Oriental Medicine: A Lifelong Study

The study of Oriental Medicine is a lifelong devotion. We know we must always be learning, whether in school or as a licensed practitioner. We study to pass the next mid-term or final; we work to pass our board exams; and we continue to study to give our patients the very best care possible. Oriental Medicine is a huge body of knowledge, overwhelming at times, so we all can use help in gathering this knowledge. This article includes some methods that have worked for me and my friends. Most of my suggestions are for students, because I am still a student and teaching assistant myself. For the practitioner, I hope these study tips will be useful as well.

Use all of your senses. When you study your herbs taste them, smell them, feel them, look at their color and feel their texture. Try to find pictures of the live plants so you can appreciate their beauty. When you study points, draw them on your body, draw them on a friend’s body. Buy dolls at the thrift store and have one for each channel. Make it three dimensional. If you have a points statue, draw each channel energy in a different color with a permanent fine point market, with tai yang one color, shao yang another color, etc. That way you can see the whole body light up as the different stages in the six stages. For Oriental Medicine theory, try to visualize the patient with his or her various symptoms, or try to act them out yourself. Imagine a pattern inside of yourself.

Remember what the Italian educator Maria Montessori said, “The hand teaches the brain.” Be an active participant in your learning. Keep writing, keep drawing, keep touching. Many students like the flashcards that you can purchase, but it is always better to make your own, even if you also have the store-bought kind. Most of us can type, but typing can become very automatic. It is easier to remember facts if you write them out by hand. Writing something out by hand demands more of your attention and what you write will be remembered better.

Use repetition, repetition, repetition. Make your flashcards at least three days before your exam (if possible), then “run your cards” every eight hours. This is a form of self-test, and helps immensely on the day of the real test. This way the material has a chance to imprint itself on both your short-term and long-term memory. Be careful to make your flash cards “flash”. This means don’t try to put too much information on one card. A good set of cards might have just the name of an herb on one side and the category on the other side. Play games with your cards and your herbal samples. Shuffle your cards and play solitaire with them, each line gets a category. For points, the Deadman flashcards are very useful. You can still make your own points cards, though, for things like categories of points, shu points, etc.

It is always easier to remember something that you understand, rather than through rote memorization. With herbs, especially, there is a lot that you can understand. Get a pin yin dictionary and look up the pin yin names of the herbs (Bensky does this for many herbs, but not all). The names often have to do with stories about the herbs, or something to do with their shapes, color, or use. You can also get a Latin dictionary and look up some of the Latin names. Dioscoreae, for example, means something like “two hearts”, and the leaves of the Dioscoreae are in the shape of a Heart, and are opposite to each other, in pairs of two. Emphasize the characteristics when you study the herbs: the temperature, tastes, and channels. We often give the characteristics short shrift, but they can help you understand the actions of the herbs more deeply and completely.

Make your own My Materia Medica. Use a page for each herb, and have your translations and study notes on each page. Glue a little piece of the herb on the page with rubber cement. And create your own memory cues to help you remember. Be creative, if you can, or just practical. Use drawings, because then you are using all of your senses, and visual cues are often easier to remember. Draw even if you think you can’t. If you can write your own name then you can draw, and if your drawings are really terrible, then they will be funny and that will help you remember, too. For example, for chan tui, Periostracum Cicadae, I drew a cicada with red spots all over it, shaking with spasms, so now I can always remember the actions for chan tui.

Get a study buddy or study group. A lot of students say they would rather study by themselves, and this is always true for the deep memorization work we have to do. But there is often a point in the learning process when a study partner may be able to test you better than you can test yourself. He or she may have noticed some fact that you skipped. Or you may get into a debate on some point, and when you are taking the test you will hear the memory of that voice saying the answer in your mind.

Learn as much Chinese as possible. Just imagine how much easier Chinese medicine must be for the Chinese student—they are not trying to translate at the same time that they are learning all this new material.

One of our teachers told us that we should consider our four years in school to be just an “introduction” to Oriental Medicine. We were shocked at the time, but now that I will be graduating in a few weeks, I realize what a brief introduction it has been. That’s why Oriental Medicine requires lifelong study. Thank goodness that we love it so much.