Eric Hollander is a TCM practitioner working out of San Diego, California. He’s set up a successful practice ( Hollander Acupuncture ) where he specializes in fertility enhancement and pain relief.

I sent an email to Eric recently asking for advice about studying TCM. He was kind enough to take some time out of his busy schedule and offer some well-earned advice.

­What study techniques paid off?

I found making flash cards quite useful. I found if I could take it with me, I could study on the beach or wherever. Study groups worked well to because I found I remember things I talked about with other people. Most people have a problem remembering all the herbal material. As you may know the Chinese had tra­ditional rhymes or poems about the herbs. I think they were onto something because, some of the silly rhymes some of my classmate made up still stick with me to this day. Try to create some of you own. Maybe someone has translated them from the Chinese?

What seemed really important when you were a student and now seems less essential?

This is a tough one. I think while striving to do well academically is important, you shouldn’t make yourself a stress case over it. Ultimately you will have to review the basics over and over again over the course of your career, so don’t think you have to know it all now. It is impossible.

What things turned out to be really important in making you a successful practitioner?

Initially, having a solid education that gives you the confidence to start a practice. I think most of us get that in the United States. Clinically, I think being able to relate to people well, so they feel cared about. Good listening skills and, focusing on dealing with the complaints that bring people in. What was important from a business standpoint was learning from mistakes made in managing my practice and handling patients. Learning from other people who are adept at the business side of the practice is invaluable as well.

How did you structure your notes? Any tips to share?

I took a lot of note in school, but my handwriting is poor. I don’t consider not taking one of my strong points. Aside from passing tests, you will get some great pearls of wisdom from your teachers. The problem is, 2, 5 10 years later will you ever be able to find it? You may want to start some kind of system that you can go back to, and add to, as you as you take seminars, that won’t end up buried in you student notes.

What were your three most important resources?

I am assuming this is for when you start as an intern and need to start looking up conditions and points and formulas. Maciocia’s “The practice of Chinese Medicine” is a great book to work off of for the first few years together with Bensky’s Formulas and Strategies and Materia Medica. There is a quick reference guide to for looking up herbal formulas that I found very helpful, because you can look up the formula related to the organ, or diagnosis quickly with out getting lost in a huge textbook. I can’t remember the name off hand, but I am sure it is still in print. Back then the internet didn’t have too much, but it has some great resources today such as many of the TCM forums.

What still doesn’t make sense?

I never developed a good handle on some of the minor meridian systems like the divergent channels. They seemed so esoteric. I still like working with the main and extra meridians.

If you could send a message back to yourself as a student, what would it be?

Work on yourself more. Self confidence is far more important in how well you do later, then your GPA. Get some real life experiences outside the classroom, and learn the business side of running a practice and promoting yourself.

I received an e-mail recently from Adelyn, who was looking for a good resource to compare Western herbs to TCM herbs. She wrote “I was making a burdock root decoction the other day and my mother wanted to know what burdock root was in Chinese and I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if I had a big English-Chinese herbal encyclopaedia of sorts so my Mom and I can communicate better?”

This request stumped me. At this early stage in my education, Bensky’s Chinese Herbal Medicine: Materia Medica is my lord and master. (An 8th semester student once said this to me — “Bensky will be your lord and master” — and now I can’t get it out of my head.) Unfortunately, despite being lord and master this book probably isn’t the best resource for somebody who wants to do detailed comparisons between Western and TCM herbs.

So I didn’t know a book that fit Adelyn’s request. Fortunately, a little later she seemed to have found a potential resource. Adelyn wrote again describing one book that seemed pertinent: Western Herbs according to Traditional Chinese Medicine: A Practitioner’s Guide. Hopefully she’ll let us know how good of a resource it is.

If any of you had the same issue and found a good resource, please comment below.

Little boxes. They’re all over the standard form we students use when we follow our instructor during rounds. While we fill in all the little boxes (Heat Lamp? Check. E-Stim? Check.), the instructor is asking important questions, making useful analogies, and linking perceived pathologies with classical theory.

