America Has Disease Care, Not Health Care: Dr. Jingduan Yang

“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.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Dr. Jingduan Yang, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Dr. Jingduan Yang:
Thank you for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:
America is in an unusual situation. Americans are very unhealthy. At the same time, they spend incredible amounts on health care. What’s really going on?

Dr. Yang:
It’s simply that in America, we really don’t have a health care system, even though we call everything health insurance and health care. But if you look at what we’re doing for our patients, we’re really trying to manage 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, they 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. It’s a very misleading concept that we have a healthcare system. That’s why we’re not very healthy as a nation, because we allocate all our resources trying to deal with the consequences of problems or disease, rather than to prevent it and find the root causes that cause those problems.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about inflammation. I hear that inflammation is related to a lot of diseases. How do you view it from your unique medical expertise?

Dr. Yang:
Let’s take inflammation as an example of the disease model and crisis management model vs. a healthcare model. Let’s say there are two kinds of inflammation. One is acute inflammation. If you’re infected by virus, bacteria, 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, temperature. Could it be local temperature, just a 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 threatening 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 repair itself and fight the infection away. Therefore, only one acute inflammatory response is overreacting and threatening life. That’s why we intervene with, for example, steroids, right?

For example, at the COVID time, some people had what they called 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. The chronic inflammation is constantly there and constantly causing damage to the tissues. And as a result, that becomes 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 everything gets the opportunity to accumulate there and cause heart attacks and strokes. All the chronic inflammation can become the foundation of damaged tissues and cancer and diabetes. If it happens in the brain, it contributes to depression, anxiety, OCD, and even dementia and degenerative nerve disorders. Therefore, to control chronic inflammation is important.

But from the disease care model, we cannot address what caused the inflammation. We come in trying to control the symptoms. If you have Parkinson’s disease, we try to make the tremor go away and by manipulating the receptors of neurotransmitters. We’re not addressing what was causing the inflammation in the brain. If you’re depressed and we give you antidepressants, we’ll give you ECT, 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 open system we eat all kinds of food a lot of food got into our gut and cause 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 you know people call 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.

Therefore, if we don’t look into people’s gut and only focus everything above your neck, then you are not addressing the underlying cause of the problems. I’m not saying all the depression was caused by the gut, but at least you shouldn’t look at the head as connected with your heart, with your lungs, with your liver, with your kidney, and with your gut. In Chinese medicine, every organ is connected and every part of the brain is connected with every organ.

There’s no way you could address any part of the body’s issue without looking at the whole system. 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 having, but now we have all that into our gut. And we even have a habit of eating the same food over again.

If the food you like to eat is contaminated by something else, 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. because it’s so chronic, it’s so subtle, but it causes problems 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.

That’s why we advocate for eating local, fresh, organic food and eat a variety of food, alternate food, and don’t eat the same food over and over again. When you do that, you are addressing health. You are not just reacting to a disease. In Chinese medicine, emotional stress affects not just your mood. It also affects your gut. Anger affects your gallbladder, which regulates our digestions. Sadness affects our large intestines. That’s where you eliminate waste. Your heart, the over-excitement or feeling vulnerable, affects your small intestines where you absorb nutrients. Fear directly affects your bladder, causing problems with urination.

Energetically, emotional distress affects everything. 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, visible and touchable.

But at an energetic level where human life really is. Physical function and mental function are manifestations of human energy. Of course, people began to recognize how important the mitochondria is to our health. You can look at a Harvard professor writing a book saying that depression is related to brain energy. That is partially true because the mitochondria is modern medicine’s discovery of where the energy is produced. The dysfunction of the mitochondria 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, the imbalance, dysfunction you know, imbalanced dysfunction of mitochondria will be root causes for many, many problems anyway. Those issues can be addressed through diet, lifestyle, exercise, and stress management. Once we bring that into medicine, now we can begin to talk about health.

Mr. Jekielek:
You have quite a unique approach that you have been developing for some years. All these different elements of preventive medicine have come together in your work. Please tell us about that.

Dr. Yang:
Yes, when I came to this country, I heard so many new definitions about different medicines. and complementary medicine, holistic medicine,
and mind-body medicine, functional medicine, regenerative medicine, anti-aging medicine, and the one I like the best is 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 beings. When I was thinking about it, I kept going back to what human beings are made of, right? If you look at it, you really see four pillars. First of all, most superficially, we are structural beings. We have hair, skin, muscles, bones, organs, nerves, you know, all these structural parts of it. I call them anatomy, right? At 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 biochemistry running inside us, that to make us the second dimension of human being. But if I drop dead today, you have, I would have my same structure. I might have the same biochemistry, 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 brain. Modern medicine does recognize and measure the energetic level of human beings. At the same time, in Chinese medicine, it is always called Qi. When we say somebody died, we said he has stopped breathing or stopped having Qi, right?

