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Brave New Medicine: A Doctor's Unconventional Path to Healing Her Autoimmune Illness Kindle Edition
by Cynthia Li MD (Author), Arlie Russell Hochschild (Foreword) Format: Kindle Edition
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In this revelatory memoir, Doctor Cynthia Li shares the truth about her disabling autoimmune illness, the limitations of Western medicine, and her hard-won lessons on healing—mind, body, and spirit.
Li had it all: a successful career in medicine, a loving marriage, children on the horizon. But it all came crashing down when, after developing an autoimmune thyroid condition, mysterious symptoms began consuming her body. Test after test came back "within normal limits," baffling her doctors—and baffling herself. Housebound with two young children, Li began a solo odyssey from her living room couch to find a way to heal.
Brave New Medicine details the physical and existential crisis that forces a young doctor to question her own medical training. She dives into the root causes of her illness, learning to unlock her body's innate intelligence and wholeness. Li relates her story with the insight of a scientist, and the humility and candor of a patient, exploring the emotional and spiritual shifts beyond the physical body.
Millions of people worldwide are affected by autoimmune disease. While complex conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) are gaining attention, patients struggling with these mysterious ailments remain largely dismissed by their doctors, families, and friends. This is the harsh reality that doctor-turned-"difficult patient" Li faced firsthand.
Drawing on cutting-edge science, ancient healing arts, and the power of intuition, this memoir offers support, validation, and a new perspective for doctors and patients alike. Through her story, you can find the wisdom and heart to start your own healing journey, too.
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Print length
274 pages
Language
English
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Publisher
Reveal Press
Publication date
1 September 2019
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“I love this book—a harrowing and somehow also charming account by a brilliant doctor of how
she healed her body, mind, spirit, and soul from a debilitating autoimmune disease. After her doc-
tors had given up on her, with a husband and two little children at home, she broke out of the
constraints of Western medicine and found her way home to health, renewal, and her own true
self. This beautifully written, prescriptive book is going to change—and even save—people’s
lives.”
—Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling author of Bird by Bird and Almost Everything
“Eat, Pray, Love meets Anatomy of an Illness meets a Deepak Chopra workshop in this engaging,
exquisitely written doctor-as-patient memoir. Cynthia Li humbly, humorously, and honestly un-
earths the roots of her debilitating illness, but the gifts don’t stop there. With 15 practical, ground-
ed tips for how to heal, this book also serves as an unconventional, whole health prescription,
sure to facilitate the healing journey of others. With raw transparency and the kind of courage we
need among both doctors and patients, Brave New Medicine charts a new terrain, bridging conven-
tional medicine with functional medicine, nutrition, environmental health, intuition, and spiri-
tuality—all in a highly entertaining, hard-earned miracle story.”
—Lissa Rankin, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Mind Over Medicine and The Daily
Flame, and founder of the Whole Health Medicine Institute
“In Cynthia Li’s spellbinding book, we encounter the moving story of a physician struggling with
her own autoimmune illness. Li’s writing is so intimate—and so exacting—that it cuts like a knife.
She raises fundamental questions about the future of medicine, her own future, and about being a
doctor and a patient at the same time. The result is a beautiful book that will be read and remem-
bered for years to come.”
—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies
“Each year brings a new stack of ‘how-to’ health manuals, but Cynthia Li’s book is different. It’s a
moving, personal—and sometimes unsettling—investigation into the deepest questions sur-
rounding chronic illness. What makes us sick? How do we live with the uncertainty of a myste-
rious condition? How do we define health in an age when conventional medicine focuses almost
exclusively on disease management? The answers Li arrives at in her exploration change her as a
person, and the way she practices medicine. Her book is full of wisdom for both health care prac-
titioners and those suffering from chronic illness.”
—Chris Kresser, MS, LAc, New York Times bestselling author of Unconventional Medicine
“It is a major concession to admit how much Li’s book inspired me, given how deeply skeptical I
am about alternative medicine. When Li, a physician herself, develops a terrifying syndrome that
regular medicine can’t even identify, she becomes her own doctor, charting her symptoms, doing
experiments, and seeking help from whoever offers it. Emotionally, she rises from a crouch of de-
feat to the confident stride of an explorer—and you will find yourself rising with her.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Natural Causes, and founder of the Economic Hardship Re-
porting Project
“This is a memoir for our time. Cynthia Li is a superbly trained physician of internal medicine
====
Beyond Medicine: What Qigong Taught One Doctor About Healing
Cynthia Li
Almost 7 years ago, I met Master Gu for the first time. My former midwife-turned-friend and mentor, Yeshi Neumann, had invited me to his studio in Petaluma, CA, for a workshop. Innocent enough, I thought. Low risk. I was a doctor of internal medicine, trained to think critically and methodically, skeptical of anything that might fall into the realm of “miracles.”
