There is no wonder drug, expert, influencer or leader who will save you.

Sorry. There just isn’t. And I guess I need to vent about it.

We don’t get to jump off the learning curve and set up camp because we worked really hard to get somewhere. There isn’t a remedy that is “safe and effective” for everyone or works every time, even if it worked once before. There’s no leader or expert you can count on to make things right. The search for an ultimate solution will have you spinning your wheels endlessly while you miss on countless opportunities to heal and grow. You’re always going to have to come back and sit with yourself to integrate everything that comes at you from the outside and wells up from the inside.

I’m not saying dismiss advice or recommendations. Yes, there are aids and powerful medicinals… there are people with insight and experience who can help (I access them all the time!) There are ways to get relief and work towards healing. There can be hope in new leadership. But truth, healing and growth require constant engagement.

My Expert Opinion (isn’t going to fix you, but here it is)

As an acupuncturist/Chinese medicine practitioner, I constantly get questions about what to take or what protocols, diets or exercise regimens work best. People regularly ask me about whatever superfood, supplement or modality is currently in vogue. And my response is often “it depends.” I realize this can be a frustrating answer for people looking for solutions. But I’m not trying to withhold help. It really does depend.

One-size-does-NOT-fit-all still applies and lot depends on YOU.

Unraveling your own mysteries

One of the things I appreciate about Chinese medicine is that it uses observations of natural processes and patterns to help us notice and understand imbalances. It’s a paradigm that makes so much room for deeper understanding and healing.

Signs of heat, cold, dampness, dryness, excess, deficiency and stagnation/circulation can provide important clues. The color, smell and viscosity of our body fluids offers clues. The dryness of our skin, nasal passages and hair…our ability to take in nourishment (breath, food, water, love) and release toxins/excess (exhalation, excretion), offer insight about how different systems are working and what they need to work efficiently. And so much of the story is recorded on the pulse of your radial artery. Understanding these things is an exercise in cultivation, but you are not at the mercy of experts. You live in your body. You have an important role in discerning what’s going on.

Your “lived experience” is only selectively relevant to experts because of their limited ability (and/or desire) to incorporate those experiences into your diagnosis. Your experience (and whatever you project onto your experience) matters. Just because your practitioner doesn’t know how your painful break-up, your vaccine reaction or an accident from years ago factors into the equation doesn’t mean these things are irrelevant. The impact of your own experience on your body, your spirit and your life is ultimately yours to untangle.

Chinese medicine and other more holistic modalities also incorporate a lens for examining for your spiritual and emotional life. So your feelings and emotional responses offer clues.

If you can’t lose weight, is it because you’re holding too much? Have you created a buffer to protect yourself from pain you can’t confront? Are you stretching your own internal boundaries to accommodate everything that’s coming from outside, even if it overwhelms you and is impossible to digest? Are you constipated because you can’t let go?

Within Chinese medicine, the Spleen, for example, has a role in the digestion/assimilation of both food and thoughts. When you take in more than you can process, you can’t digest. That overwhelm can show up as gas, bloating, lethargy and loose stools OR it can show up as “brain fog” and muddled thinking. Often these things show up together. Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) can show up as a manifestation of the inability to digest and assimilate ideas (think gut-brain axis).

Therefore, there are different treatments based on different presentations.

• Some people need to strengthen their boundaries. For example, leaky gut is literally a boundary issue (so is a compromised blood brain barrier.) The integrity of boundaries is related to the Spleen in Chinese medicine. Weak boundaries/flaccidity/low tone tend to indicate Spleen deficiency, which can lend to accumulation of dampness.

• Some people need to drain dampness. Dampness is cumbersome and overwhelms. It dampens our metabolic fire (Kidney) and weighs on our spirit (Heart). (Emotionally, these weakened boundaries can also lend to imbalances that cause relationships become a burden.) Digging deeper, some people pathologically rely on dampening (sweets) because it helps contain/control/suppress inflammation that we don’t know how to deal with. (From this perspective, tumors can be thought of as dampness surrounding heat toxins that we’re otherwise unable to clear.)

• Other people need to let go (Lung/Large Intestine), or stop suppressing what needs to move and clear (Liver).

• Perhaps there’s a lack of will power or metabolic energy (Kidney).

• More often than not, multiple factors are at play and there’s an order of priority and a balanced approach is key.

In other words, Ozempic isn’t the answer.