So it is the same concept. The third dimension is really the most important dimension, which is the energetic dimension of human beings. Without that dimension we don’t have life, we don’t have activities, we don’t have feelings, thoughts, emotions, movements. All the signs of life are the manifestation of energy. But we begin to see it, we measure it, and we even try to intervene energetically. For example, today we have a cardioversion, electronic shock therapy, transgranular magnetic stimulation therapy, neurofeedback, and a lot of physical therapy using lasers. So we’re doing more than energetic intervention to humans.

But we don’t understand what human energy is about and what human energetic physiology, psychology, and so on and so forth because of 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 an X-ray machine today, you know, we don’t even know what your bone is like. But today, if I scan you with the X-ray machine, I only see your skeleton. So the same thing, if we have that imaging technology can see human beings at, let’s say, quantum level. And we might be able to visualize all the energetic activities and structures and movements in you.

That’s what Chinese medicine was about. Somebody at some time had a capacity and was able to visualize that and describe the medicine at a totally energetic dimension. That’s really the value of classic Chinese medicine for today’s healthcare, because we’re not there yet. But the last dimension is almost critical, is what a human being is really about. I like the saying that the human being is a spiritual being or 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 the most important dimension is how do we take care of that? Because almost that part of the health determines the rest of it. Human soul and spirit is almost like a 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 going to be enough.

Therefore, the fourth dimension has to be a 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. 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?

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m thinking about red light therapy for energetics. This is something that a few friends of mine have been getting into lately. Does that work?

Dr. Yang:
Human beings are very sensitive to energy. With acupuncture, people always think acupuncture is done with a fine needle. You touch something. I had a patient who was a big police officer and suddenly had terrible sneezing. Then his back hurt and he couldn’t stand up. The doctor said you might have a herniated disc as a result of that bad sneezing. He went to the ER, got treatment with drugs and was still in pain and couldn’t walk.

I picked the two acupuncture 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 stood up and he walked. That’s how fast it can be. I can’t explain it from the structural perspective because hands on the lower back were far apart and had no structural connection. And I can’t explain it from a biochemical perspective.

Yes, acupuncture does produce endorphin, but not that much. He got morphine and it didn’t work. The only way I can explain is that it energetically unblocked the blockage and energy began to flow and the pain began to dissipate. That’s the way I explain this kind of phenomenon. Of course, I can’t visually demonstrate it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please tell us about your background. You’re not just an acupuncturist and a psychiatrist. You really have been looking at medicine from many different vantage points.

Dr. Yang:
I have to say that 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 Chinese medicine practitioner and a teacher. I started learning when I was 13 years old. But when I had the opportunity to go to medical school in China, my father, who taught me Chinese medicine, insisted I should go to medical school to learn modern medicine. He believed at that time that combination of it should be the most powerful one.

So I want to learn all about modern medicine. Of course, that’s where the confusion starts. Because, for example, Chinese medicine says that the kidneys determine blood production. Modern medicine says, no, it’s the bone marrow that produces blood. Later, I discovered it was a hormone coming from the kidney that stimulated the bone marrow which produced blood.

That hormone is called erythropoietin. Today it’s become a medicine for people after chemotherapy because their bone marrow gets inhibited, they get anemic. So they have to take this erythropoietin to stimulate the production of the red blood cell. But you can see the two parallels of the two medicines. I always thought that discovery was in the 1970s and 80s. Yet people knew what Chinese medicine had been saying for a thousand years and took that seriously. They studied the kidney and probably discovered this hormone 50 years earlier.

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 discoveries every day, not the other way around. Does that make sense?

Mr. Jekielek:
That makes a lot of sense. You hear a lot today, especially among people who are in the Make America Healthy Again movement, that there isn’t a lot of money in those sorts of studies. You can’t patent it 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 prevent cheap and preventative therapies from actually being the norm. What’s your take on that?

Dr. Yang:
There is 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 and dissecting the dead
body. Everything has to be visible and touchable. So everything starts from there.

