Recent Cases
Recent Cases First of all happy new year to you. I’d like to start the new year by talking about some interesting cases from the end of 2017.
The first case is a middle aged woman who suffered from high heart rate. The problem came out of nowhere according to her. Her doctor put her on beta-blockers to slow down her heart beat. This only had a temporary effect. As soon as she taking it her heart rate would pick up again. A high heart rate is a very uncomfortable feeling. It literally feels like your heart is going to jump out of your chest. Some patients even describe this as likening to a heart attack. The person’s mental composure typically disintegrates rapidly when this happens. In the view of Chinese Medicine this patient’s problem came about because there is congested flow in the chest. The causes uneven pressure on the heart. The heart beats fast because it is trying to siphon this pressure away although it does this unsuccessfully and really it is just an attempt to cry out for help. Treatment we use Chinese Medicine and acupuncture to redirect this flow to its proper pathway. The patient had 7 visits and I didn’t hear about her for quite some time until near the end of the year when she dropped by to tell me she has been ok for a while already. She has since stopped her medication as well.
The second case is patient who came from all the way on the west side on the referral of her friend who is one of my patients. The person suffered from itchy eczema of the lower legs. Medically speaking this is a type of special eczema which we call “stasis eczema”. It is a result of poor venous flow of the lower legs. The blood that doesn’t properly flow back up fast enough eventually stays down there for too long. The fluids inside the blood slowly seeps out of the veins and into the surrounding tissues triggering a type of allergic reaction. This is one of the theories currently believed to be the possible cause of this. Chinese Medicine wise what we do is to drain out the excess fluids that have built up down there and to speed out the blood flow. In a sense we get the body to pump fresh water down there to ‘wash out’ the dirty water. During the first visit the patient entire legs, upper and lower, were ready and itchy and a bit scaly. Over a course of visits of treatments the redness gradually disappeared. It starts decreasing from the upper legs down to the lower legs, essentially back to where it initially started, around the ankles. This patient is almost ok now but is still undergoing treatment. Patient was adamant that she would avoid steroids at all cost and thankfully this has worked out very well for her.
Third case is a woman who has back pain that rendered her unable to work for some time. Now typically back pain is a all too common problem that I treat. But sometimes cases like this the standard acupuncture protocol is not enough. I prescribed Chinese Medicine for her because I believe her back pain at least partly stems from ‘weak kidneys’ as we call it in Chinese Medicine. Which means the lower back is painful or causing sciatica like symptoms because it is actually too weak to hold those bony structures together down there, causing them to become wobbly and unstable, thereby easy to impinge on nerves, causing pain. She did not like the taste of Chinese herbs although she held on it for two weeks. I think that was just enough to bring her systems up to a certain level for acupuncture to work more effectively on her. Although we stopped the herbal medicine but I felt that was a key factor in her eventual improvement. She said she has never felt this much relief in a long time, after seeing so many different doctors of various types.