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— updated 2021-06-17
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— updated 2021-06-17
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RMHInet — a health, wellness, and longevity
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| For a quick overview of RMHInet features, requirements, fees, etc., and how it complements our other educational programs, see Courses/certification. See also: |
| · RMHInet is a social-media brainstorming network for individuals, students, and professionals to share ideas and information about health, wellness, and longevity and to apply the power of technology and dedicated focus groups toward solving complex health problems. Crowd-sourcing, when carefully implemented, has demonstrated that it can often provide its participants with analysis and solutions to challenging problems, faster and at much lower cost than conventional options. |
| · Members have access to RMHI's extensive array of self-explanatory and easy-to-use text references, databases, interactive-learning tools, simulators, and expert-system software for traditional Chinese medicine ("TCM"). By using the expert-system software modules, AutoSage-TCM and CaseQuery, you can begin accessing detailed symptom-pattern analyses of complex health conditions after only 60 hours of training and study — Herbalists' BootCamp. |
Copyright ©2016-2019 by RMH-Publications Trust; all rights reserved. Published by the Rocky Mountain Herbal Institute; c/o PO Box 579; Hot Springs, Montana [59845] USA. Education and software for health professionals: www.rmhiherbal.org
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Subtopics on this page…
A practical/technical explanation of holism"Which herbs, drugs, supplements, or other therapeutic interventions would be beneficial for a person with medical disease X?"
However, what if the preceding assumption is terribly flawed and the cause of much misery, unnecessary suffering, chronic disease, and out-of-control healthcare costs? Most people would demand that anyone challenging this assumption take extraordinary measures to prove their case. Consequently, this article is lengthy. I do not expect you to alter your habits of thought easily. If I do manage to convince you that this perspective is flawed, the alternative solutions I describe below are designed to help you regain control of your health and drastically lower your healthcare costs. Problems and solutionsImagine that your automobile's engine begins to emit alarming grinding noises. You take it to your local mechanic, and he quickly assesses the problem: "engine noise". Solution: he recommends that you purchase a set of ear plugs. In spite of having only rudimentary knowledge of car engines, you are justifiably disgusted and drive your car to another mechanic before the engine fails and leaves you stranded. Now imagine that you have been experiencing steady aching pain in your muscles and joints over much of your body for the past few months. You take your body to the local doctor. He diagnoses the problem as "fibromyalgia" and prescribes medication to suppress the pain. But hold on a minute, and think about this. Pain is like engine noise. In any practical field of endeavor, whether it be engine repair, gardening, repairing a bridge, or human health, it is widely understood that to satisfactorily solve any problem first requires a thorough description of the problem:
A lazy person could, in a few minutes, think of a clever-sounding Latinized phrase that might impress people and convince some of them that he understands specific, medically-defined health problems — fibromyalgia, thrombocytopenia purpura, moniliasis, amoebic dysentery. But are these labels really a complete description of the problem? Do they represent a level of understanding that will lead to reliable and lasting solutions? Or do they merely lead to temporary remedies that are the equivalent of ear plugs? (See no evil, hear no evil, feel no pain...?) You decide to go to a practitioner reputed to be more holistic, perhaps a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine ("TCM"). Perhaps he or she spends more than 10 minutes, and actually asks about details like your energy levels, aversion to temperature extremes, bowels, urine, thirst, appetite, sleep, menstrual cycles, etc., and inspects your tongue and pulse. After taking all these clues into consideration, you are given an herbal formula to try for a week. If these clues are evaluated correctly, the selected herbal formula might actually work for a while. But what about environmental, occupational, and dietary factors? If those are not considered, the selected formula may merely be the equivalent of a more effective set of ear plugs — temporary relief, followed by eventual recurrence of the problem. By the end of this article, which is admittedly lengthy, you will understand why environmental, occupational, and dietary factors in health and illness have become the elephants in our living rooms. The consequences of ignoring these factors are so dire that many prefer not to think about them at all. However, if you are one of the growing number of people who recognize that addressing these issues is a matter of survival, of yourself and even perhaps of our civilization, we describe a solution that we hope will interest you. Reductionism vs. holism: avoiding tunnel visionMost people do not realize the extent to which they have been mentally and socially programmed to accept the reductionist paradigm of western bio-medicine. Reductionism: a system of analysis based on the assumption that complex systems can be understood primarily by a detailed analysis of all their component parts. Implicit in the question "What remedies, natural or otherwise, would be good for disease X?" is the assumption that the label "disease X" presents one with all the information one will need to select effective remedies. However, that is simply not true. Holism, a greatly misunderstood and widely abused term, means comprehension of the behavior and functioning of a system and its component parts as being intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole system, including its interactions with its environment. The very concept of remedy-for-disease-X is not holistic, but highly reductionist, regardless of whether one is using natural or synthetic remedies. Most medical disease diagnoses refer