But health doesn’t start from something visible. Health and life starts from something invisible. It starts from the soul, right? Then you have energy, then you have chemistry, and then you have a body. So therefore it’s hard. People do not get the health part because health is difficult. Nobody really knows how to take care of their 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 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. If your doctor is paid to only prescribe medicine, to only talk to patients for 15 minutes, and to only get paid for doing surgeries, and they’re not motivated to do anything else health-wise. Today it is really bad.

I’ll give you some specifics. We think sick people should be hospitalized. Okay, great. But do you know how many people died in hospitals due to medical errors? Medical error means it’s just by accident somebody made a mistake, that person died, called medical error. And in the United States, it’s over 100,000 people a year. It is the fourth leading cause of death. But if you combine that with the infections in the hospital, contaminations and other side effects of treatments, like an adverse reaction to medication, that’s another 100,000 people that die from that.

That means patients didn’t do wrong things. They take the medicine as prescribed. Doctor 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 caused by adversary drug reactions. Among them, 100,000 people would die.

Currently, a 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. We have to define what health really is. Without that, we can’t really transform our system from disease care to health care.

Mr. Jekielek:
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. It’s quite the opposite.

Dr. Yang:
Right. 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 stress management, as much as they pay them as they’re prescribing medicine or procedures, that will incentivize them to pay more attention to health. If we pay the surgeons the same amount of money if they operate on five patients versus 15 patients, right?

That will tremendously reduce the amount of surgeries they’re pressed to do in order to keep the same revenue or income. Because in the United States, 40 times every week, our surgeons operate on the wrong part of the body. This is a statistic from a few years back. Because they rush, they do all these things, and they make mistakes.

Now, there are malpractice laws against the surgeons and OB-GYN doctors to the point where nobody wants to do the procedures anymore. Many people have quit. We should not incentivize surgeons to do more surgeries. It’s the same thing with prescribing more expensive imaging testing, you know, MRIs, CAT scans, because they are equally expensive.

When I was a neurologist in China, I started at a time where we didn’t have a CAT scan and we didn’t have an MRI. That all came 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 examinations. They just directly prescribe imaging testing and heavily depend on radiologists to make the diagnosis, not themselves. Supposedly, we only use imaging as a reference, as assistance to our own diagnosis, not other way around, because imaging systems sometimes miss things.

A radiologist does not know the history, knows the clinical picture, and thoroughly can overlook something important, right? This is the thing that we also need to be careful about, not incentivize people to prescribe expensive imaging systems. This influences a lot. When we were in medical school, we always got free lunch from these pharmaceutical companies.

Mr. Jekielek:
Really?

Dr. Yang:
Yes, and the residents too, 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 actually realize we’re gradually brainwashed to the point we become a pharmacologist rather than doctor. 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 because the medicine we studied in medical school is very rich. If we can apply all that knowledge into our everyday care, our healthcare system is a real healthcare system. But now when we graduate from medical school after residency, we focus on two things mostly, medication and the procedures. That’s it. We threw away this whole biochemistry textbook and we focused on pharmacology. Do you see what I mean?

In Chinese theory, in Chinese philosophy, we think we have three kinds of physicians to manage health. We have the Shangyi or op physicians that make health policy. They actually run the nation to prevent disasters and war. Because bad policy can cause harm, loss of life, and suffering which no doctor can fix. Therefore, the most important doctors are the doctors who can make good public health policy.

Middle doctors focus on healing people and treating you as a whole person. They treat you as a four-dimensional being, take care of you, and prevent you from getting sick. That’s the middle doctor. Then there are the downstream doctors who take care of the sickness and crisis. They’re important, but they’re just a part of the stream. Therefore, the op doctor and the middle doctor are far more important than the downstream doctor.

If you look at our American system today, the downstream doctor is taking care of everything. And that’s why I want to set up a new medical education system where we educate a new 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.

Mr. Jekielek:
If I can get this straight, you said that the Chinese approach is to have these three kinds of doctors?

Dr. Yang:
It is not current Chinese. It’s the ancient wisdom of Chinese medicine. There was a story about a famous Chinese medicine doctor whose name is Bian Que, and who was very famous. The emperor asked him, are you the best doctor? He said, no, I’m not. I only treat the sickness. The best doctor is a doctor who can prevent people from sickness, and that’s my big brother. The emperor said, how come nobody hears about your big brother and everybody knows about you?

Bian Que said, because he prevents people from getting sick, so nobody knows about him. Then he went on to say, the best doctor is a doctor who can heal the nation. And the second best will heal people. The third is to heal the sickness, disease. He said, I’m only the third one. That’s the story behind it. Looking at today, I think we need a doctor equipped with triple skills and knowledge.

