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Tony Lu, M.D., is director of integrative medicine for Loyola University Health System and an assistant professor of medicine at the Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. He has an active practice in internal medicine, acupuncture and homeopathy at Loyola’s Family Health Center at LaGrange Park. He earned his medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. He studied clinical acupuncture at the University of California at Los Angeles and is board-certified by the American Board of Medical Acupuncture. He studied medical homeopathy at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

Guy Spiro: Dr. Lu, tell us a little bit about your background.

Tony Lu: I’m trained in Internal Medicine. After many years of practice in the Emergency Room, Urgent Care and Primary Care, I decided to branch out into unconventional modalities such as acupuncture. I’m Chinese and I grew up in Vietnam. When I was growing up, whenever I would get sick I had a choice: Did I want to go to the Western doctor or the Chinese doctor? My experience with western doctors was that whenever I went, I ended up with a shot, probably penicillin, but if I went to the Chinese doctor, he would take my pulse, he would whisper something in my mother’s ear and all I had to do was to drink this awful tea. But at the end of the tea, I got a little reward, fruit or something. So my choice was very clear; I would go to the Chinese doctor because I didn’t get the shot.

GS: But then you ended up training in western medicine.

TL: Well, I always wanted to be a physician and was the first doctor in my family. During my medical school training, my mother always asked me why I didn’t want to be an engineer and have a normal sleep/wake cycle like a normal person. But I just kept persevering and eventually became a doctor. I’m glad I did because I always wanted to help people and I’ve been able to do that.

At a point when I was in primary care, I was in Florida and I had a huge geriatric practice. A typical geriatric patient will have multiple symptoms presenting all at once. A lot of the time you try to rule out the most obvious things or the most serious things. Then you start to look for something that would fit what your conventional model teaches you. A digestive problem, for instance, then you look for certain disease or conditions that would go along with that. But the problem is that you do a lot of tests and blood tests or procedures that you are taught to do, and the results come back normal. You start to wonder, what is missing? I decided that conventional medicine is very good when someone is in a disease mode. But when someone is not in a disease mode, you may not be able to find anything through conventional testing or procedures. There has to be something beyond that that we’re not addressing. That “something” is very well addressed by non-conventional modalities. Combining the two can give you a way of thinking and diagnosing and treating that really brings out the best outcomes for the healer as well as the patient or client.

GS: Don’t you also find with older patients that medications that they’re on cause other symptoms?

TL: Absolutely. With the side effects of one medicine, you need another medicine to combat that side effect. You keep chasing and chasing the symptoms. The problem is that symptoms are dynamic, they change so. With Chinese medicine or with a mind-body-spirit medicine, you can look at the whole picture and really see where the root of the problem is, and maybe stop it. That way you can get long term resolution instead of waiting for something, patch something and choose another band-aid. That’s not a good long-term solution.

GS: So after becoming successful in western medicine, you decided to explore Chinese medicine.

TL: I figured maybe I could find that missing link from my culture and upbringing that I didn’t learn in medical school.

GS: I understand that you had a pretty prestigious teacher. He was Mao’s doctor?

TL: Master Wan Su Jin, yes. In the later years of Mao Tse Tung’s life, he was one of the five that treated him. Every year I bring about fifteen people to China to study Qigong and we stay at the Qigong Institute where he is. One day we were having dinner and he brought out Mao Tse Tung’s miniature statue and I thought, oh no, we don’t need a propaganda lecture. It turned out he told us a story about a place that we were going to tomorrow where there’s a hotel in the suburbs of Beijing, and it’s actually designed by the guy who designed the Pyramid at the Louvre, a Chinese architect, I.M. Pei. The hotel was located on the grounds where Mao had spent a few days before he decided to attack Beijing. Apparently at that time he was trying to regroup in that suburb area, right at that site. The site was actually a military compound and it was all sealed off because he was there, strategizing how they were going to attack the city. No one was able to get access inside.

When Mao was walking from the military compound to his villa where he stayed, he saw this very old man appear in front of him. He was with his bodyguards and the bodyguards were upset to have this stranger walking towards Mao. They were going to arrest him, but Mao went over and talked to this man. Apparently the old man whispered in his ear three things, three numbers. After he was done, the old man turned around, walked away from Mao and disappeared.

It turns out the three numbers were the date that he was going to attack Beijing, the date he would become the Chairman of the Communist Party, and the year he would die. So that’s how he brought up the story that in the last few years, he was one of the five doctors of Mao Tse Tung. During that last year he was very sick and the doctors tried very hard to help him, but Mao told them that, no, this is the year that I’m supposed to die. But this was a vision that Mao had, and they actually planted a tree where that vision occurred. We planned to go to that hotel and practice Qigong at the site. It’s an area with very strong chi. When you do Qigong, you want to go to a place with very powerful chi because you’re trying to manipulate chi and bring the good chi into your system.

GS: Talk a little bit about what you teach.

TL: I’ll be leading an acupuncture workshop at the convention. Master Chen Zhenglei is going to be in Chicago for the first time, and he does a special kind of Qigong called Medical Qigong. With this you not only learn how to practice Qigong, but you learn how to treat people with Qigong. His style is a multi-practitioner treatment; five people nourish your chi. You have this surge of chi in your system. Besides the treatment and the practice, you also learn about the different rituals of Qigong. Qigong is heavily influenced by the Taoist philosophy, so you learn about the culture, the Taoist philosophy and some of the rituals they do in the process as well. For example there’s something called Qigong Calligraphy on the schedule. What it is is, while you’re being treated by the master, the whole process is captured in calligraphy. The Taoist priest is going to do the calligraphy, do the painting so that every time that you hang that painting on the wall, it’s going to invoke that feeling of treatment. Qigong Calligraphy is a very special thing that I think most Qigong practitioners hear about, but aren’t involved in. So it’s a very special event because you seldom see those kinds of things here.

GS: This is one of the great grand masters in the world that’s going to be here.

TL: Also I think that another great master, Master Lee, who is a renowned Qigong master in China, is going to also be there in the same place. People that attend the one-day seminar on Sunday [November 14th] can also participate in some of the events in Tai Chi.

The other thing that is maybe a surprise, the Kamta Lama of Mongolia is going to be there during that time too, so I’m going to have him come and do a blessing as well on Sunday. He is at the same level as the Dalai Lama of Tibet, but this is in Mongolia. He is also a physician and spiritual leader, and he is considered the medicine Buddha in Mongolia. It will be a very exciting thing, all these things coming together in one place on one day.

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