Dr. Leon Hammer (one of my professors and heroes!) used to preach to us about the concept of vulnerability. It is a concept that is intrinsic to Chinese medicine. Sometimes we fail to see the forest for the trees. Vulnerability is such a basic paradigm of heath and sickness and it is becoming more and more overlooked as we get more and more specific and more and more segmented and more and more limited in our examination of the human response mechanism.
First of all, what is vulnerability? It is an area of weakness in a person - an area that when stressed, is likely to rear up and make ugly noises. The three main root causes of vulnerability are trauma, lifestyle, and inborn.
Most everyone knows someone who injured their knee and every time the weather gets damp or cold, that knee acts up. Dampness and cold often settle into an injured joint that hasn't been treated properly. (Ice is for dead people in Chinese medicine. There are herbal liniments that can alleviate swelling and pain and bring blood to the area without introducing cold and dampness at at the same time - but that's another story.) Trauma was the original insult. Dampness and cold are the stressors, the knee is the vulnerable area. I see this a lot in clinical practice. The knee will always be vulnerable unless you drive out the dampness and the cold. (which we can often do).
I also see a number of people who get severe headaches and if you quiz them carefully, at one time they suffered a head injury in the past. Its surprising how many people were kicked in the head by a horse! The injury was the initial insult, the stressor varies (it can be an emotion, a smell, etc) but the head is the vulnerable area, and it will always be, unless you can heal the energetic changes that occurred from the trauma.
Vulnerable areas are often a result of lifestyle. People who burn the midnight oil, work the night shift, eat very little good-for-you fats in their diet, or are simply getting older, tend to be yin deficient. You can think of (at least one aspect of yin) as WD-40 (lubricant) for your internal organs. If you are low on lubricant, and a stressor comes along to plunder your already deficient yin, watch out! Heat from friction can cause a multitude of ills in all parts of the body. Most likely, the part that screams out is the area that was the most yin deficient to begin with. I need my sleep. If I don't get my sleep, my tendency towards yin deficiency dry fries my brain.
There are very few, if any people, who don't have a constitutional area of vulnerability. I once knew a guy who threw up every time he got nervous, or if he ate anything spicy, or if he missed a play in his football game. He had always been this way, and so had his sister. Talk about vulnerable stomachs! My kids both had weak spleens and lungs as children.... any time the weather turned, or someone sneezed around them, watch out! They were sneezing and coughing and sick shortly thereafter.
The bottom line is.... this is not something that should be delegated a Chinese medical concept and ignored by the rest of health care! A good place to use this concept would be in pharmaceutical research. Its my hypothesis that people with weak spleens and stomachs are the ones who will suffer the most nausea and digestive issues from chemo. It's my hypothesis that people who all already yin deficient will suffer more hot flashes from diuretics. It's my hypothesis that people with energetically challenged livers and spleens will be the ones who have side effects from statins. I could go on and on......
A lot of vulnerabilities are obvious - like the injured knee, for example. Many more are not obvious to the layperson but glaring to the eyes of an acupuncturist. An energetic workup should be done on every person once a year, along with a physical exam. Then everyone would be aware of their areas of vulnerability, even if they are not manifesting at at the time.
Oh, how I would love love love to be involved in western research that includes the concept of vulnerability into its paradigm! It would really be cutting edge science......
