American Thought Leaders - America Has Disease Care, Not Health Care: Dr. Jingduan Yang

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

“In America, we really don’t have a health care system, even though we call everything ‘health’ insurance, ‘health’ care, and this and that,” says Dr. Jingduan Yang.“We’re not healthy as a nation because we allocate all resources trying to deal with consequences of problems or disease, rather than to prevent [them] and find the root causes that cause those problems,” he says.Yang is a specialist in psychiatry and integrative medicine, and is a fifth-generation practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine. He’s the CEO of Northern Medical Center and founder of the Yang Institute of Integrative Medicine.Western medicine could learn a lot from the approach of Chinese medicine, he says, which emphasizes prevention before problems become structurally damaging and looking at every part of the body as part of an integrated system.“In Chinese medicine, every organ is connected. ... Therefore, there’s no way you could address any part of the body’s issue without looking at the whole system,” Yang says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Do you know how many people died in hospital due to medical error? In the United States, it's over 100,000 people a year. Dr. J.D. Yang is a specialist in psychiatry and integrative medicine and is a fifth-generation practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine. A lot of things Chinese medicine emphasizes is prevention. It's the treatments before the problem becomes structurally damaging. You should help people with high blood pressure before they develop into stroke. He's the CEO of Northern Medical Center and founder of the Young Institute of Integrative

Medicine. If you ask a doctor today, what do you do every day? Besides prescribing medicine, they didn't do much else. So it's a shame. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Dr. J.D. Yang, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for having me. America's in an unusual situation. Americans are very unhealthy.

At the same time, they spend incredible amounts on health care. What's really going on? Well, it's simply put that in America, we really don't have a health care system, even though we call everything health insurance, health care, and this and that. But if you look at what we're doing for our patients, for everything, health insurance, health care, and this and that. But if you look at what we are doing for our patients, we're really trying to managing their disease and dealing with the crisis.

So as far as health, and nobody really doing much about it. For example, if you see a primary care doctor, they run tests, they check on you, they say, well, you look fine. They give you clean bills, so-called, and they send you home. Come back next year. What are they waiting for?

Literally, they're waiting for you get sick and they can find something that can do surgery or put you on medication. Until then, doctors are not very useful for you. But if that's the time and then you already have lost your health, same with health insurance. They don't pay anything to promote your health, prevent disease, but once they begin to pay you, trust me, you have lost your health so really is a very misleading and the concept of we have a health care system that's why we're not very healthy as a nation because we allocate all

resource trying to deal with a consequences of problems or disease rather than to prevent it and find the root causes that cause those problems. Okay, let's talk about inflammation. I hear, and this is relatively new to me, that actually inflammation is related to a lot of disease. How do you view it from your, let's say, very unique combination of medical expertise? Well, let's take inflammation as an example, how the disease model and crisis management model versus the healthcare model. Let's say there are two kinds of inflammation. One is acute inflammation. If you're infected by virus, bacterial, or injured by trauma, and the body has

an immediate reaction to protect itself, as a result, it manifests as inflammation. The tissue will swell, will be red, and will cause pain, and it's caused, you know in temperature. Could it be local temperature, just the heat, and or you have a fever as a systematic reaction. Actually, that acute inflammatory response is the body's defense system. Therefore, unless it is overreacting or threaten the life or damaging the other system, we really should not intervene. We should let the body take its own course by supporting it with, let's say, hydrations, nutrients, minerals, and let the body to repair itself and fight the infection away. So therefore only one acute inflammatory response is overreacting and threatening life. That's why we intervene with for example and steroids right. For example at the COVID time some people had a what they call a cytokine storm. That's when the steroids will be

utilized and will be very helpful. On the other hand, what we really talk about is chronic inflammation. And the chronic inflammation are constantly there and constantly causing damage to the tissues. And as a result, that become a site where things begin to go wrong, depends on which part of your body is affected. For example, if it's affecting the blood vessels and the internal wall of the blood vessels, then when the damage of the wall, then everything gets the opportunity to accumulate there and cause heart attacks, you know, cause a stroke, and so on and so forth. And of course, all the chronic inflammation can become foundation of damaged tissues,

cancer development, diabetes, and so on and so forth. And if it happens in the brain, it contributes to depression, anxiety, OCD, and so on and so forth, and even dementia and degenerative nerve disorders. So therefore, controlled chronic inflammation is important. But from the disease care model, we come in, cannot address what was caused for inflammation. We're coming trying to control the symptoms. If you have Parkinson's disease, we're trying to make the tremor go away and by manipulate the receptors of neurotransmitters. And we're not addressing what was causing the inflammation in the brain,