But I was also desperate. I had suffered for years with complex autoimmune conditions, including Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and dysautonomia–the “shadow” conditions of Western medicine.
Despite conventional treatments, my health continued to worsen. At one point, I was bed-bound for 6 months, housebound for 2 years. So when Master Gu encouraged us to practice every day, I figured I had nothing to lose.
With my health brittle and my children young, I started with 15 minutes twice a day, doing sound healing practices. When I could stand erect to do movement forms, I began noticing, after years of chronic vertigo, that I could stand with my eyes closed. Gradually, I committed to practicing 45 minutes every morning. As I understood it then, mind-body practices were just another slice of the total pie of all the other health-promoting changes I’d already made by studying integrative and functional medicine:
- nutrient-dense diets,
- a rainbow of vitamins and minerals,
- a pocketful of herbs,
- sleep hygiene,
- gut healing,
- acupuncture,
- cranial osteopathy,
you name it.
My health was improving in numerous ways. No need to urinate throughout the night, an increase in appetite, stability in weight, and a lessening of vertigo, aches and fatigue. I was laboriously but gratefully moving toward 100 percent.
Then my health crashed. Again. Despite all I’d done, my entire stress system plummeted. I endured a 3-month period that felt like a prolonged near-death experience, terrifying not just because I was at the edge of life, but because many of my experiences fell into “mystical” or “energetic” realms, of which I wanted no part.
Was I not already on the forefront of internal medicine, integrative and functional medicine, intuitive medicine? I realized what I knew was but a drop in the ocean. I didn’t need more information. I needed, in fact, a miracle.
One of the primary things I did was to dive deep into qigong. I ramped my practice up to 2-2 1/2 hours a day, doing lachi and visualizations when I couldn’t get off the couch. I bought Master Gu’s textbook and Luke Chan’s 101 Miracles of Natural Healing, poring through and highlighting them as though medical textbooks. Master Gu and the 101 testimonials from the Medicineless Hospital in China reminded me that our bodies store the subconscious, complementing the theories I knew of epigenetics (how our thoughts and emotions and movement dictate the folding patterns of our DNA) and neuroplasticity (how the same factors change how our nervous system wires and rewires). In the framework of root-cause medicine, I realized I hadn’t gone deep enough. Down below the factors that cause disease and those that promote health, lay the mysterious qi energy. It wasn’t a slice of the health pie; it had the potential to be the whole pie itself. Qi surrounded and infused me, seen and unseen. But its potential depended upon two things: my capacity to tap into the qi field by my consciousness (the mind and heart), and my ability to activate its flow within my trillions of cells (the body).
After a while, something shifted. I went from doing the practice as transactional (I practice in order to get better) to transformational (I practice because it connects me to the energetic source of healing, whereby the body heals as a side-effect). Healing the body as a side-effect! I’d done so much soul- and mind-centered work prior, but had somehow compartmentalized mind and spirit from the body. And as a doctor, my ultimate goal for myself and my patients was always to heal the body, too.
Since the plunge into qigong, the trajectory of my health, for those who have witnessed it up close, would be categorized as a radical remission. It defies all medical explanation. I’ve also tapered completely off my levothyroxine, which I’ve taken for 14 years. My husband has been astonished, not fully grasping what’s going on, because on the outside, it seems I had always been doing everything “right.” Last week, my family took a river rafting trip in the desert canyons of eastern Oregon. For over a decade, this kind of trip was something I had to sit out. This time I went. And I paddled through rapids, hiked the shale hillsides, and slept under the twinkling of the Milky Way, feeling both like me, and not me, too. Perhaps this was a truer me than I’d ever known. All my husband could say was, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”
Whatever I’m doing, I’m entering yet another paradigm shift. That is, learning that when we tap into Pure Consciousness, the complex prescriptions distill into golden simplicity. Food and air and water are sources of energy. So is qi. And in many ways, harnessing qi feels more important to me now than eating food.
I hesitate to ever tout one practice as The Method, because like anything else in deep healing, it’s not one-size-fits-all. We’re unique beings with unique lineages and gifts and callings. Wisdom Healing Qigong connected me to my Chinese heritage in a way I’d never been before; it also transformed the trauma I experienced growing up in an evangelical community in Texas (the dualism of good and evil and the fear of being left behind) into one of the most powerful healing forces in my life now (God as pure consciousness, as the common origin of all, and Jesus as the embodied form of pure consciousness).
There’s so much I don’t know and can’t explain. It can only be experienced. But what I gather is this: nature’s laws are immutable. What we call miracles don’t defy these laws; they just access laws higher than we’ve previously encountered.
Published July 19, 2019
