Because It's Good For You

The other day, I was talking to someone who knows that I practice Acupuncture and BodyTalk. She said, “ A friend of mine told me that I should take Apple Cider Vinegar because it’s really good for you.”

This is not the first time someone has said something like this to me. And so I gave her my standard answer: “Sure! As long as you’re not allergic to it.”

We live in a society in which our opinions are profoundly affected by the media and advertising, and we must remember that the sole purpose of every natural supplement company and health food store is not to provide us with excellent health care, but rather, to sell their products! Therefore, we must all exercise caution in accepting their claims without discrimination.

It’s kind of like shoe sizes. The “average” woman in the United States wears size 7. But that doesn’t mean that we ALL should TRY to wear size 7 because it’s good for us.

Now, please know that I am not saying supplements are bad. I take supplements on a daily basis myself. And if the supplements have been given to you by a doctor or a health care practitioner, then by all means, take them! My only word of caution would be this: If, after taking a certain supplement for a period of time, you notice that you are feeling bad (or worse than you were when you started), consult the prescribing physician and discontinue it.

Several years ago, I decided to do a certain detox program. I ordered a kit online because the website contained hundreds of testimonials filled with miraculous stories of weight loss, resolution of chronic illness, and before-and-after photos. After a week and a half on the cleanse, I had what felt like a urinary tract infection and pain in my kidneys. When I went to my health care practitioner, she tested me for each specific herb in the cleanse, and lo and behold, found that I was sensitive to Urva Ursi, which happened to be one of the ingredients. “But isn’t that supposed to be good for kidney and urinary health?” I asked in astonishment. “Yes,” my practitioner responded, “but it’s toxic to you!”

Who knew? The point is that your body will send you very clear signals that something isn’t working for you. In my case, it was kidney pain that finally got my attention (note to self: pay more attention next time!).

Each one of us is absolutely unique. No one else has our specific body chemistry. We all react and respond to different things in different ways. Because of this fact, we must take responsibility for our own health and notice when something isn’t working for us, whether it’s a supplement, a food, a relationship, or a career. Therefore, what’s good for “everyone” may work for us…or not…because we’re not all size 7.

The Heart, The Emperor

Recently I treated a patient who had just endured a terrible shock. She had just found out that her business partner was embezzling all her money, and had fled the country.

After a few links, which seemed to go very smoothly, heart and all other organs came up as a priority to be linked. After tapping for some time on her head, I realized that I hadn't been aware of the normal "shift" signifying that the link had been formed. I usually feel this shift after tapping on the head and chest. I thought, well, I must have missed the shift, for surely it must have happened by now. But when I checked, the response was "more tapping." After tapping for another period of time, I checked again, and finally had to tap directly on the heart in order to tap in that particular link.

The interesting thing about this link is that it quite aptly describes the traditional Chinese diagnosis of Heart Shock, in which the patient has endured a profound shock to the system. Consequently, all the organs are in disarray.

What makes this happen? In Chinese Medicine, the Heart is the emperor of the body, and is protected by the Pericardium, the covering over the heart which is actually seen as an organ in Chinese Medicine, and is the emperor's bodyguard. When the emperor sustains a blow that the bodyguard cannot catch, the emperor himself takes the hit. This profoundly affects all the other organs.

When Heart Shock happens, the ensuing pattern is Blood Stasis. Therefore, the most important treatment principle in Heart Shock is move the blood.

In traditional acupuncture, we move the blood with herbal formulas (for instance, Gui Zhi Tang/Cinnamon Twig Decoction), but also with specific points: Spleen 10 is always a good choice, as is Liver 3. Some practitioners use a specific point prescription for shock (for instance, Kidney 3-16-27).

In BodyTalk, since we are following the body's lead and addressing what the body has determined to be a priority, the focus is slightly different. Therefore, the specific priority will vary depending on the needs of the individual. The important thing, from the practitioner's view, is to be aware and alert as to the particular client's needs, rather than having one's own agenda. And from the client's perspective, it's helpful to recognize and acknowledge that one's own body has an innate wisdom that will release traumas and heal itself on its own time.

www.quantumlinkwellness.com

Summer Heat

It's summer, and although it's cooler in Los Angeles than it is in other places in the United States--in Texas, it's been over 100 degrees for six weeks!--it's still much warmer in LA than usual. Although some people find the warm weather invigorating, summer's heat often challenges people who are intolerant to heat, making their life very uncomfortable.

Believe it or not, Summer Heat is actually a diagnosis in Chinese Medicine. It involves typical heat symptoms: sweating, red face, excessive thirst, dry lips, scanty yellow urine, and headache. In western terms, we would probably call it heat exhaustion.

