Hi, I’m Dr. Klepzig and it’s been a long cold winter, but spring has finally arrived, which brings up a topic about the spring season change and spring season challenges. If you’ve been a patient of mine or you’ve been in the office especially for Acupuncture, you’ve heard me talk about five element theory and especially during times of the season change.

The five elements are fire, earth, metal, water and wood. Every room in my office has the five element theory chart.

Each of those five elements is associated with a couple of different organ systems in your body. So in the wintertime it’s associated with the kidney and the bladder. And then it moves into the spring where it’s associated with the liver in the gallbladder.

In the summer it moves into the heart and the small intestine. And then we move into Indian Summer or the earth element which is associated with the pancreas and spleen. And then in the fall it’s associated with the lung and the large intestine and that’s the metal element.

So we’re on this continuous loop throughout the year. And during the wintertime, the energy that we’re getting from the sun is low in the sky and it’s at a 3 Hz frequency. So if you look at a tree, all of the energy in the tree is down in the roots.

It’s the same thing with the human body. During that time of the year, all the energy and the vitality of our body is in the bones, the kidneys and the bladder. And during that time, the body is making extra repairs on those particular tissues.

In the springtime, when the energy picks up and the sun, the energy we get from the sun moves into a five, five and a half hertz frequency. The energy within a tree starts to move out into the trunk and into the branches. Same thing happens with the body.

We’re going to move that energy, as the energy quickens, it’s going to come out into the liver and the gallbladder and it’s going to move into the joints. So two things to consider. Number one, when we’re going through that transitional time of year, or that transitional phase from that 3 Hz frequency to a five and a half hertz frequency, it means your body’s bringing up all of the potential issues that it’s working on, trying to repair chronic issues especially.

The Popliteus Muscle and Spring Season Challenges

And it’s like bringing it up on the computer screen. And so you can experience an exacerbation of symptoms during the spring season change, or any other season change for that matter. But in the springtime, some of the real typical things we see are flare up of joint pains, especially with the knees, because there’s a muscle on the back of your knee called the popliteus muscle.

The popliteus muscle is a stabilizer for your knee, but that muscle is also associated with the liver and the gallbladder. And so in the springtime, your body can actually take energy from that muscular layer to push it to that organ system. If you don’t have quite enough vitality or energy in your body to start to make repairs, what weakens the knee and causes instability? And if you have a chronic problem there, you could get a flare up of that.

It’s also a time of year where I see liver and gallbladder problems, especially gallbladder issues, can flare up in springtime. Gallbladder can become hot. If you’ve had a gallbladder problem in the past and you had the gallbladder removed, at the time, it seemed like a great idea, and you felt a lot better from it.

Emotions and Spring Season Challenges

But you’re still not absorbing your fats or your fat soluble vitamins, and that bile is thick and sticky, and now it stays in your liver all the time, potentially forming stones and congestion there. So those type of issues show themselves again in the springtime. And in Chinese medicine, the liver is also the storehouse of your emotions.

So if you have anything going on, current or past, that has to do with anything emotional, it could be stirred up in the springtime. And so those are the kinds of things that we typically that I typically see. So if you come in during the springtime or any other season change, if you’re coming in for acupuncture, I do specific acupuncture points to help your body move into that new season so it doesn’t drag out for you for a very long time.

So we are intimately tied into our environment, and we definitely see it when the seasons change. So the next season change that’s coming up is going to be moving into the summertime, which is mid June, but typically you start to see changes a little bit earlier than that, two weeks ahead of it, two weeks on the other side of the change.

The things associated with that particular season change have to do with the heart and the cardiovascular system. So I’ll do something new around that time to fill you in on some of the details about the summertime season change.