Last month, on November 29th, my second eldest brother died of cardiac insufficiency (heart failure). He passed away with his eyes and mouth half open, an expression of courage and hope. My eldest brother and I felt very grateful to him and sent him off saying silently to ourselves: “Thank you indeed. We appreciate your strenuous struggle!” We really felt much indebted to the deceased for what he had taught us.

Clumsy but sensitive since his childhood, my late brother never got angry about things or people. He was amicable even toward people who ridiculed him. He was sort of excessively sweet to everybody around him. But something unfortunate fell on him early in his 20s. At his workplace where he had a part-time job, he got involved in money trouble and was unjustly accused of culpability. This incident made him shut himself up indoors, which was followed by various symptoms such as confusion of day and night, disorder in the life rhythm. He began to use sleeping pills and antidepressant drugs. His doctor diagnosed him with integration dysfunction syndrome.

One out of 120
This psychological trouble, which was known until a few years ago as “schizophrenia,” but to avoid its discriminatory connotation and for other reasons, another name was adopted in 2002, namely, “Integration Dysfunction Syndrome.” Its symptoms differ from person to person, but commonly among the sufferers, visual and auditory hallucination or delusion occurs, and the sufferer gradually loses his/her viability.

They say this problem comes from excessive dose of dopamine, a neurotransmitter, but the cause-and-effect relationship with the disease is not definitely confirmed yet. It is most likely to affect people in their adolescent period. Now its incidence rate is said to be one out of 120, which is very high. Integration dysfunction and depressive psychosis are two major endogenous psychoses. So much so that most psychotics are suffering from either the one or the other.

Self-defense
In psychological medicine, it is said that if an unborn child or a child in its babyhood suffers damage to its genes, the trouble affects normal brain developments and, with the growth of the child, it causes abnormality in various organs and affects the balance of the hormone, thus eventually giving rise to psychological disorder. Observing the symptoms of my brother, however, the thought occurred to me often that he was trying to retrieve his proper mental balance by resorting to visual and auditory hallucinations. This thought is based on my belief as a specialist in Oriental medicine that every human being intuitively tries to maintain proper mental balance in self-defense. Thanks to acupuncture-moxibustion treatment, my late brother suffered comparatively moderate symptoms and for the past several years had very few visual or auditory hallucinations, and lived a peaceful life with a smile on his face.

Oriental Medical View
A number of people suffering from auditory and visual hallucinations or from depressive psychosis come to my clinic. Many of these people are excessively single-minded, lack power of resistance and confidence in themselves. They are so persistent in blaming themselves that I cannot help feeling that these factors drive them into a kind of psychotically difficult conditions. As in many physical and mental cases, both are inseparably related to each other, and the consequence is likely to appear either in physical or mental areas, such as cancer or myocardial infarction in the former, or various psychological problems in the latter.

The growth of psychological tension may be followed by a vicious cycle of the following problems: the liver condition gets high-strung, the stomach is heated up and invites overeating, overeating results in the increase of internal fever, which in serious cases causes the heart to be heated up as well. Heating up the heart may lead to insomnia and unstable mental conditions. Overdose of drugs to counter these symptoms may give rise to loss of self-control, resulting in recklessness. This type of mental disorder seems to be on the increase today.

My brother’s heart was extremely weakened because of the many kinds of drugs .he had taken for long. His doctor had given up on him for some years. This year, his pulse grew faint, hands and feet felt ice-cold, face turned pallid. To help him from this condition, my eldest brother and I took turns to give him moxa treatment on relevant moxibustion points.

Gratitude and Respect
Despite these symptoms, my brother never harmed anybody, so I always accepted his mysterious words and conduct quite naturally. Moreover, I was filled with a sense of gratitude toward him. This was because it seemed that he shouldered the entire hardships on behalf of my eldest brother and me. He was also a most respectable individual. While my whole family and relatives were either successful acupuncturists or medical doctors, he alone was jobless and kept getting into and out of hospital, and lived a most pitiful kind of life.

Every time we saw him, my eldest brother and I myself and all others in my family were deprived of any sense of arrogance, which is something often seen among medical specialists who are addressed as “Sensei,” a word usually used in addressing or referring to somebody “superior.” Our late brother always “warned” us against the possible temptation to feel superior to others and made us wonder who are really respectable, people in high positions, wealthy people, or people with a fame.

The genuine value of a human being has nothing to do with his/her title or wealth. He made us realize the importance of asking this question most seriously. Recollecting the faces of my late mother and brother, I am always made to re-determine to live out my own life in their footsteps and fulfill my mission as a respectable human being.

May both of them rest in peace!