All this good stuff is going by, and I’m checking in little boxes. When I get a chance to write down some notes on the important things just said, there’s no room on the sheet.

I finally came to the realization that a standard “Patient Progress Form” is inefficient for a student. It’s made for a veteran practitioner who makes minimal background notes and instead values speed and information density. A student needs a hybrid form that had basic fields for the standard data — patient info, chief complaint, pulse, tongue, points, herbs, etc. — as well as lots of room for notes on the random information that comes up during diagnosis and treatment.

So I came up with a progress form that does double duty as a note-taking tool. It has less fields and check-boxes but leaves much more room for notes and meta-data. (Note: this is not an official health care document. I think HIPAA likes lots more little boxes. If you like this template and want to use it as a student for note taking you can download the pdf here.)

Front:

Back:

My classmate Tommy is the supreme originator of ways to organize notes. I snapped a photo of today’s innovation while we were having lunch in the student lounge.

“No big deal…all he’s doing is carrying herb samples in his notebook.” Actually, that’s a color xerox of the herb samples, held in a laminated page.

There you go. Line up one page for each group and you have your ultra-portable study tool. I’m not sure why Tommy placed them label down . . . this may be a sign of supreme confidence.

A couple years ago MIT started offering parts of their courses online for free. This was a great opportunity: all of a sudden, commoners had access to the same material as the bespeckled few who were accepted as students. You could now watch the first five minutes of Introduction to Computational Neuroscience, go down to the local laundromat and tell your neighbor you’re an MIT student.

If nobody cares, don’t worry. The important thing is a few of the online classes are helpful for supplementing your Western med studies. I watched a series of lectures from the Introductory Biology course last year while taking Biology and it’s good stuff. Professor Walker is an energetic lecturer and presents the material well.

Other universities are following MIT’s lead and offering free material. Yale doesn’t have as many open classes as MIT in their program, but the quality of the video recordings is much better. Unfortunately the classes aren’t as pertinent to the TCM student brushing up on Western medicine. Then again, Professor Shankar’s physics lecture is worth watching just for the dry humor. Physics and humor. Right on.

So what about the TCM student? As it turns out, there are loads of open courses with in-depth, wide-ranging content. Tons of it. Only, get out that dictionary because it’s all in Chinese. Dr. Ka Wai Fan published an article last September in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine describing the efforts the Chinese Ministry of Education to make free courseware on TCM available to the public.

Dr. Ka believes the material is high quality since competition is so steep to be part of the program. “Since the selection process is extremely rigorous and the number of courses taught in China is terrifically large, it is a great honor to be chosen [for online publication],” he writes.

So here we are, the non-Mandarin speakers, standing with our heads pressed against the store window, wishing we paid more attention in Chinese 101. Irish practitioner Phil Rogers posted an article on his website with a “plea” to the Chinese Ministry of Education to help out English-speakers and translate some of the material to English. He also provides links to some of the topics available — TCM Basic Theory, TCM Diagnostics, Wen-Bing, Acupuncture, and so on — which is like putting the donut rack right next to the window we’re looking through.

It looks like high-quality, free courseware for english-speaking TCM students isn’t a reality yet. In the short term, you can supplement your Western studies at the MIT or Yale site.

Am I missing something? Please let me know of any sites with high-quality TCM material and I’ll post it here.

StudyingTCM was listed in a top 10 list of TCM blogs and websites by blogger Yael Ernst. Yael’s most recent entry on Chinese Medicine Notes mentions my blog with other (much more informed!) sites focusing on TCM. Thanks Yael!

Yael’s top two mentions go to a site called Deepest Health, which she recommends strongly, and rootdown.us, which many of you have probably heard of after their recent run of large ads in TCM papers like Acupuncture Today.

Rootdown is especially interesting because they’re taking a social constructivist approach to the collection and formation of knowledge. Social constructivism is the idea that learning is mainly a socially enacted process. Other online communities have used the same approach, but it will be very interesting to see how it is applied to TCM — a tradition with such a historical and codified knowledge base.