Mr. Jekielek:
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?

Dr. Yang:
I’m not sure. And actually, when I was a neurologist running inpatient, outpatient intensive care, I thought of doing a great job in terms of saving people suffering from stroke and multiple sclerosis and getting Guillain-Barre syndrome. I felt great that 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 emphasizes is prevention, and the treatments before problems become structurally damaging. For example, you should help people with high blood pressure before they develop a stroke, and you should help people control their blood sugar before they develop to all the medical complications of diabetes, right?

That’s the moment I feel like, finally, I see the parallel of two medicines. One medicine is more focused on disease, the consequences of a problem.
Another medicine is focused on function and also prevention of the 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 determines their response? Of course, there’s biochemical foundations, there’s energetic
foundations, 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 spiritual health, we’ll look at everything in a very negative way. And we’ll respond behaviorally, socially, and even physically in a very negative way. How can we have good health?

Eventually, I feel like we should have one medicine, which is a good medicine. This medicine looks at 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 fits in the need of that individual at that level, and we should all address that and we should utilize them together.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please chart for me the progression of your medical education and teaching.

Dr. Yang:
I went to the Fourth Military Medical University, one of the top four medical schools at that time in the country. When I was in medical school, I was totally consumed by the new books coming from the West on philosophy, on psychology, and on neuroscience. I feel like one of the treasures of modern Western medicine is actually our understanding about the human mind and human psychology.

When I was a research fellow at Oxford University doing clinical pharmacology, I was studying a very specific neurotransmitter called serotonin and how some mood stabilizers, which are actually anticonvulsants from a neurologist’s perspective, now the psychiatrists use them to stabilize people’s mood. We suspected it affects certain neurotransmitters like serotonin. That was my research project.

However, when I was doing the research reading about these specific neurotransmitters, I found a lot of basic research and published in a magazine totally unrelated to mental health called Hypertension. That means people who were studying hypertension were 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 Chinese medicine.

One day he said that mood disorder and hypertension are the same problem. It’s all the problem of your liver. I was in the second or third year of medical school. I said, wait a minute. One is cardiovascular disease, another is a mental illness. What are you talking about? How could there be the same problem? Of course, none of us could win that argument.

But when I was reading that, that was an aha moment. I said, now I understand the foundation. If it happens in the cardiovascular system, it may contribute to high blood pressure. And if it happens in the neurological system, it can contribute to other problems like migraines, depression,
and mood problems. So you see these two medicines do have a lot of parallels that help me to that.

Another experience I had was with Professor Michael Gelder, who was the chairman professor of psychiatry at Oxford. He took me out to lunch, and after lunch, we went to a library at Merton College in Oxford, one of the very old colleges. He showed me tons of books about medical
botanicals. That’s another time I realized that not just China has herbal medicine. In the West, herbal medicine has been there for a long, long time. A lot of new medicine we’re developing today actually originated from those botanicals and herbal medicine. That was my experience at Oxford.

When I got back to China, I thought I was going to change China and I wanted to change the medicine. I found China was changing me in a way I didn’t like, so I left. I came to the United States and thought I wanted to become a psychiatrist. But of course, I had to start from somewhere. I ended up in a job teaching Chinese medicine for three years in Minnesota.

Of course, I didn’t forget about becoming a psychiatrist. I passed all my medical license boards and I was lucky to be accepted by Thomas 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.

There I had the opportunity to apply acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, and a neuro-emotional technique that Dr. Monti taught me, actually utilizing Chinese medicine principles together with the neurofeedback, psychodynamic therapies, and medication management. I was able to integrate all that in one thing.

Of course, I had the limitation of what I could do in a hospital setting, so I started my own integrative medicine center, 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 the opportunity to do the Integrative Medicine Fellowship at Arizona University with Dr. Andrew Weil. I was very lucky in the whole process where I met all these great teachers.

Mr. Jekielek:
The first time you really started applying this four-dimensional model is with the Northern Medical Center. Tell us about that.

Dr. Yang:
I wouldn’t say it’s the first time that I applied it. I formulated this in 2016 for the first time in my book called Facing East. I began to apply that four-dimensional medicine in my institute practice for mental health patients. It is different because it is a very conventional diagnostic and treatment center, heavily regulated in the New York States. It’s primary and multi-specialty discipline center. We’re at the beginning stage. I started seeing patients in September. Now, we are seeing about 1,000 patients a month.

But what is different 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 in an underserved area in Middletown, New York. I feel like we should be able to provide this type of care for everyone. It’s about equality and people having equal access to what their default integrated medicine is, not just for the elite.

