I Can Talk to the Internal Organs-Chapter 84 - 75: Fascia Knife and Gua Sha Board

This thing has been on and off for three or four years now, and it keeps coming back to life like a phoenix from the ashes. It really is quite torturous.

Especially after many people tested positive, they suffered from those aftereffects like blade throat, white lung, whole body weakness, etc., which significantly impacted a lot of people’s work and life.

Lu Jiu remembers that last year there was an expert from the health department who said if your throat is uncomfortable, like having a blade throat or something, just eat an ice pop to ease it a bit. Lu Jiu nearly laughed out loud when he saw this news.

Blade throat is at most just a symptom; the discomfort is only in the throat. If you eat an ice pop, you might temporarily quell the throat pain with the iced effect, but the pathogenic influence is also carried by the cold into your organs.

The consequence of this would only be more serious.

Such an anti-intellectual statement being proclaimed openly suggests that the expert himself is deeply convinced by it.

However, this kind of lowly understanding is no different from saying directly drinking disinfectant when sick will kill the virus.

It’s actually not surprising that these experts now have such understandings; many medical experts and doctors treat headaches where they happen and foot pains where they occur.

This isn’t limited to Western medicine; Chinese medicine is the same.

When Lu Jiu was studying at Jinling University of Chinese Medicine, many classmates would ask the teachers in class which Chinese herbs can lower blood sugar and which can lower blood pressure.

Even though the teachers pointed out not to be bound by disease, and not to match medicine to specific diseases, Chinese medicine, in essence, isn’t about confronting disease directly.

Yet many classmates couldn’t help but match medicine to disease while learning.

This really is a shift in mindset that hasn’t happened.

A decade or more of specialized and segmented modes of study have accustomed many people to targeted thinking. This is a good thought model; many scientific researches require this kind of thinking, but it doesn’t quite suit the learning of Chinese medicine.

Because Chinese medicine emphasizes the word "perception" so much, its theory is huge, vague, and broad, seeming to lack direction yet full of directions everywhere.

It’s like the clash of Eastern and Western civilizations. Eastern civilization believes in gods too but only effective ones, whether local or foreign, as long as it works, I believe it. Western civilization is different; if you don’t believe in Jesus, you’re a heretic and have to be executed. This is the dichotomy, a zero-sum game, where coexistence doesn’t exist.

We emphasize all-encompassing, fundamentally not pure opposition, which is why many top figures in the field of Chinese medicine say it’s hard for current students to grasp the essence of Chinese medicine without studying ancient medical texts.

Because the foundational thinking logic of our ancestors is the cornerstone of learning Chinese medicine.

"Dr. Lu, please take a look, ouch... I seem to have a muscle strain, it hurts like hell."

At the clinic’s entrance, Wu Zengshuang wailed as he walked in.

"What happened?" Lu Jiu asked.

"Well, I went to the gym this morning, and a guy there said he wanted to train with me. I thought having some help was good, and this guy was pretty big, training with him could mean learning a few moves."

"But this guy was too hardcore, with deadlifts, deep squats, just kept adding weights. I told him I couldn’t go on, but he kept saying it’s okay, he’d assist me, and then snap, I strained my arm. Ouch, ouch, ouch."

As soon as Lu Jiu touched Wu Zengshuang’s arm, this guy immediately started howling.

This falls under the category of external injuries; acupuncture and prescriptions are not as useful here as gua sha is.

After understanding which area of Wu Zengshuang was strained, Lu Jiu took out a gua sha board and a bottle of essential oil from the drawer.

Then he slowly lifted Wu Zengshuang’s arm and began scraping downwards on his arm with the gua sha board.

Lu Jiu’s movements looked gentle, but every press seemed to pierce into Wu Zengshuang’s skin.

"Ah~ ouch~"

Lu Jiu didn’t rush to scrape the strained spot of Wu Zengshuang but slowly applied force around it. But even so, the force still touched his strained spot.

However, this pain was still bearable for him, and slowly, after Lu Jiu scraped for over ten minutes, Wu Zengshuang suddenly felt less pain.

At this point, Lu Jiu also changed his technique, using his wrist’s motion to gently sweep the board over the strained area of Wu Zengshuang.

Wu Zengshuang couldn’t help but frown but didn’t yell.

After Lu Jiu scraped for another ten minutes or so, Wu Zengshuang felt the pain in his arm seemed to have lessened a lot.

"Dr. Lu, it doesn’t seem to hurt much now," Wu Zengshuang said. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"Alright, now switch to the other arm," Lu Jiu said.

"Huh? Only my right arm is strained, the left one is fine," Wu Zengshuang said.

"Illness can conduct itself, like sometimes when you sprain your ankle, clearly it’s the left foot that got injured, but after some time, the right ankle starts to hurt. This is the ailment conducting from the left foot to the right foot. Now when I scrape your left arm, I’m also treating your right arm. In Chinese medicine, this is called treating the left illness with the right, or the right with the left," Lu Jiu said.

Huh?

That was true!

Wu Zengshuang suddenly recalled how in middle school, during a PE class, he sprained his foot while running and had to limp around school for a week. Then the second week, his right foot suddenly started to hurt a little.

At the time, he found it strange. He clearly didn’t twist his right foot, so why did it hurt? Dr. Lu’s words resolved his over-decade-long confusion.

Watching Lu Jiu scrape his left arm, Wu Zengshuang suddenly said, "When we left the gym, that guy even wanted to use a gua sha tool on me, saying it could help my strained area recover. I seriously suspect he’s a shady private instructor, way too professional."

Lu Jiu laughed, "You, you can train in the future, but before your spleen and stomach fully recover, try not to lift heavy weights. It’s not beneficial to your body, and you’re likely to get injured."

Wu Zengshuang nodded, "Yeah, yeah, I was just fooling around. If it weren’t for that guy nagging beside me, I wouldn’t have done any deadlifts. By the way, Dr. Lu, this is a gua sha board, right? Is it the same thing as that gua sha tool?"

Lu Jiu laughed, "Pretty much, though there are differences."

Wu Zengshuang asked, "What’s the difference?"

Lu Jiu laughed, "One is the native father, the other is the foreign son."

Wu Zengshuang burst into laughter, "Haha, is that so?"

Lu Jiu laughed, "Just kidding, but not far off."

The gua sha tool, how to put it, theoretically there’s nothing wrong with it, and the tool is advanced enough, but it only promotes the body’s blood circulation, causes minor trauma on certain parts, and improves the poor adhesion condition between muscles, ligaments, and fascia.

These effects can all be achieved by gua sha.

It’s just that those who don’t understand gua sha think it’s just scraping out blood and sha; its role is merely to activate blood and resolve blood stasis, and if not careful, it might damage the skin.

Moreover, the gua sha tool is advanced, with enough varieties and a hefty price, making the gua sha board feel rustic, losing a lot visually.

So many people, after being repeatedly brainwashed by the same rhetoric, develop a notion of, oh, the gua sha tool affects the nerves, muscles, and fascia, and gua sha affects the skin surface. One is for sports recovery, the other is for treating disease; they really aren’t the same.

This might be the value of discourse power, twenty years ago, just like today after three years of trials and tribulations, still the same!