to highly localizable anatomical, biochemical, or physiological phenomenon without reference to any context in which they occur. The following explains the practical consequences of such a restricted focus: Chinese herbalists observe that a dozen people afflicted with the same viral infection might each respond to the infection in different ways, and that different stages of the illness, based upon the manifestation of symptom patterns, require wholly different herbal formulas. What might work well for an individual with a high fever, delirium, and thirst, yet who has a vigorous constitution, might be entirely inappropriate for another individual who has a low fever, fatigue, poor appetite, and a weak constitution, even though the very same infectious organism could be responsible for triggering acute symptoms of infection in both individuals. To choose herbs and formulas based on medical diagnoses is often as naive as choosing them based on single symptoms. Just as western physicians recognize that single symptoms (e.g., headaches) might be explained by a wide range of medical diseases and tissue pathologies, Chinese herbalists understand that a specific medical disease entity (e.g., influenza, hepatitis, leukemia) may be associated with a wide range of different systemic factors that created the susceptibility to the disease, and which must be resolved for there to be either complete recovery or satisfactory management of the condition. The following excerpt (Essentials of Expert-Systems Pattern Recognition for Traditional Chinese Medicine: User's Guide to AutoSage-TCM, by Wicke and Kruse, 2016) explains the concept of holism from a practical perspective and how it may provide crucial insights in situations where reductionist analysis fails: In comparing and evaluating the assessment or diagnostic protocols of Western medicine, traditional Chinese herbology, and other systems, we should acknowledge that the ultimate test of any assessment method's clinical usefulness is how effectively it describes and summarizes the problem — the patient's illness — in a manner that directly points to working solutions. A diagnosis that fails to yield practical guidelines that point to a specific set of drug, herb, formula, and/or dietary remedies, or at least a set of clear guidelines or strategies for choosing such remedies, is a diagnosis that is relatively useless except perhaps for its academic or theoretic value. As the preceding explanation reveals, emergency medicine physicians may sometimes have a more holistic perspective of the diagnostic process than many western herbalists or other alternative healthcare providers who have not had rigorous training in holistic systems-evaluation methods like those used in traditional Chinese herbology. Emergency medicine, of all the medical specialties, can rightly lay claim to the best track record of performance in improving human health and rescuing people from what would otherwise be dire and long-lasting consequences of trauma and disease; it is my opinion that the reason for this success is directly related to its focus on whole-body systems analysis and intervention. Alternative and complementary modes of healthcare have become quite popular with the public, but when these professions are examined more closely (acupuncture, TCM, naturopathy, massage therapy, chiropractic, herbalism), one will almost inevitably find the reductionist paradigm of western biomedicine at their core. Many may claim to observe the holistic, systems-oriented principles that their historical forebears espoused, but they reveal their true working philosophy whenever they frame healthcare options as remedies-for-disease-X. I have concluded after many decades of teaching Chinese herbology that the reductionist paradigm of modern medicine and science has penetrated so deeply into our culture that it has become a pervasive form of subconcious mind control. I have frequently observed successful graduates of our Chinese herbology curriculum, which requires rigorous understanding of the holistic concepts, definitions, and theories of TCM, revert to asking me questions like "What herbal formula should I use for a client with disease X?" After asking them whether they would like to first rephrase the question — I refuse to answer it in its original form — they usually quickly correct themselves as follows: "I have a client medically diagnosed with disease X; his TCM pattern assessment is Deficiency of Kidney-Spleen Yang with a moderate degree of chronic Blood Stagnation; what herbal formula should I use?" That is an example of a more holistic, systems-descriptive assessment, which provides enough general detail that one can at least begin intelligently discussing possibilities and options. Regardless of whether one is seeking to overcome an illness or to improve health and longevity, we are each unique in our responses to foods, herbs, and environmental conditions. TCM syndrome-pattern analysis can provide important guidelines for optimizing individual diets, choosing which herbs and supplements to take, and tailoring exercise and lifestyle habits to match individual needs. Why is symptom-pattern analysis such a useful indicator of underlying health imbalances?Individual symptoms, each by themselves, are relatively ambigious. Attempting to choose remedies based on individual symptoms is like trying to hit a target in a darkened room wearing blindfolds. However, people commonly experience symptoms of illness well before blood tests or other diagnostic tests reveal abnormalities. Why is this? During my graduate studies of sensory physiology, the intricate and sensitive mechanisms of human sensory organs made a lasting impression on me. To this day, electronics engineers struggle to create artificial devices that can match or exceed the sensitivity of biological sensory cells and organs. Why not harness this data from human sense perception directly as a diagnostic tool? After all, doctors and healthcare practitioners have been doing that for thousands of years. During the 20th century, however, many of them became excessively reliant on lab tests and gradually lost their clinical skills in observing patients, using their intuition, and evaluating symptom patterns. If symptoms appear well before any medical test reveal signs of disease, then it would seem that symptoms could potentially provide an invaluable early-warning signal of future