I’ve been thinking about this. This is something that I think about. Between spirituality and scam culture exists a fine line of overlap.

Some of this is my own imposter syndrome. Some of it is also the work of practicing astrology. When you do astrology with a person, you’re not with them living their life and affecting change and making choices with them. It’s their life. Instead, you’re just looking at their chart. Maybe you’re teaching them how to look like all of the art teachers in my life taught me. By looking with them, by witnessing them, you’re supposedly making a difference.

So, I try my best with making writing that might make someone feel seen. And I try my best with astrology readings. Sometimes I feel like I did a great job. Sometimes not so much. My job is to look at things with people, to see people where they are asking to be seen. It’s a fickle art.

What is real medicine? What is real healing?

Here’s the thing. This is my family story. On my dad’s side, I come from a family of traditional medicine practitioners. My dad was actually supposed to inherit the craft. He walks around and he talks about what medicine is, what it isn’t. He’s a Taurus so he’s very no nonsense about these things.

“All medicine is poison. Poison is medicine delivered in the wrong quantity. Medicine is poison taken in the right quantity.”
“The water that creates you can’t poison you.”
“Pollution can cause too much life and overcrowd the environment. That’s something every idiot can see.”

These are things that my dad taught me. He’s very annoying most of the time but I enjoy him too. Not right now because we’re actually fighting but sometimes. But he didn’t inherit the family practice of medicine. Why? Because our village was demolished. If my dad were to go back, he wouldn’t even be able to find it because the entire region has been reconstructed.

I’m very skeptical of books that brand themselves as traditional healing manuals that just give you a long list of plants with their properties and what those plants can do for you. I’m also skeptical of anyone who tries to claim Chinese medicine because I know that Chinese medicine is a recent invention. I think that a lot of the Chinese medicine being practiced in the United States, especially the practices that are based on books, are actually scams.

Trust me on this. I come from a long line of what you would call Chinese traditional healers. That knowledge didn’t make it to me but I hear the stories.

They’re real stories. My great grandpa could heal you without speaking to you, by taking your pulse or by holding a pendulum in front of you and watching its movements. He healed my grandma who was losing her vision. The western style doctors couldn’t heal her eyes after doing every examination available to them but my great grandpa did. Using his divination, he observed that she was going blind not because she had any eye problems at all but because her liver was polluted. None of the western style doctors were testing her liver because they focus on symptoms and her only symptom was blindness. After my great grandpa cleared my grandma’s liver, she could see again.

My dad was supposed to inherit the family healing craft. They keep this stuff hermetic and only pass it along to chosen heirs. The reason why my great-grandpa chose my dad as the heir was because only men could inherit medicine. My aunt actually wanted to learn but they didn’t recognize her. My dad didn’t want to learn so the craft was lost. But he learned a little. Every summer, he would live in the mountains raising goats. Do you know how healing practices are passed down?

It’s not through books. It’s through rhymes. Everything is oral knowledge and you have to memorize it slowly one piece at a time. The rhymes are not about plants cut from their environments or about different organs. The rhymes are about place. They are about direction, about temperature, and about the village itself. Every village has a different healing practice because every village is a different place that produces and requires different medicines.

In the 60s, Chinese medicine was consolidated as a national invention. That’s why I say that Chinese medicine, the idea that the local healing traditions of every single place in this big country could be unified and called one thing, is a recent invention. There is no such thing as one Chinese medicine just like how there’s no such thing as one China. Folks medicine is oral. If it’s in a book, then it’s a recent invention. If it’s written, then it’s already a translation.

The unification of Chinese medicine coincided with the barefoot doctor movement. These were village people who learned medicine and who tried to write down what they knew in books. If you look for barefoot doctor manuals, all of these books are geared towards specific places. But they try their best to be more general and less locationally specific because they are aware of their place in a nation building project. In fact, the manual I read through actually started with a small essay about Mao. Just some random sentiments about his political theory.

The barefoot doctors did a lot. They created public health infrastructure for millions of people. Due to their work as doctors and healers, life expectancy in China went from thirty years old to seventy. Today, it’s even higher than that.

I looked in a barefoot doctor manual and what I found was really interesting. Do you know what I found?

The book doesn’t start with the human body. It doesn’t start with different herbs or plants that you can pick. It doesn’t start with harvesting or ingestion. It starts with place and observation. The book teaches you how to dig a well so that you can clean water but it tells you that you must observe and know the place where you are living before you understand where water is clean.

That’s divination. You observe. You try to read the world around you using your observations.

You have to know where the water is clean. To know that, you have to know where you are and you have to observe what is happening in that place. That’s how barefoot doctors were able to bump up life expectancy by forty years. They weren’t just massaging people or doing acupuncture or processing herbs. They were mediating a relationship between rural people and the land.

Before barefoot doctors were a thing, there was no mass public health infrastructure in China. They invented it.

I’ve been trying to learn more about this history because I found out that my grandpa’s sister, who was also not chosen to inherit the family’s traditional healing practice on account of being a woman, actually became a barefoot doctor. I found out that the Black Panthers actually visited China before Nixon and that they met healers who were working in the barefoot doctor movement. I found out that the Panthers and the Young Thugs invented their own form of ear acupuncture after their trip that they used to heal people suffering from substance withdrawal in the South Bronx.

Before the Black Panthers created community health clinics, there was no concept of community health in the United States. They invented it.

I think that this is part of the reason why I’m such an anti-traditionalist. Traditions don’t exist for me because my ancestral village was demolished already and my family’s healing practice was lost. Good riddance maybe. Traditions have been used to gatekeep medicine from the women who were doing the most healing. I don’t believe in using the old terms for things, that old things are necessarily better, or that history will time test your inventions. I believe that you have to make up things that suit the times you are living in right now. That’s what the Panthers did. They invented their own medicine.

There’s a fine line between spirituality and scam culture. That’s because real medicine has to be made up. You have to observe the place, the real place you live in, and you have to invent your medicine. A lot of these books are completely bogus. They skim the surface of centuries of oral knowledge that might have been passed down, might have been lost. Knowledge isn’t permanent. It’s told, retold, and it is sometimes lost.

And that’s okay. Because you can always invent new knowledge. That practice? Participation? That’s real medicine.