Before the Yin-Yang Method: My Life in Western Medicine

Today, I help people find the same balance that once saved my own life. It's called the Yin-Yang Relationship Method and it's grown out of over a decade spent studying how Motion and Stillness show up in the people we love. But before I could teach this method to anyone else, I had to stumble into it myself. Here's how that happened.

I came to Yin-Yang Theory in the midst of a Western medicine career I assumed would be more than enough.

At the time, I was a 32-year-old commissioned military officer. I was already a doctor, having completed all three USMLE Steps, and I was working in the Southern branch of Public Health Command for the U.S. Army. I held a Master's in Healthcare Administration and was moonlighting with the Texas Hospital Association.

I had studied and practiced Western medicine in nearly every form it takes. I had done clinical work in rural communities and inner-city hospitals. I had worked in free public hospitals and traditional private-pay hospitals, in Mexico and in America, in private care and in government-run systems. I had touched public health and policy work, private-sector medicine, and academic life, and had been published through the VA. I had patients pass away under my hands during desperate CPR efforts in a code, and I had helped bring babies into their first day on this planet.

And yet, I had never heard of Traditional Chinese Medicine, acupuncture, or herbology. Yin and Yang were words I might have seen on a fortune cookie, at best. I had spent over a decade studying medicine in so many forms, but here was a system that had existed for thousands of years and was used by millions of people, and I knew nothing about it.

I had been injured and was going through a rigorous rehabilitation program at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas. I was under the care of an excellent nurse practitioner who was quarterbacking my care team, physical therapists working to rebuild my mobility and strength, and a mental health therapist leading me through my first real experience with therapy. The whole team was outstanding. And yet I could not seem to recover, physically or mentally.

I avoided prescription pain medication to steer clear of the well-known path from back pain to addiction, which meant I was in constant, chronic, debilitating pain. Over time, that chronic pain and the mental fog that came with it were slowly leading me toward depression.

I was married at the time, and struggling, but my then-wife had a suggestion that would change everything. She knew of an acupuncture office in downtown San Antonio and told me to go check it out. So I did.

I didn't know it yet, but that one appointment was about to unravel everything I thought I understood about medicine, and about balance…