At Northern Medical Center, I’m trying to create a medical model of integrated medicine, literally four-dimensional medicine for the underserved and everyone else. This is an experiment. I have to say it’s a very challenging case. It involves where the funding comes from. Even the providers you hire, they need to be educated in that mindset. And all patients need to be educated.

For example, today I had a patient who was 54 years old and terribly depressed. She said, I’m so depressed because I had a massive heart attack. I thought I was healthy. 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 tells 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, that is just an example.

How do we bring this four-dimensional integrated medicine to everyone? That’s the mission and the purpose of having Northern Medical Center. That’s the reason I’m 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.

Mr. Jekielek:
It all comes down to preventative medicine. There seems to be an interest in that in this new administration that’s coming in. What do you think they should be doing?

Dr. Yang:
We really need to allocate funding to study health. So that’s one thing. It 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, produce strong evidence, and support that. On the other hand, on the medical side, we need to establish exemplary medical centers, inpatient, outpatients, and everything in between, to show how integrative health and medicine are practiced.

Yes, we need to change everything else. But can we just build a prototype, 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. The United States is not at the bottom when we compare with the health status of other advanced, developed countries. I would strongly recommend different incentive systems that make the surgeons operate less, particularly not to use it as a primary tool of diagnosing patients, but as an assistant tool.

The primary tool should be the doctor, and that will save a lot of money. We should have real health care insurance that reimburses health care providers like nutritionists, acupuncturists, herbalists, lifestyle counselors, and stress management specialists. We should really pay them to help the patients stay healthy. Primary care doctors should be paid to prevent the patient from getting sick, not just check them and treat them when they’re sick.

We really need to limit pharmaceuticals to advertise directly to the general public. We shouldn’t restrict their access to the governments and to save money on the lobbies. They should not be allowed to fund research at 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.

We don’t need to increase our healthcare spending. We already overspend compared to other countries. We just need to relocate them so that patients can benefit and become healthier. Otherwise, the current system is that 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.

Mr. Jekielek:
We have a whole generation of medical doctors and other medical practitioners that might be giving erroneous advice. They might be viewing things one-dimensionally, not four-dimensionally like yourself.

Dr. Yang:
It’s a mindset. You don’t have to know everything to practice integrative medicine. You just need that mindset shift and education too.
The most effective way is to start educating the existing physicians or healthcare professionals, and begin to help them to establish what healthcare is vs. 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 ways to understand it and to provide support and help. I think that’s what I would start with.

Mr. Jekielek:
Hopefully there’s a doctor or two watching this episode who might be interested in what you’re talking about. Where do they go?

Dr. Yang:
I’m in the process of setting up the Northern Institute of Integrative Health to do this education. 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 Weil, Dr. Oz, Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Daniel Amen that can come to teach and to train the existing physicians. They’re actually waiting. They’re hungry to learn all that.

The only thing the government needs to do is to incentivize them, then they can practice what they learn. The majority of physicians I know who trained in acupuncture 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.

Mr. Jekielek:
What if you just want to learn the basics? If I want to school up on everything that you’re talking about, where do I go?

Dr. Yang:
I wrote a textbook about acupuncture. I feel very strongly about it, not because it’s acupuncture Chinese medicine, it’s because it’s an exemplary medicine for energetic medicine. It fills the gap. So I’m restarting this continued medical education program actually sponsored by Arizona Medical School for CME credits. I plan to restart it. If anybody watching this video is interested, contact me so I can put them on the list. Once we open, let’s say in the fall and they can get notified.

On top of that, we want to bring teachers to feel all this different dimensional medicine. I would probably start with a three day 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 a, what I call, a working framework for the doctors.

Actually, I want to start retreat programs for the general public to apply this four-dimensional health model in self-care. And that’s very, you know, easy to do. There’s so much that needs to be done, but I’m excited that we’re at the time that people are looking for it. There is increasing awareness. I’m very excited about the new administration. They’ll have this priority to make America healthy again. However, we need to know how to do that effectively and efficiently.

Mr. Jekielek:
How can people reach you?

Dr. Yang:
They can reach me at Northern Medical Center. The website is northernmedical.org. We’re still in our infancy stage, but we have an integrated medicine practice here, and we’re big into education and communication with patients.

Mr. Jekielek:
Dr. Jingduan Yang, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Dr. Yang:
Thank you for having me. I’m glad to have an opportunity to communicate with you and your audience about four-dimensional medicine.