My teacher, Edward Obaidey, who has been practicing, writing a series of acupuncture books, and translating acupuncture texts, all while maintaining an extremely busy practice in Tokyo for the past 25 years, has been a great source of inspiration. He has instilled the “need” to study the major classics, to penetrate the essence of our art. The “need” was compulsory, this was a baptism by fire. I resisted and it was very difficult to grasp. Over time, my resistance faded and has morphed into a burning desire, pun intended! You see, out of 10,000 books extant about Chinese medicine, less than 1% have been translated into English. There are numerous texts that have been written and translated about this medicine but a picture is worth a 1,000 words. Literally speaking, Chinese and Japanese are logographic languages. Through these pictographs, meaning unfolds and speaks to us in a way that is greatly diminished when written in English. [Read more…]