Recent Cases
It has been a few months since I've posted. Recently there has been some interesting cases that have benefitted from Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture treatments. These cases are not quick-fixes; they took 2-3 months to improve and stabilize.
First case is an acne case. The patient is in her twenties. She has suffered from acne for some time already. The acne looked a little bit on the cystic side. These cases are not going to be easy to treat. I told the patient that I am not sure if Chinese Medicine or acupuncture can reverse some of the damage that might have already been done on the skin, but my treatment is focused on stopping the inflammation and preventing new acne from breaking out. If acne stops breaking out, then the skin will have time to heal. To what extent does it recover is up to the patient's body. Generally speaking acne in young people is more or less related to food. However the patient asserts she is a very healthy eater. She told me what she actually ate daily and I told her that is likely what has led to your acne. She was in shock. Of course she was. Healthy eating in Chinese Medicine is very different than healthy eating in western nutritional science. Generally speaking she ate too much raw cold foods. If her body could take it then so be it. But her body could not take it, as reflected in her pulse. The cold food has overcooled her body and closed off the circulation to the extremities. This causes too much blood to congest in the facial area, leading to acne. The aim of treatment was to correct this improper flow of blood. After months of treatment the patient's acne has subsided and what are now left are some post-inflammatory pigmentation and some residual inflammation that still resides underneath the skin.
The 2nd case is a young gentleman who recently came to Canada. He nearly wrecked his body by taking fat-burners that are sold in body-building supplement stores. Considering how many people take things like this, his response is a little out of the ordinary. Although I had heard years before while still in Chinese Medicine school that body-building supplements can be quite dangerous if taken carefully. The purported effect of the fat burner was to increase heart-rate, among other effects. Those effects should taper off and disappear after stop taking the supplement. However this did not happen for this fellow. His heart rate continued to be high. When he came to see initially it was over 100 beats/minute. This is scary but also quite dangerous. Fortunately he is young. But despite this he was already suffering from the effects of rapid heart rate including anxiety and restless and unease. He did not initially trust me and my treatment. I don't blame him, for in his state I wonder if he can even think clearly. The fact that he even came to see is unbelievable already. He said he would try my herbs first to see how it turned out. He was also too afraid to get acupuncture. After a week he phoned back to tell me his heart rate had considerably slowed down. He came back and I took his heart rate and was sure he was not lying. Many weeks later now he is much more stable. Now he is being treated for other issues.
The third case is a patient who complained of pain in the back. Typically things like this respond well to acupuncture. However she only gets relief for around 5 days and things would come back. This repeated itself until I decided I could not continue to treat it the same old way otherwise it would be pointless. I decided to treat her body system instead because based on experience if body doesn't get better with regular acupuncture then the pain must be a result of faulty body systems in the inside. This concept is not very well embraced by most practitioners who treat pain, whether that be chiropractors, massage therapists, physiotherapists or even acupuncturists to be honest. Pain is often viewed as problem of the local muscle area, but this only covers part of the patient pool. A whole bunch of people no matter how you massage and crack their back or whatever number of needles you put there the pain is still there. Such is this patient. A change in thinking has resulted in dramatic improvement in her pain as well as the pain-free duration. Then it so happens that she also has chronic constipation. She takes Mg pills to get her bowels going, but has had to rely on more and more pills recently. I honestly felt like she may be overdosing on Mg if this trend continued. Based on her pulse the reason for the constipation is because her lower system, or what Chinese Medicine calls "the kidney system", is weak. This system controls the bladder and lower sections of the large intestine. With Chinese Medicine over a period of 1-2 months her reliance on Mg has cut down to 50-60%.
The last case is the case that I learned the most. This is a prostate patient. It is very ironic really. The prostate is the man's best friend during his youthful years, but turns to be his most formidable enemy in his later years. It's like your best friend not only turned his back on you and borrowed a ton of money and ran away with it so you'll be stuck in debt indefinitely. Prostate pathology happens to be this type of scenario. It has no precedence in ancient Chinese medical literature because nobody lived long enough in the past to have this kind of problem. Likewise is probably the case in the West of times of yore. Modern scientific research into prostate pathology has too many explanations, all of which seem valid but contradictory in themselves or to other theories. The most common theory is that the prostate enlarges because it is provoked by DHT, which is a potentized form of testosterone. Most of the supplements or medications out there currently aim to inhibit the transformation of testosterone to DHT. But this is a self-slap in the face because DHT is supposedly very high in young people but they have no prostate problems. Old people don't even have enough testosterone so how does DHT even get to the amount to enlarge the prostate? The 2nd explanation says it is not DHT, but estrogen. So some men actually inject themselves with testosterone to stave off this possibility. But some research suggest high testerone is linked to prostate cancer, but others say the opposite. Another explanation says low vitamin D is associated. Because vitamin D is not only involved in calcium metabolism it is also involved in maturing cells. The prostate is enlarged because the prostate cells divide too prematurely and too much. In a sense, an enlarged prostate has quantity but no quality. The 4th explanation is personally I think the most sensible one although it lacks wide spread validation. 2 doctors from Israel(Gat Goren) suggested that the real reason of BPH is because the blood vessel system of the prostate area and testicle area are defected essentially in these patients. This causes delayed and slowed drainage of blood of this area. The blood of this area contains high concentrations of hormones from the testicles owing to the proximity. Because it does not drain so therefore the prostate is literally soaked in this hormone soup. As years go by it undergoes abnormal enlargement. Their treatment essentially reroutes the blood flow in this area so this pooling doesn't exist. While the theory is very nice, the jury is still out whether or not all BPH patients actually have faulty veins of that area.
What does Chinese Medicine say? Chinese Medicine says something similar, although there is no equivalent to it from old medical literature. I have my own idea that I have yet to fully confirm. But at least with this patient his turn out is considerably good already. He initially saw me because he was already on 2 pills. One of them is to block the hormone to supposedly shrink the prostate, the other one is a muscle relaxant to make peeing better. He was only on 1 pill before but things got worse so the MD put him on these 2 pills. He came to see me because these 2 pills still weren't doing the job. First he has a lot of inflammation down there. So the first course of treatment was to get rid of the inflammation. Once that was dealt he felt much better because it was always burning anymore. Night time frequency has dropped significantly from around 2x from 5x. This alone took about 3 months. Recently he went back to his MD who was surprised he was 'actually better'. His PSA was not high to start with but nevertheless had a slight drop, which is a good thing. He is still continuing treatment.
