I Have a Difficult - to - Treat Illness. Will Acupuncture and Herbs Help?YES!

With real - life examples from my practice.

My sickest patients often have this question – Do I treat their illness?  They need to know that I can help before taking the leap of investing money, time, and that even-more-precious resource — HOPE! — into another strategy.  Often their diagnosis, the thing they are asking me if I treat, was hard won, after months or years of insisting to their doctors that something is not right and doing all the follow up appointments within all the various departments of medicine to prove it.

So here is the long version of that answer, starting with the short version.  I do not treat your <insert name of illness here>, but I do treat your body and its symptoms.  This is such an important distinction, and I hope that you don’t think I am evading an answer.  

Let me explain.  Let’s consider a familiar health complaint: acid reflux.  We can all use the word acid reflux, but what we feel can vary widely.  For one person, it can be an “ocean of burning”.  (This is a quote from a real live person who came to my practice, by the way.  I love how articulate patients can be when describing their bodily sensations.)  For someone else it can be a chronically phlegmy throat (but of course not every phlegmy throat is acid reflux)!  For someone else it can be a dry cough in the morning, after lying flat all night long.  Chinese medicine is very basic.  We break things down into hot/ cold, up/down, inward/ outward, dry/ wet, too much/ not enough.  So you can see how each of these three experiences would get a different treatment.  If I give the phlegmy throat treatment to the dry cough person, not only will my efforts be ineffective, I can make the person worse.

Let’s look at some real life examples from my practice to see what this looks like:

A mother in her early 40s hemorrhaged multiple times after child birth.  This caused acute kidney failure, which then led to high blood pressure. Her doctors saved her life multiple times.  Her kidney doctor was very interested in not making her dependent on blood pressure medication forever due to a temporary situation, and was doing his best to wean her off quickly.  She came in to treat the high blood pressure.  Slowly and persistently we nourished blood.  This is often needed postpartum, but this was a much more extreme version of a typical postpartum state.  For a long time – many months – she could not go off of the herbs without her blood pressure increasing.  Eventually, her vessels were filled with enough blood that I could then treat the downward direction of her body, and she came off the herbs with a normalized blood pressure.  I never treated high blood pressure.  In fact, I don’t know how to.  But I do treat blood deficiency for example, and tight neck and shoulders, which were some of the symptoms that helped me know how best to treat her.

Another example from my practice – Scleroderma CREST.  There is a lovely doctor (I have never met him but his patients speak so highly of him) that sometimes sends me patients.  Two of them came in with the diagnosis of Scleroderma CREST.  Both received very different treatments.  One was treated for strong emotions that affected her digestive symptoms, a mixture of dryness and damp, and the heat that comes from being a very loving person.  She came in with an inflated belly that looked like a 5 month pregnancy, bowel and throat issues, and left feeling like herself again.  The other is currently getting treated for being “ too dry”.  So far, after 3 visits, her chronic toe tightness/ pain from her disease process has gone away, difficulty swallowing is improving, and the dry mucosa of her mouth, nose and eyes is more moist at the end of each session.

What about things like POTS, extreme heart rate fluctuations, and other autonomic issues of this nature?  These symptoms are very common after covid, and I have treated it so frequently that I cannot easily access a stand alone case in my memory.  These kinds of illnesses have gotten better with a wide variety of strategies.  Some patients needed more upward movement, while others needed more downward movement.  Some were too wet and hot, while others have been a mix of wet and dry with cold.  I hope you are beginning to see the difference in how practitioners in my field think.  

I have many more examples – let me just give a couple more so that you can really begin to see how your body would also be able to respond to this medicine.  Recently a health care practitioner came in.  She works in a hospital, and had contracted Clostridioidis difficile, often called C-diff.  This is a bacteria that is resistant to antibiotics, so it really is “dificile”.  Despite 20 days of antibiotics and a leave of absence from work, she was still having chronic, smelly diarrhea multiple times a day, often watery.  She had high thirst for cold water, and was feeling exhausted from months of chronic fluid loss.  She got better immediately with a formula used to treat a hot dry stomach with too many hot fluids falling out of the bottom of the body.  Just to show you how much your body guides the process, I would like to share a recent mistake I made in clinic as a counterpoint.  A young man came in who also has frequent soft and smelly bowels with high thirst for cold water and a stiff neck that I misinterpreted as a side effect of chronic fluid loss.  What I ignored or did not properly appreciate is that he also had signs on his tongue that indicated a wet and hot stomach instead of dry and hot stomach.  I gave him the same formula I gave the c-diff patient, and not only did it not help him, but it made his condition worse.  We were able to quickly adjust and change formulas.

This leads me to another important thought — we do not expect side effects in East Asian medicine!  There are very few scenarios where symptoms may get worse before they get better.  Sometimes this can happen in the first 24-48 hours after treatment, or when resolving the surface of the body with herbs.  Barring these situations, which your practitioner can carefully discern, you should feel progressively better.  Patients are so used to unpleasant side effects being a necessary part of conventional treatment that I have to reiterate this often.  If you feel worse from a treatment, that is very important information – your body is always the ultimate expert on your health and when it gives a clear yes or no, we heed that information.

If you would still like to hear more, here is the last example for this post.  Recently, new parents brought in their baby, who had been diagnosed with a rare genetic disease.  It is so rare, that I feel like naming the disease is almost identifying information, so I won’t.  I was so impressed with these parents, because they persisted in looking for answers when they felt something was off.  They now had a diagnosis, which comes with a community of parents navigating the same thing who are working to have this condition studied.  So far, the diagnosis doesn’t really come with a treatment plan.  

When they showed up with their child, the Dad asked me what I knew about this disease.  Very little, I explained, only what they had already told me and what I had read online.  I explained briefly to him what I am explaining in long form here, and he instantly understood.  His baby was extremely aware of their surroundings, had trouble discerning the border of their body, was a bit constipated, and did not have the muscle tone to hold up their head for extended periods of time or sit up unassisted.  After four acupuncture sessions where we treated the baby’s body, not a newly named disease known to affect 445 people world-wide, the baby’s response has been so incredible.  Even those in the baby’s life who do not know about the treatments remark in the days after each session that they are progressing by leaps and bounds.  The baby is now sitting up unassisted, pooping normally, crawling, and, in a very healthy and age-appropriate way, complaining about what doesn’t go their way.

I hope these examples have illustrated that this old way of diagnosing by looking at the body and what comes out of it does not suffer from not using modern ways of seeing into bodily functions with imaging and labwork.  In fact, it is our strength.  I like to know about imaging and labwork, but then immediately try to forget this information so it doesn’t influence my ability to truly see what is in front of me.  I have seen time and time again that when bodies get better, lab work improves.  

This is quite different from that other wonderful, life-saving medicine that we all tend to access first.  This is why I don’t, and shouldn’t, treat your disease name, whether the name is SIBO or something still identified by a string of numbers and letters.  I am always treating your entire body and how it is presenting in a given moment.

It is my wish that collectively we would start with nature-based medicines like the acupuncture, moxabustion and herbs of Traditional East Asian Medicine before or at the same time as consulting conventional medicine.  Each body that is brought back into balance helps recalibrate the web-of-life towards balance.  True health is a gift not just to yourself, but to your loved ones and the world at large.