health problems. The difficulty lies in exactly how to interpret the total pattern of symptoms that a given patient may present. While each individual symptom may have a wide range of possible causes and explanations, in combination, they begin to yield more information. Just as a single clue in a crime scene may have many dozens of possible explanations for how it came to be, put many clues together, create a hypothesis, ask whether additional findings are consistent with the hypothesis, and you may be on your way to solving the crime. Symptom-pattern assessment in Chinese medicine is exactly analogous to the job of a private investigator. Various symptom clusters suggest the possibility of certain patterns; pulse and tongue data plus additional questioning about other symptoms can help to either confirm or exclude these possibilities. (The analogy to criminal forensics is quite apt: environmental pollution and toxicity, adulteration of commercial food products with toxic ingredients, and medical research fraud require the diligent healthcare practitioner to function much as a private detective — we are literally witnessing mass crimes against humanity that have resulted in early death or debility for hundreds of millions of people, and to effectively overcome these problems often requires tenacious sleuthing.) Why have even many so-called alternative modes of healthcare (including "TCM") fallen into the same abusive patterns and practices of mainstream medicine?Even many of the so-called alternative and complementary modes of healthcare have succumbed to the western biomedical paradigm, because regulation, licensing, and school accreditation have created strong incentives for the western medical paradigm to become dominant within the educational curricula. For example, at many TCM colleges, the proportion of courses devoted to traditional symptom-sign pattern analysis and herbal formulation has steadily declined, substituted with increased course requirements in biomedicine and various sub-specialties such as gastroenterology, pediatrics, gynecology, etc. The theory and practice of holistic assessment is frequently taught poorly by instructors who do not even understand, respect, nor communicate its ideas well to students.•[a3]• (This is the reason that many people are surprised to discover that most practitioners claiming to be TCM herbalists either do not follow traditional tongue and pulse assessment protocols or do them haphazardly and crudely; potentially, the pulse and tongue quickly and inexpensively reveal crucial information that greatly increases the reliability and accuracy of a whole-body-systems pattern assessment.) Graduates of such programs, who rarely develop the capacity for accurate holistic thought and analysis, inevitably follow the remedy-for-disease-X paradigm. It should be clear that holism and remedy-for-disease-X are mutually incompatible concepts. The relentless deterioration of traditional Chinese medicine during the 20th century is no accident. This decline accelerated following the Communist Revolution in China. Mao Ze Dong, the leader of post-revolutionary China, was strongly influenced by people committed to the western model of healthcare — "Rockefeller medicine". Committees of such individuals were appointed by Mao to gradually infiltrate and replace the principles of traditional Chinese medicine with entirely western scientific notions. Thus what remains today, popularly known as "TCM", is generally a hollow imitation of its former incarnation as the primary mode of healthcare for thousands of years in China. The factory assembly-line mode of healthcare will become obsoleteEven assuming that a practitioner is skilled at a holistic paradigm (e.g., traditional Chinese herbology), there remains yet another obstacle to solving the complex, multi-factorial illnesses that now afflict many people: the assembly-line model of healthcare in which a licensed and certified practitioner, following years of expensive education, attempts to pay back his/her often massive student loans by means of a successful practice. A financially viable practice will efficiently process a minimum number of clients through the office each day, first offering standard remedies that have previously worked for the specific combination of disease-X and pattern-assessment-Y. When such traditional or statistically verified standard remedies fail, the amount of time and frustration can quickly escalate, resulting in a referral to some other practitioner, holistic or not, who might be able to provide a solution that can be offered within the time constraints imposed by economics. Unfortunately for the growing number of people with complex, multi-factorial illnesses that have been caused, triggered, and/or aggravated by multiple toxic environmental, chemical, and dietary factors, what their situations really require is a sustained and systematic program of education and mental-social-spiritual deprogramming, so that they can begin eliminating the toxic factors that have made them ill. To be successful and cost-effective, this process must be largely self-directed. My own awakeningImmediately after graduating with a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1980), on traveling to my first research job, I stopped to visit old friends and family, several of whom were eager to question me regarding specific health problems. My graduate training had focused on mathematical modeling of the nervous system using techniques pulled from various engineering disciplines, and I was flummoxed on hearing my aunt's first innocent question: "What can I do for my migraine headaches?" I regretfully replied that my studies involved predominantly theoretical issues rather than practical medical concerns — I hadn't the first clue about answering her question. Why are many simple, time-tested remedies no longer working?Over the 30+ years that I've practiced Chinese herbal healthcare, as each decade has passed, it seems that many illnesses have become more difficult to resolve, less likely to respond well to protocols that worked well in the 1980's, and more likely to recur without continual and careful monitoring. Worldwide, we are seeing rates of chronic illnesses and diseases of aging skyrocket: Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. A whole range of formerly rare autoimmune diseases have proliferated: lupus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease are only some of the more common among a lengthy list. Moreover, there are many more illnesses much of the medical community is resistant to or refusing to acknowledge: Lymes, Morgellons, EMF-sensitivity syndrome, vaccine-induced illnesses. The common thread shared by many of these illnesses is that people worldwide have been exposed to a massive onslaught of toxic chemicals and pharmaceutical drugs, ionizing and microwave radiation, deteriorating food supply resulting in simultaneous nutrient deficiencies and chemical toxicity, abusive medical practices, and both covert and overt forms of biological, chemical, and radiological warfare, all of which have been facilitated by a global infiltration and takeover of governments by international corporate cartels. Regulations that may have formerly served to protect public health and safety have long since been sabotaged by an agenda to increase corporate profits and power regardless of the human and environmental consequences. Mainstream media, academia, law and the judicial system, government, and even religions have been hijacked by mercenary forces in service to corporate power and global dominance. As millions of Americans are recently discovering, many status-quo "authority figures" routinely lie and commit fraud to defend a system that is collapsing as its corruptions and incompetence are publicly exposed. For some people, to acknowledge the enormity of this betrayal would trigger a nerve-shattering state of cognitive dissonance, so they have chosen to ignore it, pretending that life goes on as normal. Propaganda, deceptive advertising, mass mind control, and dumbed-down public education have, until now, kept the vast majority mentally benumbed and ignorant. Dutifully consulting their doctors for a quick remedy to temporarily chase away their pains or to suppress their anxieties, many inevitably succumb to debilitating chronic illnesses. The simpler health problems that I typically saw during the 1980's, which responded well to standard traditional Chinese herbal protocols, have been gradually replaced by complicated illnesses rooted in multiple factors of chemical and environmental toxicity. Consequently, I have found that clients who demand a quick remedy without wanting to know more about the factors underlying their illness are the least likely to experience lasting relief. I began to shift my style of practice to include significantly more education, both individually and in group classes, to explain how many of the accepted products and practices of modern industry were making many of us ill and to provide alternative options. Many of these alternatives were traditional practices of growing and preparing food; personal hygiene and sanitation; making homemade cosmetics, toothpaste, and soaps; physical activity and exercises; natural and non-toxic construction materials for homes, furniture, and clothing; and healthy forms of art, dance, and music — customs that prevailed as our dominant cultural heritage before corporate mass marketing convinced us to jettison these time-tested methods for something "new and different". Following the rapid expansion of the Internet around the turn of the century, an increasing number of my clients came to me already armed with information and ideas they had gleaned from websites, some of them written by people with illnesses similar to their own and who reported what had worked and not worked in their own situations. They were already more knowledgeable in some aspects of their illnesses than I and were seeking my advice more as a fellow colleague than as an authority who could provide a quick fix. The unique perspective that I often provided was to reveal how the methods of traditional Chinese medicine, which are rooted in observing changes in symptoms and easily observed clinical signs like tongue and pulse, could help these individuals select protocols optimized for their unique metabolic profile, body type, and other systemic characteristics. The traditional Chinese method of syndrome-pattern analysis provides a systematic means for evaluating a specific protocol's overall effectiveness and potential side effects. Creative ways that many people are now circumventing the current dysfunctional systemSince the year 2000, I have noticed that of all my clients, those who achieved the best results have taken maximal advantage of the Internet, searching for relevant articles, subscribing to discussion groups for people with their category of illness, and asking for online advice. By the time they seek out my help, they are already aware of many options and are most likely at the fine-tuning stage where they need help in applying specific protocols. The systematic poisoning of the population can be overcome by each of us as individuals. Mental-social-spiritual deprogramming can most effectively and inexpensively be achieved by taking advantage of the huge amount of free and low-cost information now available via the Internet. Numerous mutual self-help groups have arisen taking advantage of the ease with which people can instantly network and communicate with each other. To be effective at using the Internet for self-education in health matters (or, for that matter, any other topic) requires applying a few common-sense principles:
Our solution: RMHInetRMHInet is a brainstorming-crowdsourcing network for individuals, students, and professionals to share ideas and information about health and to apply the power of dedicated focus groups toward solving complex health problems. Crowd-sourcing, when carefully implemented, has demonstrated that it can often provide its participants with analysis and solutions to challenging problems, faster and at much lower cost than conventional options. RMHInet combines
with the unique insights that persistent, committed individuals can contribute toward helping each other overcome challenging health problems by applying personal experience, reason, logic, and intuition. RMHInet integrates these elements into a format that is accessible to anyone who is motivated to reclaim control of their life and health. Participation at the Beginner level requires only 60 hours of your time in introductory study and tutorials, all of which are presented in easy-to-understand and clearly worded explanations. The remainder of this article will explain why RMHInet was developed and how it can solve three serious problems afflicting the current healthcare system, which is dominated by international pharmaceutical cartels and the medical-industrial complex:
Our goal is to make accessible, in a self-explanatory and easily accessed format, knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine at a professional level to anyone with an interest in improving their health and in sharing this knowledge with others. We can show you how to discover solutions to complex health problems quickly and inexpensively and yet simultaneously target potential solutions with greater accuracy and thoroughness than conventional options. All that is required your willingness and ability to carefully follow instructions and to learn how to compile an accurate symptom history. The key component of RMHInet: AutoSage-TCM, expert-system software for automated pattern analysis
If one does an Internet search for "Chinese medicine expert system", "TCM expert system", or "TCM artificial intelligence software" one will find hundreds of references to academic research articles, the vast majority published by Chinese researchers and universities, but very few working systems available for practical use by individuals and practitioners. Academic reviews of attempts at such expert systems generally have generally concluded that the results either were disappointing or were limited in application to a narrow range of clinical diseases. Privately, I have speculated that the reason for this profusion of academic interest in TCM expert systems is that among pharmaceutical companies worldwide, it has long been understood that nature has always been the best source for new drug ideas, and these corporations have been scheming at better ways to data-mine nature's vast resources, including Chinese herbs. The standard game plan is to isolate an active biochemical constituent that has predictable effects by itself and then modify it chemically so that it can be patented (natural substances cannot be patented), with the hope that the modified product will be similarly effective and not unduly toxic. At the same time, the pharmaceutical industry maintains a steady barrage of propaganda that herbs are primitive, either ineffective or dangerous, and that only their "scientifically proven" drugs are safe and effective, when numerous clinical research studies and officially maintained statistics reveal the exact opposite to be true. •[a1]• The results of any corporate-sponsored TCM expert-systems research would likely be kept a closely guarded trade secret. The reported results officially published in academic journals have typically been peppered with obscure jargon, murky logic, and a general impression that the field is fraught with confusion and uncertainty. I strongly suspect that the intended purpose of such articles is to convince the casual reader that expert systems for TCM are boring academic curiosities that are nowhere near practical implementation for practitioners or the general public. However, expert-systems applications seem to be rapidly evolving to produce successful practical applications in robotics, automated piloting of drone aircraft and other vehicles, Internet search, marketing, finance, engineering, factory automation, mining exploration, human written and spoken language understanding and translation, virtual-reality simulations, and many other areas. (The vast majority of expert systems, sometimes referred to as "artificial intelligence" are, in reality, highly sophisticated software algorithms that calculate patterns and probabilities and then make decisions based on these pre-programmed algorithms; they do not really possess true intelligence, which is the ability of a living being to evaluate new and unexpected situations and to adapt one's behavior to these new circumstances.) For the past 25 years, I have worked with a small group of people at RMHI to develop the AutoSage-TCM expert system for TCM syndrome-pattern analysis. I have been a practitioner for over 30 years and am committed to making the logic and mathematics of Chinese medicine accessible to as many people as possible — not just to practitioners but to anyone with access to a computer and a healthy dose of common sense. AutoSage-TCM was completed in January 2016 and tested thoroughly for over a year. It is now being used successfully by RMHI students, graduates, and associates. I have personally used it to evaluate numerous difficult cases that had challenged the limits of my skills, including several nagging challenges with my own health. The results, almost without exception, establish that AutoSage-TCM is capable of producing a more accurate and detailed pattern analysis than I could possibly hope to do by hand. I think of it as my electronic TCM pattern calculator. Many of you reading this, especially TCM practitioners, may rightly be skeptical. Past attempts at TCM expert systems available to the public have been disappointing and crude. That's why we are making our system accessible on a low-cost trial basis to applicants who agree to complete a series of simple tutorials, which can be completed online. We do this for the following reason: "Garbage in, garbage out" is a phrase well known among software systems analysts. Regardless how sophisticated one's system, the quality of results will always be limited by the quality of data fed into it — that means thorough clinical case histories: a detailed history of symptoms, what aggravates or relieves them, how severe, chronic or acute, complete descriptions of tongue tissue and coating, plus pulse qualities in each of 3 positions at both left and right radial arteries. Our goal is to make this system available to anyone willing to spend the time to use it correctly. We have developed instructional materials and user guides that explain in plain language what we are doing and why. For those interested in using this for advanced clinical research, we explain the algorithms used in the system in crystal-clear detail. Those who are interested primarily in applying this to personal and family health matters are also welcome and encouraged to give it a try. You can ignore all the technical details; the essence of the method can be learned in 60 hours. A brief history of why and how we developed AutoSage-TCM and RMHInetThe American healthcare system is currently the most expensive in the world, as measured by total costs per person in insurance premiums, healthcare benefit