by Shawn Kirby L.Ac.

Many years ago, I did an interview with Bob about his early career and training in Chinese medicine.  This interview became a podcast which was featured at the site.  I was working on transcribing this interview over a year ago now, but the project got lost in the shuffle of other work.  In going through some old files today, I came across this transcription again and was struck yet again by its poignancy.  What follows are some of the highlights of that transcription.  I hope you find it as entertaining and enlightening as I have.  Enjoy.

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SK: Can you tell us a little bit about how you came to be a practitioner of Chinese Medicine – the circumstances, the motivations, the things that drove your early studies?

BF: I first decided to study Chinese medicine in the mid 1970s.  I was in my late twenties and I wanted to study Tibetan medicine, but at that time there was no way to do that in the United States.  My desire to study Tibetan medicine came out the realization that I wasn’t going to become a rainbow* any time soon [laughter] and I needed to think about earning a living.  Since I was a Tibetan Buddhist, Tibetan medicine seemed like a like a really appropriate fit but the only programs available were in India.  The shortest course was six years, the recommended course of study was twelve years, all course work was done in the Tibetan language and, of course, you had to be a monk.  Those realities kept me from studying Tibetan medicine at that point in time.  It was then that it occurred to me that Chinese medicine was a kissing cousin of Tibetan Medicine.

At that time Chinese medicine, in my mind and in other the minds of most Americans, meant acupuncture.  Not much was known about Chinese herbal medicine then in the west.  When I first decided I was going to study acupuncture, there weren’t really any dedicated schools for acupuncture or Chinese medicine, so I looked into Chiropractic schools.  At that time a number of Chiropractic schools taught some acupuncture.  But, as it turned out, although I was accepted at a Chiropractic college, my attendance was contingent upon my completion of courses in physics and chemistry.  So… I went to summer school at this local college, and I signed up for the wrong chemistry class.  Instead of signing up for chemistry as a non-major, I got into real chemistry.  Within the first week I had pulled all my hair out, and I was lying on the floor pounding my fists etc, etc [laughter].  In the end I dropped out of the class, which meant that I couldn’t go to the Chiropractic College I had been accepted to.

At this point I had moved to Boulder to attend the Boulder School of Massage Therapy, as some kind of entree, or beginning into the world of natural health, alternative health, or what have you.  By now it was 1977, and I had found out that the New England School of Acupuncture had been established in Boston.  I had in my mind the idea that after I finished at the massage school I would enroll at NESA.  But, then, life happened and I wound up marrying the director of the Boulder School of Massage therapy [laughter].  And since Honora’s [Honora Lee Wolfe] career was really here in Boulder, that meant I wasn’t going to Boston after all.

As it turned out, however, there was a Chinese acupuncturist in Denver, Dr. Eric Tao, who gave classes in acupuncture.  Basically he taught a course of five consecutive twenty hour weekends.  So, I studied with Dr. Tao, along with a number of correspondence courses that were available at the time, which no longer exist as far as I know.  I would also go the used bookstore and hunt for anything I could find on acupuncture and Chinese medicine, which I would buy and devour.  Basically, I went into practice with a hundred total hours of actual training.

SK: What was Dr. Tao’s background; where did he study?

BF: You know he passed away this year [2008], just a few months ago in fact.  Dr. Tao grew up in Beijing, and studied with his uncle who was an acupuncturist.  During his teenage years he studied his uncle’s family acupuncture style, the Tao family style.  When he turned eighteen the Second World War was in full swing.  His father was a guo min dang general.  Of course they were all generals, which may have been part of the problem with the guo min dang [laughter].  Anyway, Dr. Tao joined the guo min dang navy – I have no idea what the guo min dang navy consisted of, but nonetheless he was in the navy.  After World War II was over and the Cultural Revolution took place, he and the rest of his family left China for Taiwan.  Having been discharged from the Navy and, having no other way to earn a living, he started doing acupuncture, and hooked up with some of the local Taiwanese acupuncturists, including Wu Wei Ping.

This is kind of interesting, and many people don’t know this, but Taiwan had been a Japanese province from 1895 until, ostensibly the end of World War II.  At that time, the Taiwanese had to go to Japan for their secondary education, i.e. college or university level study.  Consequently, all the educated Taiwanese of that generation spoke and read Japanese.  As a result, Wu Wei Ping had had the opportunity to study Japanese meridian style acupuncture, which of course, today in the United States is fairly popular and well known as a result of teachers like Miki Shima, Kiiko Matsumoto, Shudo Denmai and so on.   So, although Wu Wei Ping was most certainly Chinese/Taiwanese, he was practicing a form of Japanese meridian therapy.  Dr. Tao became a student of Wu Wei Ping’s, so his own style was ultimately an amalgam of his family style and Wu Wei Ping’s approach to meridian therapy.  And that’s what I learned, and was my first style of acupuncture.

