Understanding chronic disease: the Divergent Channels
It's a beautiful, sunny day, and you go out for a run. Everything is going well, except for every person you pass hands you a widget. You pass young people, older people, big people, and tiny people; they ALL hand you a widget.
At first, you think it was odd, a little annoying, but no big deal. You just put the widget in your back pocket. Then the other one back pocket. When you run out of room there, you go to your jacket pocket, and when you run out of room in your jacket, you stuff the next widget in your sock.
Finally, when your pockets are stuffed to the gills, widgets start spilling out.
This is what happens in our bodies as we're exposed to toxins--a generic term for things that our bodies don't recognize or necessarily know what to do with--pesticides, food additives, BPA's, heavy metals, medications, vaccinations, and even, especially, emotional experiences.
Our bodies' ability to deal with toxins is like using pockets to hold widgets. When someone handed you the first or second widget, it wasn't a big deal, and you could handle it. But as people kept giving you widgets, you ran out of space to hold them.
This is the function of the Divergent Channels.
We can think of divergent channels as a series of pockets. When we are exposed to a few things that aren't so great for us, it's not a big deal, but when we are continually exposed to toxins--as is common in our industrialized world--we push our body's ability to protect us from them.
Also, it's important to note that even though toxins may have a negative effect on our bodies, that's not to say that they don't also offer some benefit. The challenge in our modern world is to identify where we can reduce our exposure and where we cannot.
In the case of divergents, "pockets" are mediumship—jing, blood, thin & thick fluids, qi, and yang—that have been taxed by the over-exposure to environmental toxins. Just as genetics are unpredictable in western science, there is an unpredictable component in Chinese medicine, which we call constitution, but our diet and lifestyle also affect the quality of these fluids.
An extremely common symptom of divergent pathology is joint pain; often this is the beginning of the divergent pathology and is fairly easy to treat.
Autoimmune diseases, migraines, and kidney stones are examples of pathology we see as we continue to burn through a few more pockets, and at the end of the pocket series is where cancers* begin.
Hydration is important for preventing divergent pathology, but it's more significant than just drinking water. We need a diet that includes animal fats, bone broth, stews, soups, and porridge--none of which are trendy.
Raw diets and dried foods, like jerky, are terrible for yin fluids, because they require so much energy and fluid from the stomach to digest. A diet high in exceptionally spicy food, alcohol, and/or coffee are also drying. Additionally, frequent training for long distance athletic races and hot yoga are risky activities, because anything that causes us to sweat excessively also becomes drying and consumes our yin, weakening the divergents' ability to protect us from the pathology we encounter.
In the practice of Chinese medicine, divergents are something that those of us that use them spend our lives studying, but I hope that this begins to give you an understanding of the importance of limiting our exposure to things we know were not meant to be in our bodies.
I also hope it gives you a sense of what you can do to fortify yourself and stay vibrant and healthy—that healing is possible!
*It's important to note that the scope of practice of Chinese medicine in the United States does not allow for the treatment of cancer; however, based on the understanding of divergent pathology, what Complement Channel practitioners are able to see in the patient's pulse is that, at the same time they present with cancer diagnoses, they have also exhausted most of their fluids. If fluids can be rebuilt, through treatment, diet, and lifestyle, we see these cancers return to latency (remission).