for example. And if you're depressed and we give you antidepressants, we'll give you ECT, we'll give you TMS or Spravato, everything is focusing on your brain and trying to make you feel different, but it doesn't make you different. What if your inflammation comes from gut, right? Gut is an open system. We eat all kinds of food. A lot of food got into our gut and caused inflammation in the gut itself. And when you get gut inflamed, it created the situation where things shouldn't be in the blood or get into the blood. People call it the leaky gut, right? And it's actually damaged the integrity of your gut. And then the nutrients should be absorbed, cannot be

absorbed, and that causes nutritional deficiency. So therefore, if we don't look into people's gut and only focus everything above your neck, and then you are not addressing the underlying cause of the problems. I'm not saying all the depression was caused by gut, but at least you shouldn't look at the head. It's connected with your heart, with your lungs, with your liver, with your kidney, and with your gut. And in Chinese medicine, every organ is connected and every part of brain is

connected with every organ. So therefore, there's no way you could address any part of the body's issue without looking at the whole system. And when you do that, you begin to address health because you begin to look at what's going on with the gut. What affects the gut health? For example, food you eat, if you eat processed food, deprived food, food with chemicals, food with additives, lots of sugar, and a lot of gluten, and genetically modified food, it's controversial, but it's possible. And all kinds of things the gut was not used to have. But now we have all that into our gut. And even we have a habit to eat the same food over and over again. And if you ever, the food you like to eat contaminated

by something else, and the body can misperceive the food you eat again, even though the food is clean again, but the body will misperceive it and react and respond with inflammatory reactions. And that's called food sensitivities. We're trying to dismiss that existence. We only acknowledge food allergies, but we're trying to dismiss the food sensitivities, but actually it does exist because it's so chronic, it's so subtle, but it causes the problem with our health if we don't look into what we eat. Almost like you eat something every day, it causes chronic inflammation without your knowledge. And that's why we advocate for eat local, fresh, organic food and eat variety of food, alternate food. Don't eat the same food over and over again.

And when you do that, you are addressing health. You are not just reacting to a disease. And in Chinese medicine, emotional stress is not just affects your mood, it affects your gut. You know, anger affects your gallbladder, which regulates our digestions. And the sadness affects our large intestines, that's where you eliminate waste. And your heart, the over excitement or feeling vulnerable affects your small intestines where you absorb nutrients. And the fear directly affects your bladder and causing problem with your urinations

and so on and so forth. And so energetically, the emotional distress affects everything. And if we understand that at an energetic level, we will begin to understand a lot of health problems that we don't with modern medicine because modern medicine is based on anatomy, chemistry, and everything has to be visible, you know, test, you know, visible and touchable. But at energetic level where human life really is, physical function, mental function,

is all a manifestation of human energy. And of course, people began to recognize how important mitochondria are to our health. And if you look at Harvard professor writing book about the brain energy is the cause of the issue is the cause of depression, for example, which partially true because mitochondria is a modern medicine's discovery where the energy is produced. And dysfunction of mitochondrial is going to be contributing to every problem. Just like in Chinese medicine, every issue is the imbalance of the qi. If we translate that into modern medicine, you know, imbalanced dysfunction of mitochondrial will be root causes for many, many problems anyway. So those issues can be addressed

through diet, lifestyle, and exercise, and stress management. And once we bring that into medicine, now we begin to talk about health. So, well, tell me, you have a quite unique approach. I've known you for quite some years and you've been actually developing this approach. And I've been fascinated watching how these different elements of preventive medicine have come together in your work. So tell me about that. Yeah, when I come to this country, I heard so many new definitions about different medicine. And we started with alternative medicine and complementary medicine, holistic medicine, mind-body medicine, functional medicine, regenerative medicine, anti-aging medicine,

and the one I like the best called integrative medicine. But if you ask a hundred doctors what integrative medicine really means, they all give you different kinds of answers. So I feel like we really need a medical model that provides a framework for education, for clinical care service, and for research, also for self-care. So people can take that framework, easily apply them, and like a checklist they can do every day and to take care of themselves. So that medicine I called four-dimensional medicine because it addressed the fundamental four dimensions of human being. When I was thinking about it, I keep going back to what human being is made of, right? If you look at it, you really see four pillows.