And I must say, Dr. Tao was a great acupuncturist.  He was only an acupuncturist, he didn’t do herbal medicine.  When he was in Taiwan he had seen scores, perhaps hundreds of patients in a day for many years.  He was a really, really, really good acupuncturist.  He didn’t care much about theory [laughter], he was not necessarily an intellectual.  He was, however, a practical individual and he got really good results as an acupuncturist. He continued to look after me, and we always kept in touch.  I was very saddened to hear that he had passed this year.

My first introduction to Chinese herbal medicine came in 1978 at the Rocky Mountain Healing arts festival, which was a two week long event hosted by the Boulder School of Massage Therapy for several years.  One of the people who taught there that year was Michael Broffman who had been an acupuncturist in Boulder but then moved to Marin County in California, where he has lived and practiced for the past thirty some odd years.  Michael had studied both acupuncture and herbal medicine in Taiwan.  His presentation at the festival was my introduction to herbal medicine.  At that time the only Chinese herbal medicine we had access to were tea-pills and the so-called patent medicines.  If you spoke and wrote Chinese you might be able to get hold of bulk Chinese herbs, but certainly not here in Boulder.

There were some herbal correspondence courses floating around at this time also which I also got my hands on.  So I mainly did acupuncture for the next four or five years with a little bit of herbal medicine.  I also did a lot of massage and taught Qigong.  I was one of the first Americans to teach Qigong separate from the martial arts.  I published the first article in English on Qigong in Yoga Journal, putting forth the idea that Qigong was destined to become as popular as yoga, which turned out to be true!  My office at that time was under the Boulder public library here in town, along the Boulder creek.  Every morning I would be there at six o’clock and my students would come for practice.  The rest of the day I would do acupuncture and massage, and a little Chinese herbal medicine in pill form.  Sometime in the early eighties, the Sun Ten company established themselves here in the U.S.  They were the first company to introduce the powdered extracts, or granules, that have since become so popular.  Around this time I started prescribing granule extracts of classical formulas.

And then in 1982, one of the members of our Boulder alternative health care community, Eric Silver, who had been studying in Hong Kong and Taiwan, did a three month World Health Organization sponsored acupuncture training in Beijing.  We had tea one day in my apartment, and he was told me all about his experience.  I had no idea you could do such a thing or that these trainings existed.  He told me that they were being held in Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Guanzhou.  He told me, “Oh, don’t go to Beijing, its too political [laughter], and don’t go to Nanjing, its too provincial, and the weather is awful (its one of the ‘three furnaces’), go to Shanghai.”  Sounded good to me, (what did I know), so I wrote a letter to the Shanghai College of Traditional Chinese Medicine requesting permission to come and study there.  Six weeks later I received a reply in the affirmative, so I bought a ticket and flew off to Shanghai.  I took a three month course in acupuncture in Shanghai, a one month course in Tui Na the following year, and a one month course in herbal medicine the year after that.  Other than my studies with Dr. Tao, that’s really the sum total of my formal education in Chinese medicine.  Other than that, everything I know about Chinese medicine I taught myself.

Basically, I read everything I could find, took what correspondence courses were floating around at the time, went to lots of seminars, learned some things from martial artists and what have you – and it was all really confusing, very eclectic and basically a big mish mash.  It wasn’t until I went to China in 1982 that I really discovered Chinese medicine, in China, and said, “this is what I’ve been looking for.”  What I learned at Shanghai was clear and definite, and was exactly the sort of thing my mind likes and needs.  Since then I’ve never looked back.

SK: What were those early trips to China like?