Why are some people more susceptible to heat than others? The answer to this question lies in their description: they are heat intolerant. People can be intolerant to climactic factors in the same way that they can be intolerant to foods, like when someone experiences nausea or vomiting every time they eat shellfish. It's not a hypersensitivity reaction--they don't break out in hives or anything--but it does make them ill, and so they avoid it...which is not so easy to do with heat.

What causes people to be intolerant of heat? Sometimes it's inherited from their parents. Hormonal imbalances can also cause heat sensitivity. Sometimes certain foods cause heat reactions, and when eaten in a warm climate, can make them be more sensitive to heat. Typical foods that cause excess heat are bread, sugar, tomatoes, and mangoes. Coffee, alcoholic beverages, and certain spices also contribute to heat issues in those who are sensitive to them.

So, in addition to avoiding foods that someone might be sensitive to that cause excess heat in the body, what can be done to reduce heat sensitivity? Here's a short list:

1. Eat lightly and drink plenty of fluids. The best thing to do in the summer is to stay well hydrated.
2. Pay close attention to your physical state, and do things in the summer to keep you feeling cool (swimming, staying out of the sun during the hottest part of the day)
3. Tap out your cortices (http://www.bodytalksystem.com/videos/). Getting the left and right brain to communicate optimally with each other can reduce many sensitivity issues.
4. Breathe deeply. When you take long, slow breaths, it allows your brain to pay attention to every part of your body, and recognize and repair malfunctions.

When heat sensitivity becomes a serious problem, there are treatments for it. Acupuncture, NAET, and BodyTalk all address heat sensitivity and heat intolerance quite well, regardless of the underlying cause.

www.quantumlinkwellness.com

Tapping: The Reset Button

Recently I ran into one of my former patients in a grocery store parking lot. When she asked me what I was doing these days, I told her that I'd incorporated BodyTalk into my practice. After a short description of BodyTalk, in which I mentioned that the Cortices technique in BodyTalk might help her son's asthma, she remarked with amazement that she recalled tapping on her own head as a child to stop her wheezing.
You might have noticed that some of the newer treatment modalities involve tapping: there's EFT, which works on emotions, there's NAET, best known for allergy elimination, and BodyTalk. Aside from the tapping, all three modalities seem very different.
Why do they all use tapping? Well, for starters, tapping has been around in indigenous cultures for centuries. Tapping wakes up the body and the brain and helps bring about healing.
Think about your spine. Inside your spine—and surrounding your brain--is cerebrospinal fluid which, according to osteopaths and craniosacral therapists, moves in its own rhythm. In NAET and BodyTalk, we are gently interrupting this rhythm to change our relationship with a substance or to call the brain's attention to something. The interruption of this rhythm is communicated to the brain and other places in the body via the cerebrospinal fluid and spinal nerves, which travel up and down the interior of the spine and emerge out of each vertebra.
We've all had a similar experience when we've contracted a case of the hiccups, which miraculously disappears when someone comes up behind us and startles us...and the hiccups miraculously disappear. We've just been reset, and our diaphragm no longer spasms with each inhalation.
It's like having a conversation with a friend, and just as you're in the middle of relating how your boss gave you so much work to do, someone runs up and interrupts you very loudly by shouting something in your face. Your mind goes blank. You can't remember what you were saying.
The same thing happens with tapping. As you tap on your head (or as your practitioner taps on you), causing a gentle interruption of the natural rhythm of the cerebrospinal fluid, your brain is surprised enough to be able to change its relationship with that substance, as in NAET. Or as in BodyTalk, your brain notices a lack of communication between your lungs and your spleen that has been causing coughing and phlegm for the past two weeks, and re-establishes the connection.