taxes, government subsidies, and direct expenses. And what do we have to show for all this? Quality of life by all measures of health and wellness falls near the bottom of the industrialized nations — a population growing steadily sicker by the year from toxic pharmaceutical drugs, a medical system concerned more with churning over profits and filling out reams of corporate and government-mandated paperwork, mass-produced food laden with toxic chemicals, heavy metals, and GMO ingredients that have been banned in many other countries, imported consumer goods saturated with toxic chemicals, vaccines adulterated with dozens of toxic chemicals and biological contaminants manufactured in China with very little quality control, and brain-damaging microwave radiation from cell phones and wifi. I could go on and on. But if you have been paying attention, and many of my readers have, you know all this already. What is perhaps not as well known even among the awakened is the steady deterioration that has occurred in almost all the so-called alternative health professions, due to the disintegration of our public education system. Over the past several decades, I have been intimately involved in developing textbooks and educational software to supplement our courses in Chinese herbology and environmental health. We have designed much of this software to overcome deficiencies in the public school system, such as the lack of emphasis on logic, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving skills. Formal higher education is irrelevant as a predictor of how well a potential student will do in our courses — as many major corporations have already determined with regard to their own recruitment of employees. •[a4]• We have had students with a wide range of prior educational attainments and life experiences successfully complete our courses, including bright high-school dropouts and homeschooled individuals, gardeners and organic farmers, college graduates, health professionals of all types, and retirees. There is nothing inherently special about Chinese herbs. Useful herbs and medicines can be found in nature worldwide. What is unique about Chinese herbal medicine is its system of logic and clinical strategy that can greatly reduce the guesswork involved in choosing remedies (herbs, diet and nutrition, exercise, massage, and even pharmaceuticals). Its core principle can be summarized as follows: The total pattern of symptoms plus tongue appearance and qualities palpated in the radial pulse, when evaluated correctly, will lead directly to a concise summary of the general, systemic state of one's health. This summary, or symptom-sign pattern evaluation, directly points to specific clinical strategies and types of remedies that are appropriate and others that are inappropriate (contraindicated). As I explained at the beginning of this article, the simplistic method of choosing herbs reputed to be "good for medical disease X" is haphazard, frequently does not work, and may lead to side effects. If the symptom-sign pattern evaluation is incorrect, a huge amount of time and expense may be wasted in trying ineffective remedies. In the worst case, side effects may result from using herbs that are actually contraindicated for one's condition. Accurate evaluation of patterns in traditional Chinese medicine turns out to be a challenging task that scholars and practitioners throughout its long history have recognized as a skill that few master. Due to the difficulty of teaching this skill, many TCM colleges distract students with memorization of vast amounts of data about herbs and formulas and sayings from classical texts, which results in what I call the idiot-savant phenomenon of TCM — a mere illusion of wisdom that has disastrous practical consequences. During the mid-1990's my long-time research associate, Curt Kruse, and I began to develop expert-system software that would perform the types of accurate evaluations that are essential to the correct application of Chinese herbs, according to time-tested principles and methods that have evolved over several thousand years. We did this partly out of an awareness that such a system would eventually be required to compensate for the relentless general decline of public education and students' cognitive abilities. It required several decades to develop the extensive databases and algorithms necessary to implement this expert system; it has now been debugged and tested for over a year, and we have already trained a number of local people in its use. (In spring of 2017, we submitted AutoSage-TCM as an entry to the international Herbal Medicine Awareness Competition sponsored by the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine. This summer, we were surprised and pleased to learn that we had been awarded Honorable Mention — 5th place — in the competition.) I have long been a techno-skeptic in spite of having a PhD in Biomedical Engineering and am dismayed at how carelessly many people embrace new technology without discerning its potential risks and threats to their privacy, health, or sanity. My academic background has given me the tools to understand the physiological basis for the real hazards that many of these technologies pose. However, regarding expert-systems technology ("AI"), I believe that we, the human species, face a stark choice in the near future: either we consciously choose to co-evolve with and to control this new technology to respect our rights and needs, or it will overtake us. AutoSage-TCM, the expert system that we have created to perform the complex pattern analyses necessary to correctly use Chinese herbs and formulas, provides a very general method that can be used to analyze the systemic effects of not only Chinese herbs, but of any herb, food, nutritional supplement, health technology, and other factors that impact human health. It's a potential game-changer. No longer are years of expensive education required to learn how to perform complex evaluations of symptom-sign patterns, which has been historically recognized even by the ancient Chinese as an art that few people master, analogous to the difficulties of becoming a chess champion. However, chess was one of the first games to be conquered by AI software. It was only after Curt and I had made several false starts in the early versions of our expert system (the early 1990's) that I began to truly appreciate the complexities of Chinese