First of all, most superficially, we are structural being. We have hair, skin, muscles, bones, organs, nerves, you know, all these structural parts of it. I call it anatomy, right? An atomic part of us. And the second, to support that, we have a biochemistry. Now, within our body, we fundamentally have a majority of body has water, you know, electrolytes, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, you know, fatty acids, and the proteins and fat and neurotransmitters, hormones, all this by chemistry running inside us, that to make us the second dimension of human being. But if I drop dead today, I would have my same structure. I might have same by chemistry, but I'm dead. Why?

Because I lost energy. In Chinese medicine called the Qi, in modern medicine, we declare somebody died because their heart, their EKG is flat. That means they have no electronic activity in the heart. Then the brain does not have brain waves. That means no energetic activities in the heart. Then the brain does not have brain waves. That means no energetic activities in the brain. So modern medicine does recognize and measure energetic level of human being at the same time as Chinese medicine always called the Qi. And when we

say somebody died, we said he has stopped breathing or stopped having chi, right? So same concept. The third dimension is really the most important dimension, is energetic dimension of human being. And without that dimension, we don't have life. We don't have activities. We don't have feelings, thoughts, emotions, movements, okay? So all the signs of life is manifestation of the energy.

But we begin to see it, we measure it, and we're even trying to intervene energetically. For example, today we have a cardiac conversion, electronic shock therapy, the transgranular magnetic stimulation therapy, neurobiofeedback, a lot of physical therapy using lasers and this and that. So we're doing more than energetic intervention to human body, but we don't understand what human energetic is about and what the human energetic physiology, psychology, and so on and so forth because the visual barrier, just like air. You and I sit here, we think there's nothing between us. No, we're buried in the molecules of oxygen, air, right? But we don't see them. The same thing with a lot of energetic things

going on in our body, we have a visual barrier. Imagine if we don't have x-ray machine today. You know, we don't even know what your bone is like. But if today, if I scan you with an X-ray machine, I bypass your pies, your soles, everything. I only see your skeletons, right? So same thing. If we have that imaging technology,

can see human being at, let's say, quantum level, and we might be able to visualize all the energetic activities and structures and movements in you. And that's what Chinese medicine was about. Somebody at some time had a capacity, I don't know how, and was able to visualize that and describe the medicine at totally energetic dimensions. So that's really the value of ancient or classic Chinese medicine for today's healthcare, because we're not there yet. But last dimension is almost critical, is what a human being is really about. I like the saying that a

human being is a spiritual being having a human experience. So what does that mean? That means really what lives in us is who we are, is our soul, is our spirit, is our mind or consciousness, whatever you want to call it. So the dimension of, the last dimension, but most important dimension is, how do we take care of that? Because almost that part of the health determine the rest of it. Human soul and spirit is almost like human driver to a car, to our physical body.

So if we don't take care of that spirit part, that soul part, and no matter what we do with this body, it's not gonna be enough. So therefore, the fourth dimension has to be spiritual dimension. You have to put all these four together because they're interrelated, interdependent on each other.

But with these four dimensions, it's very simple, easy to conceptualize and easy to organize our learning materials, education, clinical service, and self-care. So you really need to check every day, what did I do for my structural physical health? What did I do for my chemical balance? What did I do for my energetic abundance? And what did I do for my spiritual enlightenment, so to speak? What I'm thinking right now is red light therapy. Yes, red light therapy. Yes. Red light therapy. For energetics, right? Yes.

Exactly. Okay. Yeah. Because this is something that a few friends of mine have been getting into lately. Does it work? Yeah. Well, you know, the human being is very sensitive to energy. So the acupuncture, people always think acupuncture is such a fine needle.

You touch somebody. I had a patient who was a big police officer and suddenly had terrible sleazing. And then his back hurt and he couldn't stand up. So the doctor said you might have a herried disc as a result of that sleazing. No matter what, he went to the ER, get treatment with drugs and this and that. He could still, in pain, couldn't walk. So I picked the two points on his hands. According to Chinese medicine, there's points that connect energetically

with the lower back. So I was trying my luck to see if I stimulate those two points to see what happens to his back. Guess what happened? He stand up, he walked. That's how fast. And I can't explain it from the structural perspective because hands on the back, lower back was far apart

and has no structural connection. And I can't explain it from by chemical perspective. Yes, acupuncture does produce endorphin, but not that much. And he got morphine and it didn't work. The only way I can explain it is energetic. It's energetically unblocked, the blockage, and energy began to flow and the pain began to dissipate. And so that's the way I explain this kind of phenomenon.