www.quantumlinkwellness.com

Cold and Ancient China

For thousands of years, Chinese Medicine has said that cold enters the body via the acupuncture points on the back of the head and upper back when the protective energy surrounding the body is weakened. An entire system of acupuncture, known as the Shang Han Lun, was developed some 1700-1800 years ago, that traced the invasion of “cold” into the body. As cold penetrated deeper and deeper, an individual got sicker and sicker until they eventually died. Herbal formulas and acupuncture point prescriptions were developed for each stage of illness, beginning with the simple cold, continuing to high fevers, to abdominal pains and exhaustion, to urinary tract infections, and to complete depletion and death. This is how doctors in ancient China kept people alive. Oh, and by the way, the doctors of ancient China only got paid when people were well. So there was a great incentive to keeping people from being sick.
If we were to engage our universal translator, we'd look at the last paragraph and say, “Oh, back then they had viruses, just like we do, except they didn't have antibiotics. And this is what it looks like when you have a virus that you don't treat—it weakens the immune system until the white blood cells can't fight anymore, and then you die.”
Of course, back then they didn't have antibiotics. People tended to stay home and rest when they got sick, rather than going to work because they didn't have sick days or because they had to finish a project. When a major contagious disease swept through a village, people were quarantined, and they complied voluntarily to try to contain the disease as much as possible. Their very existence—and the existence of their towns and villages—depended on it.
Life in ancient China was different in other ways, too. People had a pretty ascetic diet. There was no fast food, hardly any sugar, and not a lot of alcohol. Life was hard, and people didn't party like we do.
What in the world does this have to do with you or me in 2009?
I would argue that it has a LOT to do with us!
If we focused on preventive health, instead of palliative or curative medicine, health care in the US would look completely different than it does today. But even if the rest of the world doesn't change, we can focus on preventive health for ourselves and the people we care about. Here's a brief list of things we can do, taken from simple wisdom of Ancient China:
1. Pay attention to how you feel. Notice when you start to feel tired or run down. Respond by RESTING, not pushing through it.
2. Cut down or eliminate sugar, fast foods, and too much partying.
3. When you get sick, take a day off. Chances are you will nip it in the bud rather than spreading it around your whole office.
Best wishes to all of you for a prosperous and healthy 2009!

www.quantumlinkwellness.com

Winter: The Season of the Dreaded Cough

I'll never forget the feeling...being awakened at 11:30 pm, soon after falling asleep, by the sound of my son's cough in his room next to ours...that feeling of dread and fear because my son can't breathe.
Every mother of an asthmatic child knows exactly what I'm talking about. There's a certain sound that every child makes when they cough, when you know they're in trouble. For my son, it was when the cough (which had begun 36 hours previously) had pretty much exhausted his lungs. His voice shrank to a whisper. He began to wheeze. And the cough shook his small frame, sending spasms throughout his entire body, sometimes causing him to gag at the end. I knew there was no medicine that would get us through the night, no matter what the doctor said, and that it would be a long, scary night indeed.
Fortunately for us, I learned from our nutritionist that my son had food allergies that were creating copious amounts of phlegm in his small system. When we eat food that is undigestible—either because we're allergic to that food and it creates inflammation in our gut or because we're sensitive to that food and can't absorb it—the residue of the undigested food produces excess mucus. When we reach a certain critical mass, so to speak, of mucus that our body can't store any longer, the mucus is released as phlegm, usually through the nose, in a form that looks, for all intents and purposes, like a cold. This is what our nutritionist explained to us. Hmm, I thought, that sounds suspiciously like Chinese Medicine, which I myself had studied before having children. And, come to think of it, my son seemed like he was getting an awful lot of colds—sometimes he got a cold every two or three weeks! But, I realized, no one else in the family was getting these “colds,” which made me wonder. Maybe the nutritionist was right.
So we followed the nutritionist's advice: No eggs. No wheat. No cow's milk dairy of any sort, including butter. No soy. And much less sugar. It was a miracle—my son got dramatically better in a very short period of time. I was amazed.
Now, for those of you who have never attempted an egg-free, wheat-free, dairy-free, soy-free diet, let me share with you how incredibly difficult this is to do, especially with children, and especially with someone who is a very picky eater to begin with, like my son is. Basically, you can't go out to eat. Every kid's meal known to mankind is replete with wheat and dairy, not to mention things no parent really wants to know about. Basically, on an egg-free, wheat-free, dairy-free diet, you eat meat, chicken, or fish, and vegetables, which if you're interested in losing weight is a really great diet to follow but unfortunately my son, aged 5 at the time, was already too skinny. And basically, we spent a lot of time at the kitchen table amidst plates of (you guessed it) protein and vegetables, while my son cried and said, “Mom, when can I get off this boring diet?” Breaks a mom's heart.
What kind of a life is this, I ask you? Doomed, at age 5, to eat only meat and vegetables! Ask any parent whose child has had to follow this diet, and they will tell you it is very difficult, but better than pulmicort and albuterol, the asthma medicine du jour. And I seconded that every time we fell off the wagon after a bithday-party soaked weekend, or a visit to the grandparents, or when I gave in because I just couldn't listen to the whining anymore, and the dreaded cough came back. Yes, I sighed, life is a sick joke.
But then we discovered NAET, the greatest allergy elimination therapy known to man, the holy grail of alternative medicine. NAET is a combination of Chinese medicine, applied kinesiology (muscle testing), and chiropractic spinal massage. It actually change your relationship with any substance you might be reacting to. I treated my son for eggs, and the cough went away. Really—I'm not kidding. It resurfaced twice in two years—once after he ate salmon, and once after he ate rice pasta—but after treating him for those two things, he basically doesn't cough anymore. The dreaded cough is gone!!

www.quantumlinkwellness.com