New Year's Joy: Whales, Spring, and East-West Transmission in Pregnancy Care

About this episode

The episode discusses the joy of spring and the challenges of pregnancy care in the context of Chinese medicine, highlighting the differences between practices in the West and East Asia.

Happy new year of the Yang Fire horse to everybody! In this conversation, recorded on the eve of the Chinese New Year, Leo had set out to share his excitement about the work that we have been doing on our upcoming course on "Nurturing Pregnancy." Sabine got distracted right at the beginning of our recording session by two grey whales passing by and then returning to feed outside her window, as the biggest (literally!) and most amazing sign that spring is truly arriving here on Whidbey Island. So this podcast meanders a bit, between Sabine's attempt to share the joy and love of a spring day, Leo's desire to share some insights on pregnancy care with Chinese medicine, and our serious contemplation of the challenges in this specialized field that Western practitioners of Chinese medicine encounter: We discuss the very unfortunate lack of access to the precious primary sources, historical and contemporary, that reflect the top quality of care that is common in East Asia. Then we explore the difficult clinical reality for practitioners in the West, surrounded as they are by a culture that considers both traditional Chinese medicinal treatments and acupuncture either as dangerous or as…

People in this episode

Host: Sabine Wilms

Guest: Leo

Topics covered

• pregnancy care
• Chinese medicine
• East-West transmission
• whales
• spring
• healthcare access

Keywords

• pregnancy
• Chinese medicine
• healthcare
• whales
• spring
• East-West transmission
• acupuncture

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Nurturing Pregnancy

Places: Whidbey Island

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