Dragon Rises, Red Bird Flies : Psychology and Chinese Medicine

Behind the acupuncture, herbal remedies and sophisticated diagnostics of Chinese medicine lies a “congenial system of healing that embodies unification of body and mind, spirit and matter, nature and man, philosophy and reality.” In this comprehensive and ground-breaking presentation, based on long experience as physician, psychiatrist, and practitioner of Chinese medicine, Leon Hammer offers a new model for appreciating the traditional healer’s effective and profound respect for individual integrity and energetic balance. Explaining, and moving beyond, the five phase (element) system, he shows that this Eastern practice is as much a spiritual science as a physical one. Accessible to the layman, yet a resource for the professional in any healing art, this book examines the natural energy functions of the human organism as a key to mental, emotional and spiritual health. It offers new insight into disease, showing how it is not merely an invasion from the outside, but rather a byproduct of a person’s unsuccessful attempt to restore one’s own balance.

Leon I. Hammer, M.D. is a graduate of Cornell University, Cornell Medical College, and the William A. White Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry. During the early 1970s he studied Chinese medicine in England with Dr. Richard Van Buren, and then apprenticed for eight years in New York and Massachusetts with Dr. John H.F. Shen, a widely recognized master of Chinese pulse diagnosis. Dr. Hammer practiced Chinese medicine until 1990, when he began teaching pulse workshops in the United States and abroad. He is the author of Dragon Rises, Redbird Flies, a study of the relationship between Chinese medicine and Western psychology, and is president of the Dragon Rises School of Oriental Medicine in Gainesville, Florida.