Hot Flashes, Insomnia, Bladder Infection
Most of the time, patients coming to me have only 1 problem(major one) that they want me to deal with. Patients don't often tell me to deal with 3 and more problems at the same time, even if they do have that many health complaints bothering them. However, over the last 2 months I just treated a patient who is not so common.
The patient is a female who came to me with multiple issues that have been bothering her for the last many months. Her first issue is this soreness under her right ribs that feels swollen. When I pressed around the area it was very sensitive and painful. I suspect maybe her liver isn't functioning well; she thinks so too. Her 2nd issue is hot flash-like heat sensations throughout the day as well as constant clamminess and night sweats. This problem she has gone to the naturopath in the past who prescribed her bio-identical progesterone injections. It worked in the beginning but didn't last after a few months. The third issue she has is chronic bladder infections. It was so severe at one point it lead to a kidney infection too. The recurrence of the infection in the bladder is remarkable as well, coming on every 1 or 2 weeks. In the past one of my patients had this problem but that was once or twice every month. The current patient in discussion uses antibiotics to control it but has grown sick of it since she is taking it all the time.
As a doctor I cannot treat all these problems at once. It is not really possible. The reason is because the body has only so much resources that we as Chinese Medicine Doctors can use to target problems throughout the body at a given time. When trying to deal with multiple problems at simultaneously, we end up accomplishing very little because the therapy becomes diluted.
The patient thinks and so do I that her problem is something wrong with her liver. And because she has the swollen soreness on her right ribs I decided to tackle that first. As simple as this seems, I took 4 visits to get it to go away. After it was gone I spent the next few visits dealing with her hot flashes, sweating, and insomnia. Her insomnia is particularly severe. When the body doesn't sleep it doesn't recover very well. Problems like this is usually a hormonal problem, because it happens almost exclusively in women. After a few visits we got this under control too. Up until this point, her bladder infection kept acting up. I was surprised. Usually in Chinese Medicine we like to think that multiple problems happening around the body are more or less related to each other. So one or two problems get treated other issues should go away as well. This wasn't the case with this patient. Then a few more visits, the bladder infection was finally under control. In this entire course of treatments, she has taken much herbal medicine and acupuncture treatments.
While up until now the bulk of her complaints are more or less no longer her troubles, she actually has other smaller issues that she wants to continue to address. That will be the assignment for the next year.
A side note: progesterone is actually responsible for elevating basal body temperature in women after they ovulate around mid cycle. It confuses me why it would be prescribed to her when she already feels hot all the time.