Damp Heat

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), health is defined as being in harmony or in balance. If a body is healthy, it is able to resist pathogens, or those agents that produce disease. When the flow of qi, one’s life force or energy, is unimpeded, there is harmony, balance, and good health.

When there are qi blockages — too much or too little qi — there is an imbalance, which can lead to disharmony and disease.

TCM has identified six pathogenic factors, also called the Six Pernicious Influences, the Six Excesses, and the Six Evils, that cause disharmony in the body. And boy, are they doozies.

Personally, it looks like there are four main ones (the lovely dualities of Cold and Heat, and Dampness and Dryness), with two add-ons (Summer Heat and Wind), but that’s just me.

Cold

When hypothermia hits a skier or a mountain climber, muscle control fades, motion becomes slow and awkward, fatigue sets in, the body shuts down. That’s the same effect that the Cold Pernicious Influence has — it saps the body’s energy and makes movements cumbersome. The tongue becomes pale; the pulse is slow. A person may develop a fear of cold and feel like sleeping in a curled up position. Cold is yin and when it invades the body it chills all or part of it. If there’s pain, it’s eased by warmth.

When External Cold attacks the body, acute illness may develop, along with chills, fever and body aches. When the External C old moves inward and becomes an Interior disharmony it is associated with a chronic condition that produces a pale face, lethargy and grogginess, a craving for heat and sleeping for longer than usual periods of time.

Heat

Heat disorders feel like you’ve been playing tennis for two hours in the blazing sun. You’re weary and at the same time, strangely cranked up. You can’t stop talking about the game, but your words stick in your mouth. You don’t feel like yourself again until you cool down and quench your thirst.

Heat disorders cause overactive yang functions or insufficient yin functions. They are generally associated with bodily heat, a red face, hyperactivity and talkativeness, fever, and thirst for cold liquids and a rapid pulse. Symptoms include carbuncles and boils, dry mouth and thirst. Confused speech and delirium arise when Heat attacks the Shen.

Dampness

Think about what happens to your backyard when it rains for two days — it becomes soggy and water collects in stagnant pools. That is how Dampness affects the body. Damp pain is heavy and expansive. Dampness blocks the flow of life energy and causes a stuffy chest and abdomen. When External Dampness invades, it enters the Channels and causes stiff joints and heavy limbs. Interior Dampness — caused by either the penetration of External Dampness to the Interior or by a breakdown in the Spleen’s transformation of fluids — is associated with mucous, which in Chinese medicine is more than simply bodily secretions. It is produced when the Spleen or Kidney is beset with disharmony and can cause obstructions and produce tumors, coughing, and if it invades the Shen, can lead to erratic behavior and insanity. Once Dampness has taken root, it is hard to displace.

Dryness

Dryness is a frequent partner with Heat; just think about the cracked bottom of a dried up riverbed. But where Heat creates redness and warmth, Dryness creates evaporation and dehydration. External Dryness invading the body may create respiratory problems such as asthmatic breathing and a dry cough, acute pain and fever.

Summer Heat

Summer Heat feels like the humid, oppressive weather that creates the Dog Days of August. It attacks the body after exposure to extreme heat and causes a sudden high fever and total lethargy. It is always an External influence and often arises along with Dampness.

Wind

Wind animates the body, stirring it from repose into motion just as wind moves the leaves of a tree. When Wind enters the body, it is usually joined to another influence such as Cold. If the body is infiltrated by Wind, the first symptoms usually appear on the skin, in the lungs, or on the face. Tics, twitches, fear of drafts, headaches and a stuffed-up nose are symptoms. When External Wind invades the body more deeply, it can cause seizures, ringing in the ears and dizziness.

See, I Told You They Were Evil

And then they can gang up with one another, as they have with me. For example, I have Damp Heat. (And let me tell you, I’m really looking forward to that “erratic behavior and insanity” part.) It may be that someday I can rid myself of it, but for now I have to look at it as a chronic condition. I take herbs and receive acupuncture for it. I should exercise a lot more than I do. And I need to follow a better diet, one that minimizes and even reverses Damp Heat, but do I listen? No, I keep being drawn to the foods that perpetuate Damp Heat. I guess all influences, even pernicious ones, seek to perpetuate themselves.

I’ve always hated Damp Heat.

I grew up in the Washington, D.C., area, which was built on a swamp. As a child we didn’t have air conditioning, so I spent miserable nights sweating in my bed, dreaming of fires just outside my room.

Then we move to the Virgin Islands, which is hotter still though marginally less damp. And there I develop a pernicious case of athlete’s foot, one so bad the doctors couldn’t treat it, one that looked like my toes were rotting. It was incredibly disgusting. I got an exception to the school’s dress code so that I could wear sandals instead of shoes and socks, which led to an overthrow of the dress code entirely. I was beloved of my classmates, and it was all because of my rotten toes—and Damp Heat.

Now I live in central Florida, where the summers last for a good eight months and are unrelentingly hot and humid. It’s like stepping into the breath of a very large panting dog. I live for air conditioning. I pay megabucks for air conditioning.

