One of the effects of my visits to China over the past 14 years is that they have forced me to change my approach to diagnosing the elements. In China we were asked to help diagnose many hundreds of five element students and practitioners at each of the seminars we ran there. The main reason for this was that I always emphasize the importance of a five element practitioner being confident of their own element, since this colours their approach to their patients. The sheer number of people wanting our help to do this therefore inevitably made it essential for us to adapt the procedure for diagnosing the elements which I had until then accepted as being the only correct one, one that I had learnt during my training and have practised ever since.
In my own practice I had the luxury of giving each new patient and myself the time gradually to get to know each other, and thus to develop the good relationship necessary to help me towards a diagnosis of their element. The initial interaction could be as long as two hours, with each subsequent treatment being at least one hour. This gave me plenty of unhurried time to work my way towards a patient’s element. In China, on the other hand, no such luxury was possible. We were at the most three five element practitioners, and were expected to diagnose the elements of sometimes up to more than 300 people over a mere seven days. We could only do this by devising a different approach to diagnosis, and this in turn changed my understanding of how the elements manifest themselves when seen in groups. This led us to develop what I regard as an effective method of diagnosing the elements of large groups of people.
We modified our new approach to diagnosis slowly over the first few years of our Chinese seminars, and only developed it fully as the numbers in our seminars increased (from the initial 20 or so 14 years ago to the final 500). To start with I kept the protocol I was familiar with in my own practice: an hour or so quietly alone with each new patient. This quite soon became impractical. Initially I tried to adapt the interaction of a private diagnosis by talking to volunteer patients in front of the whole seminar as though pretending that this was in some way equivalent to a one-to-one interaction. Apart from the fact that I always tried to avoid any very personal questions which might embarrass the person in front of the large audience, it also meant that we could diagnose far too few people.
I therefore had to start devising other ways of diagnosing, helped by the fact that those coming to the seminars had first to attend the preliminary seminars given by the growing group of what we call five element teachers (those Chinese practitioners who had attended many of our seminars and were themselves practising only five element acupuncture). All attendees had therefore been given what they called a provisional diagnosis of their elements at these seminars. This meant that we could subdivide the large group into five element groups, and use these subdivisions as a way of moving towards what could be called a group diagnosis.
What was so interesting was that I found that when there were several people of the same element together this seemed to exaggerate the characteristics of that element, making it appear in starker outlines. It also revealed, again more clearly, the fact that one or more of the people who had been assigned to one element did not appear to belong to that element. The differences between them emerged much more clearly when, for example, a Water person was amongst a group of mainly Wood people. This became even more obvious when the very interesting element games Guy Caplan created for the different element groups showed very clearly the presence of one or more people who reacted quite differently to the instructions given to a group. In other words, we learnt that groups of people of the same element acted in a similar way, as would be expected of that particular element. For instance, Water huddled together, as did Earth but in a more comfortable way, Metal worked individually at the tasks Guy had set them, Fire was very conscious of being observed by video, and laughed at the camera recording their reaction, whereas Wood started to try and take individual control of the tasks, as though each wanted to be in charge.
The result of all these interactions between different groups of elements was that I became more than ever convinced of the truth underlying five element acupuncture, which is that each person expresses their unique individuality through the prism of one of the elements. And the elements appeared to reveal their characteristics even more markedly when viewed in groups.
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