I’m guessing that Rootdown’s main goal is to build value by enabling this kind of knowledge sharing and creation, and then build a business around that value, similar to what Facebook has done. The “Pearls” section of the site, for example, consists of “short, practical medical tips submitted by members that may not be widely known but can be used to solve everyday clinical problems.”

Some e-Learning experts claim that knowledge and connections gained through online communities are not only important but in fact essential. E-Learning thinker George Seimens calls this new paradigm “Connectivism” and writes on his e-Learning site that “we can no longer personally experience and acquire learning that we need to act. We derive our competence from forming connections.”

There’s a lot to question in this theory, especially the sweeping under the rug of those boring things the catholic nuns in grade school were so keen on, like memorization. (Ignore the nuns reference if you didn’t go to catholic grade school. Nod your head in painful memory if you did.)

Either way, there’s no doubt that the nature of education and knowledge sharing is changing, and these changes will surely affect those of us studying TCM.

The mac has a nice screensaver feature that will rotate through the images in your iPhoto library (or anywhere else you tell it).

Since you’re a TCM student, the first thing that comes to mind is “how does this help me pass the boards.” In fact, that question probably comes to mind when you’re on the bus, buying pens or feeding coins into the parking meter. How does this help me pass the boards?

Well, if you put photos of herbs in your iPhoto library and set up your screensaver, it will cycle through them nicely when you’re not using your machine. This can serve as another way to quiz yourself whenever you happen to glance at the screen. It also makes you look very serious and studious if somebody happens to visit and sees photos of herbs fading in and out in the background.

Here’s how you do it:

First, put your herb images in a folder somewhere on your machine, preferably in your iPhoto folder (mine is located at /Users/danielmcquillen/Pictures/iPhoto Library/ ).

Then, point your screensaver to that folder. Select the System Preferences icon from your task bar, then select Desktop & Screen Saver:

Then select the folder where you put the herbs. (Again, I put mine in the iPhoto Library.)

E c’est tout. When your screensaver comes on, you’ll get an instant herb quiz.

If you don’t have any herb photos, I’ve put a few samples up on my flickr account for your experimentation. Disclaimer: I’m a poor photographer and a worse herb identifier, so please re-check the herb names and retouch as desired.

If you feel inclined, send any modifications back to me and I’ll post for others.

By the way, I’m not advocating running your machine all day so it can add to all the energy-gobbling we’re doing. If you do intend to let your machine idle, do something useful like helping scientists understand global warming.

We were on break during our Diagnosis class when Katie showed me her strategy for studying all the herbs in a single group. Basically, it involves one piece of paper with all the essential information.

It’s elegant in it’s simplicity: one sheet in a grid format with the name, taste/temp, dosage, and channels. Easy to scan. Easy to form quick quantifications (”Invigorate blood herbs has…count ‘em…one, two, three, four slightly cold herbs.”).

It’s also a refreshing return to basics…no mucking with excel, printouts, technology, wires, updates, Steve Jobs or peak oil. Just paper, pencil and some colored pens.

Check this out — I especially liked Katie’s inline sketches of the herbs right before their names. Just enough detail to jog your memory. Not so much detail that they clutter the page.

Here’s her line for jī xuè téng :

This is actually a great example of an information design technique called the “sparkline.” The term was coined by the great information designer Ed Tufte, who describes them as “small, high resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images.”

As Tufte will tell you in one of his engaging seminars, Galileo actually used a similar technique when he drew images of Saturn’s moons inline with the text of his historic observations.

If you’re looking for ways to avoid studying, you can learn more about sparklines on Tufte’s website and on wikipedia.

Thanks to Katie for sharing this great study tool!

For those of you studying anatomy or looking for a refresher, check out this promising site by Argosy.

According to the site, a completely interactive 3D representation of the body will be freely available in mid-November. As of now, there’s nothing but a flashy looking demo. Maybe they got so excited they forgot to update the site. Worth rechecking.