Of course, I can't visually demonstrate it. Unbelievable. Tell me a little bit about your background, because you're not just an acupuncturist. You're not just a psychiatrist. You really have been looking at medicine from a whole bunch of different vantage points. Well, I have to say I'm very lucky. I was born to a family that has carried a traditional Chinese medicine practice for many, many, many generations. So all I can count, I can recognize as a fifth generation. So people say I'm a fifth generation of Chinese medicine practitioner and a teacher. And I started learning about when I was 13 years old. But when I had opportunity to go to medical school in China, my father, who taught me

Chinese medicine, insisted I should go to medical school to learn the modern medicine because he believed at that time that combination of it should be the most powerful one. So I want to learn all the modern medicine. Of course, that's where the confusion starts because, for example, Chinese medicine say the kidney is the way determining the blood productions. And And modern medicine says, no, it's the bone marrow that produce the blood. And so until later I discovered it was a hormone coming from the kidney that stimulated the bone marrow

and that produced the blood. Fascinating. That hormone is called atheroprotein. Today it's become a medicine for people after chemotherapy because their bone marrow get inhibited, they get anemic. So they have to take this atheroprotein to stimulate the production of the red blood cell. But you can see the two parallel of the two medicine.

And I always thought, okay, well, that what discovery was in 1970, 80s. And if people knew what Chinese medicine been saying for a thousand years and took that seriously and studied that kidney. Probably they discovered this hormone probably 50 years sooner or earlier. Again, I'm just saying. So that's why I recognize maybe when we do research, we should not be using modern medicine methodology to test whether Chinese medicine works or not. It's the opposite. We should use Chinese medicine theory as a hypothesis to design modern medical research. In this way,

we probably will get groundbreaking discovery every day, not the other way around. Does that make sense? Well, it makes a ton of sense. And before I get you to tell me more about your background, one of the things you hear a lot today, especially among people who are in this Maha Make America Healthy Again movement, they'll say, aha, well, there probably isn't a lot of money in those sorts of studies. You can't patent that, right? And that's the reason it's not being studied. There's a lot of suspicion that the large amount of money being made in the big pharmaceutical companies actually prevents cheap and preventative therapies from actually being the norm. What's your take on that? Well, there's truth to that. Definitely people go into where they can generate profit, go where they can put their hands

on, because if you think about modern medicine, they start from what? Anatomy, dissect the dead body. So everything has to be visible, touchable, right? So that's wisdom. So everything starts from there. But health doesn't start from something visible. Health starts from something, life starts from something invisible.

Start from soul, right? Then you have energy. Then you have chemistry. Then you have a body. Okay. And so therefore it's hard. So people do not get on the health part is because health is difficult. And nobody can,

nobody really knows how to take care of health. If they're getting information from pharmaceuticals, from the private sectors, they educate that every disease has a drug for it. And all you need to ask your doctor to give you a medicine, that's it. Nobody gets educated about how to eat, how to make choices in the food, how to sleep, how to exercise, and how to manage your stress, how to recognize stress, and how to keep your energy flows.

You know, if your doctor aren't paid only to prescribe medicine, only to talk to patients for 15 minutes, and only paid for doing surgeries, and they're not motivated to do anything else health-wise. And today is really bad. As you mentioned, I'll give you some specifics. So we think people sick should be hospitalized. Okay, great. But do you know how many people died in hospital due to medical error? Medical error means it's just by accident somebody made a mistake.

That person died. That's called medical error. And in the United States, it's over 100,000 people a year. 100,000 people a year is the fourth leading cause of death, almost equivalent. But if you combine that with the infections in the hospital, contaminations and other side effects of treatments, on top of that, there's called a adversary reaction of medication. And that's another thing, another 100,000 people would die from that. That means patients didn't do wrong things. They take the medicine as prescribed. Doctors didn't do anything wrong. They prescribed the medication according to the guidelines. It's just out of bad luck. There are three million emergency visits

are caused by adversary drug reactions. Among them, 100,000 people would die. The current model of medicine, heavily dependent on pharmaceutical products and surgical interventions is really not contributing too much to the health of the population, which really means they don't get into this point. They need this kind of intervention or need this kind of medication. So we have to define what really health is. Without that, we can't really transform our system from disease care to a health care. So is it possible to incentivize the health of people in the first place? How does one even go about that? Because you're right, the current model doesn't seem to incentivize that. Quite the opposite, in a sense. Right. So, for example, if we paid a physician,

doesn't matter what kind of physician they are, same amount of money when they educate the patients on their lifestyles, on their diet, on their lifestyles, on their diet, on their stress management, as much as they're paying them as they're prescribed medicine or procedures, right? And that will incentivize them to pay more attention to health.

