DAAN Chinese Herbs and Acupuncture

We tend to forget that the best medicine is preventative medicine! Take care of yourself and you’ll avoid many of the ailments that plague modern society. And good health starts with good nutrition:

What we see now in our patients are modern diseases, stemming from modern ways of eating and a lack of nutrition that is impacting your effectiveness as a practitioner. You can treat these modern diseases – hypoglycemia, insulin-resistance, diabetes, food intolerances, adrenal fatigue, hormonal imbalances – but when the patient is malnourished (which is much more often than you can imagine), the treatment time is much slower.

For example, kidney deficiency is very closely related to adrenal fatigue in Western medicine. We prescribe herbs and acupuncture, and perhaps some lifestyle changes such as meditation. However, did you know that one of the major causes of adrenal fatigue is blood sugar imbalance, which is impacted not just by what the person is eating, but how frequently/infrequently they are eating? When the practitioners in my practice started prescribing specific nutritional supplements and Chinese herbs to support the adrenals, and prescribed a specific style of eating, we saw a dramatic improvement in our patients’ kidney deficiency. Furthermore, their improvement continued even when they stopped taking herbs. Why? Because we had given them nutrition that actually restored their kidneys/adrenals, as well as the tools to help manage it at home.

But why should you be talking about nutrition? Because your patients are already talking about nutrition, even if you aren’t. They’re reading about it, seeing segments on TV, talking to their friends and looking desperately for some magic pill to help them feel better. They’re taking some drugstore multi-vitamin, which is not only synthetic, but has approximately the correct amount of bioavailable nutrition for a gerbil. They’ve probably already been asking you questions about supplements – what to take, is this effective, what will help this condition. You might be having a hard time answering some of these questions because we didn’t learn any of this in TCM school. Your information about modern nutrition is often coming from the same sources as theirs, and while you might know whether or not some of the supplements they’re taking are helpful, you don’t really know how or why.

The ability to build qi and blood is directly related to the nutritional health of a patient. Herbs can improve the body’s function with what nutrition it has. While that can be effective, the molecular building blocks for blood and tissue (amino acids, vitamin complexes, essential fats) comes from what we eat. You may have some people who eat their vegetables or know enough to eat organic vegetables. However, did you know that vegetables harvested these days are as much as 40 percent less nutritious than they were 50 years ago, even organic ones? Did you know that omega-3s used to be widely found in meats, but because most animals are no longer grass-fed, they are sadly deficient, and then so are we? Or that besides vegetables, the most nutrient-dense food that exists is organ meats?

Even if patients ate perfectly, they would oftentimes still be deficient, and that’s where having some understanding of nutrition and supplementation will help. Patients love nutrition; they know they’re deficient and don’t eat well, and they are already interested in taking supplements. Having an understanding of nutrition, combined with your background in herbs, will allow you to help correct them if they are self-prescribing. Since you may be the only doctor they’re seeing, you will be able to see interactions between drugs, herbs and supplements. If you start prescribing nutritional supplements that make a difference the patient can clearly see, you will not only have very high patient compliance, but those patients will return again and again for more supplements. They don’t do that nearly as often for herbal prescriptions. In our practice, we have a full Chinese herbal pharmacy, yet at least half of what we prescribe is nutritional supplements. Why?