Maybe it’s the Crucible Effect. Maybe the gods just want me to deal with Damp Heat (and its concommitant problems, and the underlying emotional and spiritual connections that go along with it), really DEAL with it in some decisive way, so they put me in places where the environment itself exacerbates the symptoms. Maybe I’ll be purified by the intensity of it all. But right now it just feels like my life (and my body) is one big steam bath, and the door is locked from the outside.

I’m going to go have a glass of water now.

Nazario Turpo: A Towering Spirit

by Edgardo Krebs Special to The Washington Post Saturday, August 11, 2007; Page C02

After learning of the death of the Peruvian shaman Nazario Turpo, killed last month when the small bus he was riding in turned over in the Andean night, lines from “Beowulf” describing the burial of a Viking warlord kept ringing in my mind:

A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour, ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.

Something about the unadorned elegance of the Old English poem’s description seemed to evoke the loss of this singular man.

Nazario Turpo was a Quechua-speaking Indian from Pacchanta, a cluster of households in a valley dominated by Mount Ausangate in southern Peru. Nazario was a peasant, indistinguishable in that respect from many other Andean Indians who make their living herding alpacas and llamas, planting potatoes and weaving. He woke up every day before dawn to fetch water from a brook and, thus, set into motion another regular day of hard work in the household and the fields. He was married, and had four children and several grandchildren.

Two things made Nazario different: He was the son of Mariano Turpo and, like Mariano, he was a paqo.

Convention and ignorance would lazily translate paqo as “shaman,” a word that has us trained to picture an almost caricaturesque wise man, straight from central casting, capable of miracle cures and spiritual ministrations, of going, with his herbs, chants and rattles, where Western medicine and religion do not tread.

In the unforgiving world of the Andes, dominated by space, sky and silence, a paqo is the person who has learned how to converse with the apus, the forces stirring in the mountains and valleys, dominating everyday life. Nazario could read the sacred geography that is always impinging decisively on the familiar human landscape. Being a paqo is a gift, a calling that very few receive.

Mariano Turpo had attained the highest rank as a paqo, but he was also an activist for his community. He realized that Peruvian Indians like himself lived in a nation-state, and that their voices would be heard only if they joined the fray of Western-style politics. This was a dangerous road that Mariano followed persistently, despite many humiliations and setbacks. He would seek out politicians, local and national, always accompanied by another Indian who knew how to read and write in Spanish. “My father talked,” Nazario remembered, “and my godfather wrote things down and read documents.”

Nazario was slow in taking to his father’s path. It happened only after he had turned 40, when a bolt of lightning left him unconscious on an Andean trail. Such an extraordinary event is interpreted as a favorable sign from the apus, and Nazario’s life changed. Mariano took him high in the mountains for a week after that and began the rituals of purification and training that would gradually transform Nazario into a paqo.

I met Nazario Turpo on several occasions in Washington, where the path of his father in search of recognition and self-representation eventually led. He came most of the time invited by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. He was a consultant, working with curators to explain and give context to objects in the museum’s collections.

There was nothing false about Nazario. He did not need to pretend. There was no mistaking that he was a man of substance and authority. He had seen and lived through much, and he knew many things. But he did not put on a show or take himself seriously — not in the reverential way some Westerners who approached him were wont to adopt. He loved to drink Coca-Cola. He wore jeans. He used antibiotics when available and needed. There was no electricity in his house in Pacchanta, but he followed world events on a battery-operated transistor radio. He was well aware of 9/11, and during one of his visits to Washington in 2003, wanted to see the damage at the Pentagon. He also understood climate change, and was concerned. His bread and butter as a farmer were at stake. He could see the effects of global warming in the melting snowcap on Ausangate. He had another word for it, but was quick to adopt our own definitions when addressing audiences in Washington.

When it came to discussing those deeper things he knew, and playing chess with an anthropologist, Nazario was a flinty intellectual, unsparing in his exactitude, in the articulation of ideas. He was a botanist, a philosopher and a historian of a way of seeing the world as old as the oldest symbols in the stunning pieces recovered by Andean archaeologists.

He was doing well of late. Many tourists in Cuzco asked him to do despachos for them, offerings to the apus. That was Nazario’s geography, his history and his obligation. If the circumstances were right, and he faithfully observed the rituals, he could mediate between the sacred and the profane for anybody. For the first time in his life, he was confident that he could make enough money to buy a small place in Cuzco and send his grandchildren to school.

The last time I saw him, I was recovering from surgery. He put his hand on the scar and said, “You have to get well. People are full of light and they have a lot to give.”

Edgardo Krebs is an anthropologist living in Washington.

News You Can’t Use

On August 31, 1995, six people drowned while trying to rescue a chicken that had fallen into a well in southern Egypt, according to Darwin Awards researchers (and AP Cairo).

An eighteen-year-old farmer was the first to descend into the 60-foot well. He drowned, apparently after an undercurrent in the water pulled him down, police said his sister and two brothers, none of whom could swim well, went in one by one to help him, but also drowned.

Two elderly farmers then came to help. But they apparently were pulled by the same undercurrent. The bodies of the six were later pulled out of the well in the village of Nazlat Imara, 240 miles south of Cairo.

The chicken was also pulled out. It survived.

What a fowl way to go.