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Webinar Series: Hacking Chinese Medicine

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Event description

This is a 3-part webinar series

Joint us at:

12:00-2:00pm AEST, Monday 9th May 2022

12:00-2:00pm AEST, Wednesday 11th May 2022

12:00-2:00pm AEST, Friday 13th May 2022


Where: Online

CPE: 6 CPE points

CPE will be awarded for both the live events and/or the recordings.

Webinar Recordings: Registering for this live event will also give you access to the webinar recordings. 

Webinar recordings can be watched at any time.

Hacking Chinese Medicine: Part I

Secrets! This course will share some of the secrets I wish I’d known when I started studying Chinese medicine. 

In my travels, teachers from around the world have offered insights, anecdotes, and wildly different translations from what I’d been taught in school. Through three decades as an acupuncturist and herbalist, my brain underwent a slow-motion revolution.

This class makes the point that the “Chinese vocabulary” we learn in acupuncture school is no actually vocabulary: we learn code words, and the words we learn are often grossly mistranslated. The pattern diagnostics are an even deeper level of code – they do not mean what is implied in the English mistranslations. 

This class will teach you what you are doing, and why, and how it works, and how to convey the diagnostic words so that your patients can understand.


Hacking Chinese Medicine: Part II

We will cover subjects such as the origin of the words Yin and Yang and why it matters; what “indicated” actually means – it’s not what you think; and the crucial importance of the explanation for all of Chinese medicine: “Go through, no pain; no go through pain”.


Hacking Chinese Medicine: Part III

This class will cover the “adages.” You’ll learn what is actually meant in medical Chinese by axioms such as Anger makes Qi rise and affects the Liver; Sadness dissolves Qi and affects the Lungs; Shock Confuses the Qi and affects Kidney and Heart; Excessive Joy hurts the Heart. We will learn that “Damp” is a polite mistranslation for feces and how knowing this can help us not make stupid mistakes due to thinking that Damp means “damp.”

As a description of what our medicine does, “Balancing Yin and Yang” is a gross misquote. We do NOT balance Yin and Yang in our treatments. Learn the actual meaning of “balancing Yin and Yang.” (Its use in Chinese is similar to our “Have a nice day!”)

Find out about treatments we are taught that don’t actually work, that never have worked, and how some of these non-helpful treatments were created to correspond to dark-ages Taoist theory. When you understand what these principles actually mean, you can be on your way to becoming a brilliant doctor of Chinese medicine, instead of faking it and following a bunch of hit or miss, one-size-fits-all “point prescriptions” that only work once in a while, if ever.

You can know what you are doing. You can master this medicine: you can hack it.


Presenter: Janice Walton-Hadlock

Janice Hadlock, DAOM, LAc earned a BA in Biology at University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1974. While there, she also studied History of Science – ancient and modern. She obtained a Master’s degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine at Five Branches Institute in Santa Cruz, CA, and a DAOM degree (Doctor of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine) at Five Branches University in San Jose, CA.

She has been teaching at Five Branches, an acupuncture college in Santa Cruz, California, since 1998.

Her research articles have been published in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Acupuncture, The Journal of Chinese Medicine, and other journals in the field. Her commentary on a piece of published research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine: she was the first non-MD acupuncturist to be accepted for publication in that journal.

She has lectured extensively, at home and abroad. In China, she stumbled on a new-to-her understanding of pattern diagnostics, an expansion that ultimately revolutionized the way she understood Chinese medicine. This understanding, along with many corrected translations of the words used in English for Chinese medical principles is discussed in her book Hacking Chinese Medicine.

She brings to her study of Chinese medicine a passion for modern physics and for ancient languages and scriptures.


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