If we pay the surgeons, same amount of money if they operate on five patients versus 15 patients, right? And that will tremendously reduce amount of surgeries they're pressed to do in order to keep the same, you know, revenue or income. Because in United States, I don't know if you know that, every week our surgeons operate on wrong parts of the body 40 times. Yeah, just that kind of statistics. I don't know what's the most updated statistic.

This statistic is a few years back. You know, because they rush, they do all these things, they make mistakes. And now the lawsuits, you know, the malpractice laws against the surgeons will be to the point where nobody want to do the procedure anymore, right? A lot of people quit. So what I'm saying is that we should not incentivize surgeons because they do more surgeries. Same thing with prescribing more expensive imaging testing, MRIs, CAT scans, because they are equally expensive. And when I was a neurologist in China at that time, I started that time where we didn't have a

CAT scan and we didn't have an MRI. It's all come on later. But as we're getting more and more of these machines and young doctors become lazier and lazier, they don't want to do careful history taking and neurological examination. They just directly prescribe imaging testing and heavily depend on radiologists to make the diagnosis, not themselves. And supposedly, we only use imaging as a reference, as assistance to our own diagnosis, not other way around, because imaging system sometimes missing things. Radiologists does not know the history, know the clinical picture, thoroughly can overlook something important, right? So this is the things that we also need to be careful about, not incentivize people to

prescribe expensive imaging system. I think this influences a lot. When we were in medical school, we always get free lunch from these pharmaceutical companies. Oh, really? Yeah. And residents, definitely. At that time, I wasn't even thinking about it. I said, okay, well, here's a lecture. We learn something. We get a free lunch. That's great. But we didn't realize, actually, we're gradually, gradually brownwashed to the point we become a pharmacologist rather than doctor.

So if you ask a doctor today, what do you do every day? So besides prescribing medicine, they didn't do much else. So it's a shame because the medicine we studied in medical school is very rich. If we can apply all those knowledge into our everyday care, our health care system is a really health care system. But now when we graduate from medical school after residency, we focus on two things mostly, medication and the procedures. That's it. So that's, you know, we threw away this whole biochemistry textbook and we focus on the pharmaceutical, pharmacologies.

Do you see what I mean? So in Chinese theory, in Chinese philosophy, we think we have three kinds of physicians to managing the health. We have what we call the Shangyi or op physicians. They're making healthy policy, health policies. They actually run the country, run the nation

so that no disaster, prevent disasters and wars, so on and so forth, okay? Bad policies, because that can cause the harm, the loss of life and suffering. Nobody, no doctor can fix, right? So therefore, the most important doctors are the doctors who can make good public health policies and national policies.

The middle doctor are doctors who focus on heal the people, prevent you, treat you as a whole person, and prevent you, almost like I said, treat you as a whole person and prevent you almost like I said, treat you as a four dimensional being and take care of you, prevent you from getting sick. That's the middle doctor. Then the downstream doctor, I don't want to say they're lower doctor

because they're not lower, they're as important are the doctors who take care of the sickness and the crisis, okay? So they're important, but they're just a part of the thing, the stream. So therefore, this up doctor, middle doctor are far more important than the downstream doctor. But today, if you look at our America system, the downstream doctor is taking care of everything. That's why I want to set up a new medical education system where we educate a new generation generation of healthcare leaders who can be triple doctors, who can make good public policies,

health policies, and literally the policy of a country that's good for human life and human health, and who can take care of the health, prevent disease, and take care of the whole person. And they can go to take care of suffering. And that kind of new generation healthcare leaders we want to produce in the future. So wait, if I can get this straight, you said that the Chinese approach is to have these three kinds of doctors? Yeah. Like current? Not current. Okay. It is not current Chinese.

It's the ancient wisdom of Chinese medicine. And there was a story about a famous Chinese medicine doctor whose name is Bian Que, and who was very famous. And so the emperor asked him, you know, are you the best doctor? And he said, no, I'm not. Why? He said, I only treat the sickness, but the best doctor is a doctor who can prevent people from sickness. That's my big brother. And he said, how come nobody hear about your big brother and everybody knows about you? And he said, because he prevent people from getting sick.

