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The Story Behind The Medicine
My name is Ethan Borg and I am the
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| Images from 1918 Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body from Bartleby.com |
Fortunately for me, I suffered. No one likes to suffer, and I certainly did not appreciate it at the time. But hindsight provides clear vision, and with that vision, I can see that I would never have found my path had I been healthy. In my mind, the moment you can look back at your suffering and see why it was meaningful and, in fact, necessary, is the final moment of healing. And so I am grateful for my suffering, as strange as that may sound.
I was as healthy as a horse my entire childhood. I can remember missing only a handful of school days in Elementary school due to illness. I don't believe I missed a single day of high school at all. I was an athlete and at one point my private tennis coaches were counseling me to explore a professional career. Fortunately, I had other interests as a rotator cuff injury in my last game of my last set of my last high school tennis match ended my tennis career.
Between high school and college, I developed mononucleosis. And, while at Swarthmore College, I developed allergies and chronic fatigue. I was on an inhaler three times a day and popped allergy pills daily. And seven years passed with no improvement in my unbelievable fatigue. Every single weekend, like clockwork, for nearly seven years, I became ill with another cold or flu. At times, I suffered from depression and felt hopeless.
During those years, I chose the Western path. I saw internists, allergists, urologists, had MRI's, upper GIs and regular allergy desensitization shots (one such shot caused me to have an anaphylactic reaction). Western medicine provided a lot of hope during my times of need, even if it did not provide anything in the way of actual solutions. I kept an inhaler in my pocket for years purely as an emotional crutch. For sure, Western medicine helped best during emergencies, as it always will. But rarely did it do much for me week to week, month to month, and year to year for my chronic conditions.
Thankfully, my wife elbowed me towards alternatives to the Western model. While I was running an internet software company in Media, PA and then in Seattle, WA, acupuncture came to my rescue. What I received from acupuncture was permanent relief from all my aforementioned afflictions. In fact, I was so amazed by my results, I eventually changed the path of my career and, in turn, received a Masters in Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. I learned acupuncture and herbal medicine, opened my clinic and began my life as a practitioner of alternative medicine. And perhaps that is where the story should have ended.
The problem with acupuncture, sadly, is that people are phobic about needles. My own three-month-old went absolutely berserk when the nurse brought out a syringe the second time she ever saw one. She wasn't even old enough to turn over. The fear of needles is insidiously deep in our consciousness. No matter how much I tell people acupuncture needles feel more like mosquito bites than syringes, no one believes me until they swallow their fear and actually try one. So, as much as I love acupuncture – and I have been truly obsessed with its wonderful theory for eight years – it is an imperfect medicine by the nature of the fears it invokes in others.
The good news. In those eight years of
obsession, I had the opportunity to study the classics of Chinese
medicine, write about them, and teach classical theory to other
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| Images from 1918 Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body from Bartleby.com |
Chasing Windmills
Fu Xi Wen created a dilemma for me. Should I horde my wonderful discoveries and successes to myself – successes in fertility, complex diseases such as multiple sclerosis, organ problems, every kind of ache and pain imaginable, and more – including diseases that mystified physicians? Or should I share this knowledge? And if I shared it, how could I get the word out? Should I write a book and organize book signings at Amazon? Or would I stir as much interest shouting on a street corner? I had to ask myself the question: Who am I? Who would listen to me, anyway? I'm no dignitary. I do not have political or social capital. It certainly seemed easier to quietly heal people and grow my practice.
But I need to explain something about myself. I must be a bit dumb in the head. You see, I have always been a fool for taking on challenges far too big for me that reaped no rewards whatsoever. My entrepreneurial life is rife with examples. Once, I created a new kind of web browser that could play live websites that unfolded like interactive television shows based on a programming language just as simple as HTML. It was the bomb. But I'm guessing you never heard of it – because the bomb bombed.
Another time, I made a new kind of chat program that could tell you who was at a website, any website, while you were there and create on-the-fly chat rooms on any subject any place you went on the net (still a fantastic idea as far as I'm concerned). Sadly, the patent officer did not understand my invention, compared it to something unrelated, rejected it, and I could not afford a rebuttal. These projects and countless more drained my time, my money, and went absolutely nowhere. Did I get embittered? Did I curse the mountains that would not move? No. I walked over them and found my path.
I'm not afraid of chasing windmills. In retrospect, it looks like my pastime.
I am also not motivated by money, even though I like having it. For instance, I emailed a PDF of my first book about the classics of Chinese medicine, The Secret Chamber, to every single acupuncturist I could find – thousands of them. That book involved a year of writing and many years of research that I gave away for free because I believed in the theory and wanted to share it with everyone. While random acupuncturists know me because of this, I cannot say it did anything for my fortunes. In many ways, I have become anti-capitalistic – feeling that greed has infiltrated areas that should be sacrosanct, such as medicine.
“Given a chance, he'll sell out,” you may be thinking. And maybe you're right. Like I said, I don't mind money, its just not my motivator. Money, to me, is nothing more than keys that unlock experiences. While I value the experiences, the keys themselves are unimportant. I have no interest in spending my life energy chasing after keys.
So what did I do with my discoveries in medicine? Given that I am not fond of the intrusion of capitalism on medicine and given my willingness to spend countless hours on projects that have ultimately become rot for hard drives, I decided to create Fu Xi Wen as Open Source Medicine™ and simply post everything I know about Fu Xi Wen online in a way that anyone, even a beginner, can start curing him or herself of diseases – for free – in the comfort of his or her own home.
Do I want this project to be big? Absolutely. In fact, I expect nothing less than huge.
To clarify, I am in no way against
doctors. My own Dad is the best, most empathetic doctor I know. And
many of my friends are terrific physicians. To the most part, the
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| Images from 1918 Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body from Bartleby.com |
You can learn more about the development of Fu Xi Wen by reading the chapter “What Are My Sources”.
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