BF: Well, I got off the plane, didn’t speak any Chinese, no one there spoke any English, so there was a lot of bumbling and fumbling around.  In my early twenties I had lived and traveled in India, Nepal, Iran, Turkey Afghanistan and so forth, so negotiating a completely foreign language and culture wasn’t new to me.  Nonetheless, I really had no Chinese language skills at all.  I was the only American in the class that I was enrolled in, and I was the only one of the party that wasn’t an MD.  I was essentially in a group of MDs from Europe.  At the airport, they sent a car from the college with a doctor to greet myself and group of Belgian physicians.  Since the Belgians were MDs and, therefore, more important than I was, they sent a French speaking Chinese doctor.  Fortunately, I speak French.  On the ride back to town, he tried to figure out how much acupuncture or Chinese medicine we all knew.  He pointed at Hegu, Large Intestine 4 and asked us, “Do you know what this is?”  He asked each of the MDs in turn, none of whom knew, and then he asked me.  I replied “Bien sûr, c’est ‘hegu’.”

He was so excited; not only did I know the point, but I also knew the name in Chinese.  You could say, in a sense, my whole career since then hinged on that one simple occurrence.  I knew the point in Chinese, when nobody else knew what it was, let alone the Chinese name.  Even the doctors who had some acupuncture training, knew the point as “gros intestine quatre” if they knew it at all.  But because I knew it as “hegu” everyone at the college knew who I was by the end of the next day.  I was seen as the one who actually knew something, and therefore I was worth putting some energy into.  My “guanxi,” my connection, my place at the Shanghai College was made by that one little seemingly accidental encounter.

I had been in practice for four years by that point.  What I got out my time at the Shanghai College wasn’t so much the theoretical part of it, although it was nice to hear everything presented in a very clear and definite way, but rather the clinical part of the practice.  Every day, seeing all the patients with all sorts of problems, made me realize, “Yeah, I can do this.”  When I came back to the United States my practice really took off.  Instead of seeing one person at a time, I started seeing three or four.  I had a much greater sense of confidence in what I was doing.

SK: These days, I can walk into our warehouse and pick out a box of Seirins and a nice shiny bottle of herbs with pinyin and latin on the label.  I can even download test results for the batch number on the bottle I buy.  I would imagine things weren’t exactly like that for you when you first started out.  What was it like, procuring the tools of your trade back then?

BF: The first needles that I used were made by another student of Dr. Tao’s.  They were made by shoving wire into little stainless steel tubes, crimping it and then hand sharpening each one.  Back in the day, we used 28 and 30 gauge needles – a 32 gauge needle was considered “fine.”  There was, quite literally, a hole when you took the needle out.  For the first several years, until I went to China, these were the needles that I used.  Those individual needles I bought from Dr. Tao were much more expensive than they are today, as much as 20 cents per needle.  And you definitely didn’t throw them away!  That was one of the things you did as an acupuncturist; you sat down and straightened all the needles, re-sharpened them on a little hone, cleaned them all and put them in the autoclave etc.  When I went to China, needles cost between one and three cents apiece depending on how man you bought, so I picked up several thousand.  And I still re-used these.  It wasn’t until the mid to late eighties that disposable needles really came into play.  At some point in the early eighties Tom Riihimaki, who unfortunately also recently died, founded Lhasa OMS and started the first real supply company providing acupuncture needles to non-Asians.  OMS were really at the forefront in introducing the disposable needle.

SK: I’ve heard stories from Honora about people wild-crafting mugwort and other herbs in the mountains around Boulder.  Did you ever do any of that?

BF: Oh yeah.  Of course the stuff we picked was some sort of artemesia, but it definitely wasn’t the genuine article.  [laughter]  We also wild-crafted bai zhi, angelica dahurica, which grows around here, and also solomon’s seal; there are a handful of Chinese herbs that can be found here.   I can also remember “wild-crafting” somebody’s ornamental peonies.  [laughter]  And I used to grow my own Chinese herbs, like astragalus.  I never really grew enough to have enough, you know.  It was more to see how they grew, and to have them in my garden, and for the enjoyment of it.  You definitely can grow Chinese herbs here.  Otherwise, I used to order patent medicines over the phone from a company in Chinatown in San Francisco.  Those patent medicines back then often had either no ingredient information, or incorrect ingredient information.  We had no idea about correct dosing levels or contamination.  It was all very wild and wooly, and we were very naive.  It was exciting and romantic, but it wasn’t very well informed.

* The ‘Rainbow Body’, or ‘Body of Pure Light,’ is a phenomenon in Tibetan Buddhism that is said to be exhibited by a fully realized practitioner.  According to tradition, upon death the practitioner’s corpse does not decompose but will instead shrink, ultimately leaving behind only hair and fingernails.  Many fascinating and scientifically unexplainable occurrences of Rainbow Body phenomenon have been documented in the last century.