really red and inflamed. Lots of inflammation, lots of heat. So that's how we look at it. Some of the pulse masters are just absolutely insane. Like, literally, they can take your pulse. They'll sit there for like 20 minutes, and then they'll be like, you had gluten last Tuesday. And you're like, how in the world would you possibly come up with that? So I'm definitely, by no means anywhere close to that, but I can definitely tell which organs are sort of out of function.
What I believe is happening there, and I want you to tell me if I'm. If you think I might be right or if you just think I'm completely wrong, is that when we look at double blind placebo controlled trials, we have this idea that we're going to take a group of people and we're going to test an intervention or a diagnostic method, and we're going to isolate everything else. The problem is that there's always a healer, a patient, and a diagnostic or treatment modality. And if you try to isolate the healer from the system, the, the people that I've worked with who are the most knowledgeable and intuitive like that, yes, they're checking your pulse, and yes, they're getting data from that. But they know because they know. And the mechanism of knowing is very hard to say whether it's because they've looked at 10,000 patients over their life. It's the same. You go into an ER, a doc who's been an ER doctor for 15, 20 years, they'll touch your artery to measure your pulse, and they know in about two seconds what your pulse is. And they're always right because they felt so many pulses. They just know how many beats per minute that is because. Because it's in them. And someone who's worked with drug and alcohol addiction, someone walks in, they're like, oh, yeah, that guy's an alcoholic, but he hasn't drunk for three days because he smells like that. But what. Actually, all that stuff is real. It's like Neo in the Matrix. So sometimes I think it's more than just the pulse. Or am I just giving people more credit than they deserve?
I think it's both. I mean, I think I certainly. You see, patterns happen over and over again. You know, like, you see how people come in. You see, I mean, even from somebody's demeanor, you can sort of start to know what's going on in their body. We can really look a lot at the face, the ear, all of these different things, and get an idea of somebody's overall health. But I've definitely had teachers who have been, like, who have called out people's, like, trauma and like, sexual abuse from their childhood. That's. There's just no way that they could possibly know that. And that's a rare practitioner. But I think that what they sort of do is channel, you know, they go into that sort of qigong, energy, space, space, and energetically somehow tap into a different level that I've yet to learn.