So nobody knows about him. And then he went on to say, the best doctor is a doctor who can heal the nation. And the second best will be healed people. The third is a heal the nation. And the second best will be heal the people. The third is heal the sickness, disease. He said, I'm only the third one. So anyway, so that's this kind of the story behind it. Looking at today,

I think we need a doctor equipped with triple skills and knowledge. You've thought a lot about what it means to be a medical doctor, obviously. Was there some moment when you realized that you had been taken down the wrong path? I'm not sure. And actually, when I was a neurologist running inpatient, outpatient intensive care, I thought I was doing a great job in terms of saving people suffering from the stroke and multiple sclerosis and getting Barry syndromes. And I felt great, I was able to do that.

But when you were in that role, you didn't realize there was something that we should have done to prevent this from happening. But later on when I was teaching Chinese medicine in Minnesota, I began to recognize that a lot of things Chinese medicine emphasize is prevention, is the treatments before the problem becomes structurally damaging. For example, you know, you should help people with high blood pressure before they develop into stroke. And you should help people control their blood sugar before they develop into

all the medical complications of diabetes, right? So that's the moment I feel like, oh, finally I see the parallel of two medicines. One medicine is more focused on the disease, the consequences of a problem. Another medicine is focused on function and also prevention of problems. And of course, the mind is so powerful. Everybody knows 80% of the chronic illness contributed by what? Stress. So what is the stress? People say, oh, I have a stressful job. I have a stressful situation. The stress is not about your job or your situation, it's your reaction to your job and your situation. So it's your physical, emotional reaction to it. Same scenario, same job, some people feel no stress, some people feel overly, some people feel overwhelmed.

You know, now what determine their response? Of course, there's biochemical foundations. There's energetic foundations or constitutions. But mostly it has something to do with how people interpret the meaning, the significance of the events. If you say this is a good event, you feel happy. If you think it's a bad event, you'll be angry, right? So what determines your interpretation of that is your value system, is your belief system, and how you look at the world. So that brings us to the spiritual dimensions. If we don't have a spiritual health

and we'll look at everything in a very negative way and we'll respond behaviorally, socially, and even physically in a very negative way, and how could we have a good health? So therefore, the health, you know, eventually I feel like we should have one medicine, which is a good medicine. The medicine look at the people in all four dimensions, and we should find the best modalities.

Doesn't matter if it's ancient or modern, or Western or Eastern, as long as that fit in the need of that individual at that level, and we should all address that. We should utilize them together. Okay. So chart for me sort of the progression of your medical education and teaching, and it's all integrated. Okay. and teaching, and it's all integrated. So I went to the Fourth Military Medical University, one of the top four medical schools at that time in the country.

And when I was in medical school, I was totally consumed by the new books coming from the West on philosophy, on psychology, on neuroscience. I feel like one of the treasure of modern Western medicine is actually our understanding about the human mind and human psychology. When I was a research fellow in Oxford and doing clinical pharmacology,

I was studying a very specific neurotransmitters called serotonin and how some mood stabilizer, which actually anti-convulsants from a neurologist perspective. Now the psychiatrist use them to stabilize people's mood and we suspected it affects certain neurotransmitters like serotonin. So that was my research project. However, when I doing the research reading about this specific neurotransmitters,

I found a lot of basic research and published in a magazine totally have nothing to do with mental health, in a magazine called Hypertension. So that means people who were studying hypertension was also studying the same neurotransmitters and receptors as me as a psychiatrist trying to understand how this receptor has something to do with the mood. The reason I'm telling this story is because I had an argument with my father

when he was teaching me the Chinese medicine. And one day he said, the mood disorder and hypertension is the same problem. It's one problem. It's one problem. It's all have something, it's all the problem of your liver. I said, wait a minute. I was second year or third year in medical school. I said, wait a minute. One is the cardiovascular disease.

Another is a mental illness. What are you talking about? How could there be the same problem? Of course, nobody, you know, none of us could win that argument. But when I was reading that, that was a moment of aha moment. I said, oh, now I understand the same foundation, if it happens to, same problem happens in the cardiovascular system, it may contribute to high blood pressure. And if it happens in the brain, in the neurological system, it can contribute to other problems like migraines, depression, and mood problems.

So you see this two medicine does have a lot of parallels. That helps me to that. Another experience I had was the Professor Michael Gelder, who was the chairman, professor of psychiatry in Oxford. And he took me to lunch. And after lunch, he took me to a library of Merton College in Oxford, one of the very old college. And he showed me tons of books about medical botanics.