herbal medicine. It is a sophisticated system of logic, and its successful translation into software algorithms eventually required us to incorporate multiple expert-systems methodologies, including ideas from neural nets, fuzzy logic, Bayesian inference algorithms, vector-space modeling, and archetypal pattern matching. The end result is that, since 2017, we have taught "Herbalists' BootCamp", a series of online tutorials that prepares participants to use this expert-system software to analyze and solve real clinical problems. AutoSage-TCM is dependent on real people feeding it accurate and complete information — that means thorough clinical case histories: a detailed history of symptoms, what aggravates or relieves them, how severe, chronic or acute, complete descriptions of tongue tissue and coating, plus pulse qualities in each of 3 positions at both left and right radial arteries. Many modern health problems also require a thorough investigation of an individual's diet history plus chemical and environmental toxicity exposures. This is all relatively straightforward to do, but it does require patience, persistence, and following a few simple guidelines so that you elicit an unbiased and thorough report from your client. I have routinely spent 3 hours in completing a typical client health history, and that is probably the time you will require to do so as well. In our version of Herbalists' BootCamp, we train people in 60 hours to take a thorough clinical case history, including tongue and pulse data, and then to input this information into the CaseQuery software application. CaseQuery will automatically generate a specially formatted, encoded text file that can be interpreted and evaluated by the AutoSage-TCM expert system. Only a small minority of Chinese herbalists record thorough clinical case histories plus traditional tongue and pulse data, even though the importance of these methods are reiterated by eminent physicians throughout the history of traditional Chinese medicine. It seems the art of taking a case history has been lost, not only by most western MD's, but even by many alternative healthcare practitioners, who have attempted to mimic the assembly-line model of the allopathic medical system in which patients are shuffled through the appointment schedule in lock-step in order to maximize income. However, an increasing number of holistic physicians are recognizing that detailed understanding of a patient's symptoms and what aggravates or relieves them is essential to the medical detective work required to accurately assess environmental and dietary toxicity and to restore the patient to health. RMHInet and its component modulesWe at RMHI have created technological educational and reference tools of which the Barefoot Doctors of 1950's China never dreamed:
View screen shots of all the preceding modules. Instead of dumbing-down the subject of Chinese medicine, we make expert-level knowledge available to anyone willing to spend a bit of time learning how to use all the preceding components of RMHInet. In contrast to the Chinese Communists of the 1950's, my own philosophy is closer to that of the libertarian, natural-rights advocates — Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, and Ron Paul are a few whom I consider to be exemplary role models. I abhor top-down bureaucracies, with their penchant for attracting sociopaths to their power hierarchies like flies to a dung heap. RMHInet embodies the spirit of the libertarian, natural-rights movement: acknowledging the autonomy and natural rights of each individual, as long as one's actions do not violate those same rights of others. Each member is respected as an independent, self-determined being. We each have different challenges, strengths, and limitations, and no one else should dictate what we believe, what we should eat, how we should educate our children, and what we should allow to be injected into our bodies. The multiplicity of ideas among members is what makes crowd-sourcing networks so effective, and we make an effort to recruit members from a broad range of backgrounds and life experiences. Our counterpart to the Barefoot Doctors movement is RMHInet, a libertarian-techno-networking alternative to the disastrous, over-priced, disease-care system that is currently the status-quo system in America. Crowd-sourced brainstorming networks have become increasingly popular as effective ways to solve complex and difficult problems. •[b1, b2]• Crowd-sourced medical diagnosis has been the subject of recent research studies. Within days or weeks, crowd-sourcing can sometimes solve mysterious problems that have formerly frustrated sufferers with tens of thousands of dollars worth of medical tests, consultations, and ineffective therapeutic interventions. The keys to creating an effective brainstorming network are to
Research studies have demonstrated that the most successful crowd-sourcing networks have ways of ranking their members according to their historical track-record of accuracy so as to increase their influence within the group by means of common-sense criteria. At RMHI, the Herbal Tutor interactive-learning software, a component module of HerbalThink-TCM, has provided us with a standard that we have successfully used since the year 2000 to determine whether students have achieved a level of accuracy and precision that enables them to progress to our Supervised Clinical Internship course where they will be working with clients to help them to overcome various health problems. We have over 17 years of student performance statistics to prove that graduates of the RMHI Level-1 course are typically capable of analyzing complex clinical cases involving multiple simultaneous syndrome-patterns and exposure to environmental toxins, dietary imbalances, and other negative factors — a skill that many TCM herbalists never acquire even after many decades of practice. Each RMHInet member wins an award/points for each educational milestone successfully completed, representing a specific practical skill that will be useful to oneself and to others in the network:
Principles that we request our members keep in mind:
Chess icons and the rules of movement that they represent are appropriately symbolic of the RMHInet philosophy:
The software support toolsRMHInet is supported by an extensive array of software-based reference texts and databases, interactive games, video simulators, and expert-system modules that are largely self-explanatory and easy to use:
RMHInet makes the introductory levels of all these tools available to even beginning users and combines these with the ability to network with other users to share ideas, clinical case analyses, and suggestions. Beginners are introduced to the RMHInet system with a personal tutorial, provided by a combination of emails, phone consultations, and/or in-person instruction (if a local authorized Group Leader is available in your area). AutoSage-TCM — the key to making expert-level analyses accessible to even beginning usersAutoSage-TCM is the most recent addition to RMHI's suite of educational software for Chinese herbology and is the key component that allows us to offer sophisticated clinical analyses to beginners as well as to experienced practitioners. An estimated 60 hours of study will prepare you to create accurate case histories using the CaseQuery software and to interpret the corresponding AutoSage-TCM analysis reports. Consider the following arithmetic problem: Over the previous 25 years, researchers and developers at RMHI have systematically worked out the mathematics of pattern-recognition rules that constitute the foundation of traditional Chinese herbology. These rules explain how patterns of common symptoms and clinical signs like pulse and tongue can reveal the nature of an individual's overall state of health with considerable insight and accuracy — if these patterns are evaluated correctly. The mathematics of the rules for Chinese medicine are vastly more complicated than simple arithmetic. Correct evaluation of patterns from the symptoms, tongue, and pulse turns out to be a quite challenging task for most people, which is why traditional Chinese medicine has acquired a reputation over its long history of requiring much study, practice, and experience to master. Many have compared the complexity of its workings to that of a chess game; master chess players typically take many decades to acquire that status. However, the ability to play chess at a high level was one of the very first tasks to be solved by expert-system software, because the rules are straightforward. However, after the opening moves, the possible sequences quickly becomes immense, almost begging for some type of specialized electronic calculator that can evaluate the thousands of possible sequence variations and recommend only the most strategically advantageous moves. AutoSage-TCM systematically and exhaustively evaluates the probabilities that each of the client's symptoms is associated with a specific TCM syndrome-pattern, and all these incremental probabilities considered together are evaluated to determine which syndromes are dominant, plus estimates of each syndrome's magnitude, rank, and probability. Each clinical case evaluation requires literally millions of complex calculations. Such a system would have been prohibitively time-consuming before the introduction of ultra-high-speed desktop computers within the past few years. CaseQuery — a utility for creating clinical case reports that improves your skills in taking health historiesNow, with the addition of the AutoSage-TCM expert system to RMHI's system of software tools, if one can learn to take a detailed health history plus accurate tongue and pulse description and enter this data into the CaseQuery software, even beginning users can obtain detailed, accurate pattern-assessment reports from the AutoSage-TCM expert-system software. All that is necessary is a willingness to carefully follow instructions and to learn how to take a thorough case history, including tongue and pulse data, which we estimate to require about 60 hours of instruction and study. CaseQuery will even remind you to add missing required or high-priority information that you might otherwise have omitted, thus helping to improve your case-history-taking skills. Pulse Simulator — learn pulse palpation faster, easier, and more accuratelyOnly a few pulse qualities require extensive practice and experience, but most aspects of the pulse — like rate, rhythm, pulse duration, depth, strength, elasticity, width, and edge quality — can be learned in a short period of time. Correctly interpreted, these pulse parameters yield important information about the state of one's health. Inconsistent and confused application of terminology has been the primary obstacle to many students learning pulses well. A key reason that we can teach traditional pulse palpation technique in a fraction of the time that traditionalists insist is required is another software innovation created by RMHI: Pulse Simulator is video simulation software that graphically displays a wide range of pulse types in 3 dimensions and time, allowing the user to control the value of each of 12 separate pulse parameters and to instantly see how each parameter control changes the pulse quality. This tool not only makes pulse taking vastly easier to learn but increases the user's accuracy and thoroughness in describing a specific client's pulses. Herbal Tutor — interactive game software for learning to accurately identify syndrome-patternsUnfortunately, the profession of Chinese medicine has been fraught with a conservative mindset in educational methods that emphasizes rote memorization of ancient texts and materia medica rather than in exercising students' skills in problem solving, which any good chess player knows to be an essential skill. For over 15 years at RMHI, we have used a radically different method to teach our students the art and skill of clinical pattern evaluation: we require them to regularly use Herbal Tutor, an extensive suite of interactive game software that we designed specifically for this purpose. The software has been successful in preparing students to perform accurate and thorough clinical evaluations, but the main problem is that for the past few decades, ever fewer students seem to have had the motivation and persistence necessary to learn this technique well. Consequently, the vast majority of practitioners of Chinese medicine practitioners are applying only a small fraction of its potential; moreover, few routinely perform thorough pulse and tongue evaluations, which has been considered essential to accurate pattern assessment throughout Chinese medicine's long history. Summary — business opportunity as a TCM health-coach/Group-Leader
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