Tom Bisio - A Tooth from the Tiger’s Mouth: How to Treat Your Injuries with Powerful Healing Secrets of the Great Chinese Warrior

Thank you for purchasing this Fireside eBook.

Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Fireside and Simon & Schuster.

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

FIRESIDE
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2004 by Thomas Bisio
All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.

F IRESIDE and colophon are registered trademarks
of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bisio, Tom.

A tooth from the tigers mouth : how to treat your injuries with powerful healing secrets of the great Chinese warriors / Tom Bisio.

p. cm.

A Fireside book.

Includes index.

1. Sports medicine. 2. Medicine, Chinese. 3. Sports injuriesAlternative treatment. I. Title.

RC1210.B57 2004
617.1'027dc22

2004049590

ISBN 0-7432-4551-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-4551-7
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8877-4 (eBook)

This publication contains the opinions and ideas of its author. It is intended to provide helpful and informative material on the subjects addressed in the publication. It is sold with the understanding that the author and publisher are not engaged in rendering medical, health, or any other kind of personal professional services in the book. The reader should consult his or her medical, health, or other competent professional before adopting any of the suggestions in this book or drawing inferences from it.

The author and publisher specifically disclaim all responsibility for any liability, loss, or risk, personal or otherwise, which is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents of this book.

To Vince Black

for his selfless teaching, inspiration, and friendship.

My thanks to Mary Evans, for her weekly refrain of Where is my book proposal? Without her patience and encouragement, this book would not have been written.

I want to thank Valerie Ghent for her enthusiasm and help, for listening to my ideas tumble out and helping to put them into coherent sentences. And Val, as always, thank you for your technical assistance with computer snafus.

I would like to acknowledge my colleagues at 5th St. Acupuncture for their support and their forbearance in listening to me talk about the book.

Many thanks to Huang Guo-qi, who has helped me in countless ways over many years. He helped make possible the illustrations in this book.

My thanks to Xue Zhu for her wonderful drawings.

Thanks to my son Virgil, who put up with my pleas of just one more sentence when it was time to play basketball.

Thank you, Caroline Sutton, for guiding me through all the steps of publishing a book.

My heartfelt thanks to my parents, Attilio and Rosemary, for their love.

And thanks to Sweetpea, who curled up on my papers and kept me company as I wrote.

When I began to study martial arts some thirty years ago, I never imagined that practicing the fighting arts would lead me so far into the study of medicine. My inspiration to train hard in those early years came from stories of unbeatable masters, Asian knighterrants who defeated all comers and helped the weak and downtrodden. In time, I studied a variety of fighting disciplines under a number of different masters, became a professional martial arts instructor, and fought in full-contact matches in places as far apart as New Yorks Chinatown and the Philippines.

Somewhere along the way, I found myself drawn to the stories of teachers whose superlative fighting skills were tempered by their ability to heal the sick and injured. During my earlier training, I met many great fighters, but few healers. However, like most subcultures, the martial arts world is small. If you look hard enough, you will find what you are searching for. Then it is merely a matter of having the courage or, in my case, the naive temerity to seize the chance. To make a long story short, I met the right teacher at the right time, and he set my feet on the pathan evening of being bounced off the walls of a hotel room, followed by an animated discussion of the connection between the martial arts and Chinese medicine that went into the wee hours, did the trick.

To my obsession with the martial arts I added apprenticeships in herbology and kung fu medicine, three years of acupuncture school, and endless study of books on Chinese medicine. Gradually I became familiar with the many facets of Chinese medicine. I began to treat patients and later opened a clinic. There are many specialties in Chinese medicine, but the kung fu medicine that evolved into Chinese sports medicine has always excited me the most. One reason for my enthusiasm is that Chinese sports medicine uses all the therapies available in Chinese medicineherbology, acupuncture, and moxibustion, physical therapy and exercise, massage, and even diet therapyallowing treatments to be more easily adapted to each injury and, more important, each individual. Another is that its often miraculous effectiveness satisfies my own impatience to see quick results.

My experience is that the West tends to view Chinese medicine as either an exotic Eastern philosophy with little practical value or a kind of quaint folk medicine that sometimes achieves inexplicable results but is full of poetic imagery that is confusing to the uninitiated. Scientific is not normally a word associated with Chinese medicine. Yet Chinese medicine is a science, based upon acute observations of the natural world and mans place in that world. These are not the observations of one man or one woman or the viewpoint of a small cult of true believers. These observations were not made in a decade or over the course of one or two centuries. They are the result of two millennia of research, scholarship, debate, and practical experience by millions of people. The result is an elegant, sophisticated system of medicine that is clinically effective.

Sports medicine is one area in which Chinese medicine is particularly effective, but despite the explosion of books on alternative health and Eastern medicine, little has been written on the subject. Previous books have listed some of the herbal remedies employed in Chinese medicine or delineated treatments for specific injuries, but until now, no book has explained how to simply and practically use this medicine to treat an injury from the moment it occurs until you return to the playing field.

In medicine, receiving the right treatment at the right time makes all the difference. Nowhere is this more true than with sports, where correct treatment can prevent a minor injury from becoming a chronic problem. This book was born out of many thingsthe urgings of friends and students as well as the debt I owe my teachers to pass on their knowledge, but mostly it was born out of my frustration at seeing so many people who would not need to be in my office if they had treated their injuries correctly from the moment they occurred. This book is my attempt to make Chinese sports medicine available to everyone so they can get back to doing the activities they love as soon as possible. I hope it makes a difference.