The 12th of April is drawing nigh, so you may want to act on reserving your spot for the Three Tea Journey. Ony five spots remain. For those curious about tea, I might suggest this article on the CCCA website. In short, the beauty of tea is the beauty of Chinese medicine.
Here’s one of the featured teas of the event, what I call “Lucky Cake” because of the big fu character on its wrapping.
You get two ounces of this gem along with two more of the other two teas. You can find some of the other pictures over at the meetup the CCCA sponsors, Bamboo and Loquat: Pu’er Tea Enthusiasts of Los Angles.
The characters in the foreground are wet and bold, like aspects of this sweet smoky treasure.
Deficiency Syndromes
Respiratory Infection
This is part of an on-going series on “Deficiency syndromes.” The objective is educate the reader on the utility of Chinese medicine in treating conditions that either fall through the cracks of orthodox biophamaceutical market medicine, have poor outcomes with regard to the standard medical delivery method, or are treated in perpetuity where there may be more direct means of getting to a root that resolves the condition once and for all.
Here we have the case of a successful 30 something yo female performer who has caught “cold” and been unresponsive to customary therapy of antibiotics. She primarily feels cold, reports of never having felt worse, and suffers from general malaise. There’s cough and no appetite as well. My conclusion is that she suffers from lung deficiency and currently has some type of infection that her immune system has been unable to eliminate.
Often when antibiotics do not work the reason is not due to the wrong antibiotic or to a super strain of the bug, but due to an underlying weakness of the body. Weakness means inability to muster an immune response, what usually comes in the form of a fever. Fever fundamentally is a good sign, because it shows that the body has the reserves to mount an attack to burn out the bug. Antibiotics tend to work marvelously in instances of fever. In these cases, antibiotics ostensibly make use of the body’s energy to kill bugs. This seems to be so because in instances where there is clearly an infection of some sort but the body does not experience fever, antibiotics prove to be useless. If antibiotics were simply killing bacteria, then they should be able to do so irrespective of the relative state of the body.
The same mistake is made by mediocre herbalists. They don’t pay attention to the relative strength of the body, evident through the presence of fever and quality of pulse, and errantly prescribe cold and bitter herbs which cannot function in a body that is already cold! If the body is cold, remedies like goldenseal, peppermint, lemon, and vitamin c are totally useless, and like antibiotics counterproductive because they make the body even colder.
My objective for this patient was to induce fever, essentially to work with natural immunity and to educate her on what to expect. Sure, at one moment it got challenging, but staying the course proved worth it in very short order, about five days.
Subjective feelings of cold is a benchmark symptom of deficiency. Respiratory cases where the patient feels cold, has possible sloshing in the lungs, swelling of the ankles, and a general lack of appetite also signal cold deficiency. When the body is cold, it cannot muster an immune response, i.e., fever. Even antibiotics will prove ineffective. The key is to actually induce fever through herbs that will warm the body to burn the “bugs” out.
That’s all for this post. Contact the clinic to schedule a consultation if this picture rings a bell and you’re ready to be done with it in short order, ph. three two three 936-5152
About
Yang-chu Higgins has been a licensed acupuncturist since 2008. Before medical school at Yo-san University in Los Angeles, he pursued advanced training as a master’s student at the University of Michigan’s Center for Chinese Studies, having lived in Beijing and studied at Peking University. His credo is “providing a pointed approach to the whole person,” which he translates into treating the individual not just conditions.