So that's another time I recognize it's not just the China or Chinese has a herbal medicine. In the West, herbal medicine has been there for a long, long time. And actually, a lot of new medicine we're developing today actually originated from those botanics and herbal medicine. But anyway, so that was my experience there in Oxford. And then when I got back to China, I thought I was going to change China and I wanted to change the medicine.

And I found I wasn't changing China. China was changing me in a way I don't like. So I left, I came to United States and I was thinking, I just want to become a psychiatrist, okay? So, but of course I have to start from somewhere. So I end up in a job teaching Chinese medicine for three years in Minnesota. Of course, I didn't forget to become a psychiatrist. I passed all my medical license board, and I was lucky to be accepted by Tom's Jefferson University program, and where I met a wonderful mentor, whose name

is Dr. Daniel Monti. Someday you probably will meet him too, because he is the chairman of the first integrated medicine department in a medical school in the United States. And so there I had opportunity to apply acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, a neuro-emotional technique that Dr. Monti told me, actually utilizing Chinese medicine principles together with the neurofeedback and psychodynamic therapies. And of course, medication management. So I was able to integrate all that in one thing. Of course, I had the limitation what I can do in a hospital setting. So I started my own integrative medicine center, and now called Yang Institute of Integrative Medicine,

where I apply all these principles to the mental health patients mostly. But before that, I also had opportunity to receive a Gravewell Fellowship and to do the integrated medicine fellowship in Arizona University with Dr. Andrew Weil. I have to say I'm very lucky in the whole process I met all these great teachers. I guess the first time you really started applying this four-dimensional model is with the Northern Medical Center. So tell me a little bit about that. I wouldn't say it's the first time I applied for it. I think I formulated this in 2016 for the first time in my book called The Facing East.

And I began to apply that four-dimensional medicine in my institute practice for mental health patients. And in another medical center, I have to say, it is different. Because it is a very conventional diagnostic and treatment center, heavily regulated in the New York states. And it's primary and the multi-specialty discipline center. And we're at infant stage. I started seeing patients in September. Now we are seeing about 1,000 patients a month. But what I want to apply, what is different is in my own private practice, I don't deal

with insurance pay. It's all people pay out of pocket because those people recognize the value of the four-dimensional medicine. They're able, willing, ready to invest in that. But here, the majority of our patients are from Medicare and Medicaid, and some people even didn't have any insurance. They're underserved area. We're in the middle town, New York. And I feel like we should be able to provide this type of care for everyone. So it's about, in this sense, it's about equality, you know, and people should have equal access to what their default integrated medicine is not just for the elite. So in Northern Medical Center, I'm trying to create a medical model of integrated medicine,

literally for dimensional medicine, for the underserved and for everyone. So this is an experiment here. I have to say it's very challenging. It involves a lot of where the funding comes from, education parts, and even the providers you hire, they need to be educated in that mindset. So the mindset change, all patients need to be educated. For example, today I had a patient who was terribly depressed, 54 years old. As he said, I'm so depressed because I had massive heart attack.

I thought I was healthy. You know, I eat healthy, I'm active, I didn't have high blood pressure, I didn't have anything. Suddenly, I have this massive heart attack. The question is, really? You didn't have any problem because nobody was watching you. Nobody tell you what you should do to stay healthy. They just let you go and wait and wait until you have this problem. Now, suddenly, you begin to recognize that you need to do more. But anyway, just an example, how do we bring this four-dimensional integrated medicine to everyone? So that's the mission and the determined to build a medical school on top of it to educate a new generation of healthcare leaders that can practice the medicine that people need today. You know, something that strikes me as we're talking here, again, it all comes down to this preventative or community medicine or preventative medicine.

There's this whole sort of dimension. And there seems to be an interest in changing that in this new administration that's coming in. What do you think they should be doing? We really need to allocate funding to study health. So that's one thing. Doesn't mean you have to spend more money. It just means you have better ideas, better focus,

and a better organization, utilization of existing infrastructure and the talents. In integrated medicine, we can do very vigorous research and produce the strong evidence and to support that. On the other hand, in the medical side, we need to establish exemplary medical centers, inpatient, outpatients, and everything between, to show how integrative health and medicine are practiced, applied to them. As example, not also as a training centers or teaching facilities.

So that will be, I think we need that. Yes, we need to change everything else, but can we just build something, set of prototype, you know, show it works, show the outcomes, show how it saves money for the government and for patients, how it gives access to everyone,

and how it actually generates better health outcomes. So the United States is not at the bottom when we compare with the health status of other advanced countries, developed countries. I would strongly recommend to restrict or design different incentive system that make the surgeon to operate less, make the use of expensive imaging system less, and so that people can really utilize that when it is absolutely needed. And particularly not use it as a primary tool of diagnosing patients, but assistant tool. The primary tool should be doctor, and that will save a lot of money.

