Practicing Medicine and the Four Kinds of Illness (1of2) — A Diagnostic Framework
In more than ten years of clinical experience, I have generally classified illness into four categories.
The first category is illness arising from imbalance of the four elements — that is, diseases triggered by natural forces such as wind, heat, dampness, and dryness, as well as by a person’s emotional states. This type of illness can generally be treated with either Chinese or Western medicine.
The second category is karmic illness. This arises when an impression from a particular experience in a previous life is so deeply embedded in memory that it shapes the way a specific energy channel forms at birth in this lifetime — different from other people. Once the body’s resistance weakens or a particular set of conditions ripens, the illness suddenly manifests. Western medicine can generally find no cause for this type of illness and will often misdiagnose and mistreat it. For example: one person’s previous life was as a lion who ate a donkey that had died of an infectious disease. The lion contracted the same disease and died, his coat falling out at death. In this lifetime, past the age of forty, that person suddenly developed a skin condition identical to the circumstances of the previous life’s death: massive plaques of psoriasis appearing rapidly across the entire body, with unbearable itching, unresponsive to countless remedies. One day he happened to eat a bowl of donkey-meat stew — and within a few days the skin condition was nearly completely healed. This was a case of karmic illness, though the resolution was somewhat unusual.
Another patient: in a previous life, he had been captured by Japanese soldiers and had been bitten by infected mosquitoes (human experimentation). Reincarnating as a human, he carried mosquito toxin in his energy channels from birth. Beginning in his thirties, small blisters erupted on his whole body and face; when scratched they hardened, ulcerated, and itched terribly. And another: in a previous life the patient was a fish that became trapped in a piece of wire mesh and died. The memory of that illness lodged in his energy channels. In this lifetime he suddenly experienced severe pain in his lower back and hips — hospital ultrasound and CT scans showed nothing wrong, and he was treated for nervous system disorders or rheumatism. This too was a form of karmic illness.
The third category is invasion by external entities. Every moment of every day, small living beings are dying throughout the natural world. After death they continue to exist in the form of biological waves, present in space without occupying physical space. Due to the widespread use of modern technology such as mobile phones and computers, as well as air pollution and climate disturbances, the environment these beings inhabit is disrupted. When a person’s internal organs become slightly imbalanced in yin and yang, and the frequency of that person’s biological waves aligns with theirs, these entities will travel any distance — instantly attaching themselves to the person’s body. Over time, the damage to the affected organs can be considerable. For example: I once had two patients, both with water leeches attached internally. In one, the leech had attached to the liver, causing hemolytic anemia — the hospital had been unable to determine the cause. In the second, the leech had attached to the spleen, obstructing the central energy channels, leaving the patient unable to eat, with abdominal bloating. The spleen began to enlarge and lose blood supply, and the hospital removed the spleen — but the illness did not improve, because the leech remained in the energy channels of the spleen’s pathway. This type of external-entity attachment must be removed from the energy channels entirely before the patient can fully recover.
The fourth category is possession by outer demons. These are demons, malevolent spirits, or other supernatural entities of the cosmos that have attached to a person, each due to some karmic connection. The vast majority of such patients display abnormal behavior — crying and laughing without cause; in severe cases their minds are disordered and they speak incoherently. This is because these outer entities have gained control of the nervous system. (There are also cases of genuine schizophrenia with similar symptoms but a different root cause, so not every patient with neurological symptoms falls into this category.) If the condition can be correctly identified, it is actually the most treatable of the four. As soon as the outer entity departs, the patient recovers. If the duration of illness has been short and the nervous system remains undamaged, the patient may not even need medicine. But getting these entities to leave is not easy. It requires addressing the karmic entanglements between them and the patient across this life and previous lives, helping them resolve grievances and settle debts — and in some cases the physician must use their own merit and virtue to help repay those debts and assist the entities in being liberated and released. For instance: one female patient came to the clinic dancing and singing, speaking in a disjointed and rambling manner. Her family said she had been this way for over twenty years. This patient was a case of outer-entity possession. During diagnosis I engaged in dialogue with the entity possessing her, explained the situation clearly, offered a certain compensation, and resolved the karmic bond between the entity and the patient. The entity departed. I prescribed four packets of medicine to regulate her nervous system and restore her mind-spirit. After taking the medicine, the patient recovered, and as of several years later has had no recurrence. Another patient of the same type — but by the time the entity left, his nervous system was severely damaged from the long duration of the illness, leaving him with insomnia and high blood pressure, and slight fluid accumulation in the brain. It required over half a year of continued treatment before he achieved basic recovery. This confirms: the sooner this type of illness is identified and treated, the fewer lasting effects the patient will be left with.
Beyond these four common etiological categories, there is also the large-scale epidemic arising from the natural world — and some epidemics actually originate from another dimensional plane. For example: there was once a great serpent that had spent countless years in cultivation by consuming numerous toxic substances. After tens of thousands of years of practice, the combined karmic force of humanity — arising from the killing of living beings, from the intensification of greed, anger, delusion, pride, and doubt — disrupted the serpent’s cultivation environment. During its migration it accidentally contaminated our dimensional plane. Wherever it passed, vegetation was destroyed, and a localized toxic red field appeared in the atmosphere above the Earth. This toxin entered the respiratory energy channels of people and combined differently with different individuals’ constitutions to produce varying mutated pathogen clusters; or in severe cases, before any pathogen clusters could even form, it directly corroded the energy channels of the lungs, then damaged pulmonary function. Modern medicine can only examine the state of disease once it has already manifested — the deeper causes behind how a population falls ill lie beyond its understanding. As another example: also due to the collective karmic force of humanity, the living environment of scorpions in another dimensional plane was disrupted, causing them to suddenly appear in large numbers in a given area and produce a widespread outbreak of poisoning among domestic poultry. And so the purification of the cosmic field is a necessity for all three realms. As far as humanity is concerned: reduce the taking of life, and let each person cultivate more wholesome thoughts — this alone makes an enormous contribution to the purification of the cosmos.
In truth, as the Buddha’s teaching has it, all illness is the manifestation of our karmic force — for we are fundamentally a body of karmic retribution. But in this world of samsara, karmic force manifests through various conditions that trigger the ripening of karmic seeds. My classification of illness is simply a way of categorizing treatment according to the differing conditions through which illness arises.
These types of illness sometimes appear simultaneously in the same patient, forming a combination syndrome. In recent years, patients with such combined syndromes have increased sharply — especially among middle-aged and elderly people over forty.