Advanced Chinese Medicine 2028

Meta-practice is a tool for working effectively with different styles of practice.

This has four distinct advantages:

i.    It puts your patients in the centre.

ii.   It significantly increases your diagnostic and therapeutic skills.

iii.  It deepens your understanding of, and access to, the Chinese medicine tradition.

iv.   It provides you with a firm basis for life-long learning.

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​In meta-practice, what drives the treatment process is not your style of practice, into which you must fit your patients, but the needs of the patients themselves. If you always seek to link a patient's problem to their constitution because that is what your style of practice demands, you are unlikely to treat an acute epidemic or serious disorder involving toxins effectively. If the only formulas you use are ones written down in the Han dynasty, you are unlikely to become skilled at treating phlegm or damp-warmth, since these concepts were only developed much later.

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Meta-practice also helps you draw on more diagnostic tools. Different styles of practice emphasise different modalities, such as pulse, tongue or abdominal diagnosis, inspection or listening. Meta-practice requires you to be able to use all of them, though not necessarily all at once; the patient and context remain the primary drivers. It also allows you to employ your own personal strengths: some practitioners are better at processing visual information, others work better with palpatory referents.

 

Working with different styles of practice also forces you to be more precise in how you define the concepts you use. Any single style can get away with poorly defined concepts, but bringing different styles into conversation with each other demands that we find common ground. This can be challenging, but it ultimately expands our knowledge, and deepens our access to and understanding of the sources of our tradition.

 

Finally, meta-practice allows you to systematically extend your clinical skills without ever being limited by what you have already learned. For more info please download the course brochure below.