And we should have a real health care insurance that reimburse health care providers like nutritionists, the UGAR teachers, acupuncturists, herbalists, lifestyle counselors, and stress management specialists, we should really pay them to help the patients to stay healthy. And primary care doctors should be paid to prevent the patient from getting sick, not just check

them and treat them when they're sick. And I think we should really limit pharmaceuticals to advertise directly to the general public. We should limit, restrict their access to the governments and to save money on the lobbies. And they should not allow to fund research to the public institutions or universities. And they can do all the research in their own labs or something like that. There should be more regulation on that. Everybody, we don't need to increase our healthcare spending. We already overspend than any other countries. We just need to reallocate them so that patients can become the benefits and become healthier. Otherwise, the current system is patients in the way become a consumer of a medical system or whatever you call it or establishment and at the cost of their health.

That's a really bad system. Something that strikes me here, though, is that we have a whole generations of medical doctors and other medical practitioners that might be giving erroneous advice, I mean, based on everything we've just talked about, or might be viewing things purely one-dimensionally, not four-dimensionally like yourself. Yeah. Actually, this is a good question because it's a mindset. You don't have to know everything to practice integrative medicine. You just need that mindset shift and education too. So I think the most effective way is to start

educating the existing physicians or healthcare professionals and begin to help them to establish what healthcare is versus what disease care is and provide them tools that they can use. So they know, actually, they like that. They want to be helpful to patients. They're frustrated. They have lost faith in their profession. They don't have a sense of satisfaction and pride because they don't know what to do with their patients when something is invisible.

If patients complain about pain but nothing works, they get very frustrated. But now they have a lot of way to understand it and to provide support and help. And I think that's what I would start with. Well, so let's say there's a doctor. Hopefully there's a doctor or two watching this episode who might be interested in what you're talking about.

Where do they go? I'm in the process of setting up this Northern Institute of Health and Medicine. The difference between Northern Institute of Integrative Health. And that's set up to do this education. So hopefully we'll get this up and running. I'm not going to be the only teacher here.

We have so many great teachers, like Dr. Andrew Wiles, Dr. Oz, and Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Eamon, Daniel Eamon, and many, many of them out there and can come to teach and to train the existing physicians. They're actually, they're waiting. They're hungry to learn all that. The only thing the government needs to do is we have to incentivize them to practice what they learn. And the majority of physician I know who trained in acupuncture, for example, were

not able to practice it, over 70% of them, because they don't have the environment, they don't have the infrastructure to help them to apply that. What if you just want to learn the basics. We've been talking here for a while, but I actually want to school up a little bit on everything that you're talking about. Where do I go? I wrote a textbook about acupuncture. I feel very strong about it, not because it's acupuncture Chinese medicine, it's because it's an exemplary medicine for energetic medicine. It fills the gap. And so I'm restarting this continued medical education program actually sponsored by Arizona

Medical School for these CME credits. So I plan to restart it. So if anybody watching this video are interested and should be able to contact with me, so I can put them on the list. So once we open, let's say in the fall, and they can get notified. And on top of that, we want to bring teachers

to feel all this different dimensional medicine and to train this kind of... I would say I would probably start with a work three days workshop to help people to establish that concept because they don't need to learn new skills. They just need to learn to reframe their knowledge, reclassify, recategorize their knowledge. They already have all that. It's just every way, it's so confusing,

and we just need to reorganize it, you know, and then develop what I call a working framework for the doctors. And actually, I want to start retreat programs for general public to apply this four-dimensional health model in the self-care. And that's very easy to do. But there's so much things need to be done, but I'm excited that we're at the time that people are looking for it, and there's increasing awareness of it. I actually am very excited about new administration. They'll have this priority to make the American healthy again and accept we need to know how to do that effectively and efficiently.

So how can people reach you? Well, they can reach you at Northern Medical Center. And so- Is there a website? Yes, northernmedical.org. And we're still at our infant stage, but we have an integrated medicine practice here, and we're big in education and communication with patients.

Well, Dr. J.D. Yang, it's such a pleasure to have you on. Well, thank you for having me. I'm glad to have the opportunity to communicate with you and your audience about four-dimensional medicine. Thank you all for joining Dr. J.D. Yang and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.