My husband, Ross, offers a helpful example of important distinctions when working with cancer patients here:

It is not uncommon for practitioners to see cancer patients and those with compromised immunity. How does one know whether or not to attack fire toxins and cancerous activity or strengthen the patient and seek latency/dormancy instead? This is an area that I see a lot of damage being done to an already precarious community of patients. Many see stagnation and toxins (by virtue of a cancer diagnosis)(the what, not the why) and seek to eliminate toxins and move stagnation. Often times this is highly inappropriate and ill advised and can speed up the demise of one’s patient. The pulse will let us know if the patient has enough strength to afford the invigoration of blood and release of toxins and whether or not there are sufficient resources to finance such a plan. After all, Chinese medicine instructs us to consider our patient’s constitution and terrain, not just the stress/bacteria/cancer. It is the landscape that these pathogens reside in that is of paramount importance. Seeking to break up stagnation and release toxins in an individual who has lost the ability to maintain latency can be disastrous. And seeking to eliminate a pathogen without sufficient resources (yin-fluid) to flush it out will waste qi and impede resolution. The pulse can give us direct knowledge of the status of these factors and help determine the proper strategy to embark upon (and when it might be appropriate to switch strategies).

Reductionist methods will often obscure a bigger picture. Don’t miss it. But don’t let me make this a Chinese medicine sales pitch either. I appreciate the paradigm because it offers me a useful lens for examining just about everything, but there are plenty of great lenses to look through. Explore them.

If your eyes are troubling you, is it because you don’t like what you’re seeing? Or are you burning images from the screen onto your brain? Do you need to nourish fluids, get better circulation to your sensory orifices or do you just need to rest your eyes more?

I’m oversimplifying - and rambling - but you get my drift. Our symptoms are for us. Our bodies (or our lives) are constantly communicating needs to us and we can learn how to listen. It’s ok to seek help, but when we do, we should make sure our practitioners are good interpreters. We owe it to ourselves to find people we trust to help us decipher and meet own needs.

Your intuition is an asset here. Seek resonance. And maybe don’t be in such a rush to reach a conclusion. (After all, what comes at the end of growth?)

Snapshots and the problem with “this” treats “that”

From a more practical perspective, remember that a practitioner is there to treat an individual patient, not COVID, or Sjogren’s or POTS. We have an entire health story that we have co-written with the people who gave us life and share our lives. Solutions should be informed by that story rather than a snapshot of your current health status.

A panel of bloodwork can give us a glimpse of our current state, but the roots of our imbalances generally go deeper. If you’re magnesium deficient, supplementing with magnesium might be very helpful. The same applies for all kinds of nutrients and supplements. But are you? And even if you are, WHY are you deficient? And are there other deficiencies/excesses that come into play? Will throwing a plethora of supplements at them help or could they force weakened organ systems to do additional work that further debilitates them?

Even vitamin C can create problems if you use it incorrectly. From a Chinese medicine perspective, vitamin C is cold. It can therefore hamper your digestive system among other things. (ie. taking vitamin C to “bowel tolerance” is equivalent to taking it to the point of overwhelming your system, causing inefficiency in digestion/assimilation of nutrients and ultimately diarrhea/loose stools). In acute circumstances, the risk/benefit tradeoff can make sense. But these are things to understand and consider. If your issue is heat, maybe the cold nature of vitamin C is an appropriate treatment. But if your digestive system is already weak as a result of “cold,” you’re poised to suffer further damage.

So, while I think drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine can have their place and should never have been prohibited, they’re not for everyone. Some people won’t get the desired results. Some people can be harmed.

The same goes for various foods… or any kind of diet or exercise program or specialist or teacher or leader.

Don’t chase. Don’t settle

When we’re suffering, we tend to get caught up in a search for answers. As in, we just want there to be one. A resolution, relief… a soft place to land and be comfortable again. And all of that is great. Enjoy those moments. But even comfort has its risks. Settle into anything for too long and stagnation ensues.

We really can’t settle on anything for long.

And perhaps that’s a good thing. Because we would likely stop growing if we found the magic pill, the hero, the ultimate truth we thought we were looking for.

I’m not saying we can’t heal or get relief. That’s not what I think at all. But finding the next piece of science or the next reality that’s the real and final answer/truth/cure? No.

A word about heroes

Our dependence on heroes is how we make way for powerful villains. If power corrupts, and it certainly seems to, we need to be very careful about how we distribute it.

Consider Fauci. We literally made him a storybook hero.

How many people abandoned their own instincts and intuition to listen to follow the self-proclaimed science?

Everyone’s on a learning curve. No one has it all figured out. Not for us anyway. Let’s please keep all of this in mind as we usher in new leaders, new experts, new solutions and new narratives. If we listen to our guts, do our inner work and stay our own course, we’ll be way less likely to get lost on someone else’s path.