One of the funnest parts of my job is when someone will tell me something we hadn’t even talked about earlier, and now their bowel movements are this much better, or they’re sleeping better, or the knee pain they had forever in their right knee has gone away. And we were working on something totally not related, like headaches. But again, in Chinese medicine, knees and headaches go together.

There’s a connection between the two. So looking at the body in a holistic way, I like to be able to make those connections and teach people how that works. I think intuitively it makes sense to people that all of our parts are connected, the ear bones connected, nose bone, the knee bone and that type of thing.

But in Chinese medicine, all of our internal organs are like big batteries and they hold an electrical charge. And when they’re fully charged up and wired together, you’re vital, strong and healthy and project well. In Chinese medicine, our internal organs have expanded functions over what we look at in Western medicine.

So, for instance, the liver is responsible for in Western medicine, all the things that your liver does, which is detoxify and make proteins and helps with inflammation and digests food in your system. And in Chinese medicine, your liver is responsible for what we call the smooth flow of qi energy. And it’s also, when it’s not doing well, it’s going to pull energy out of your joints and it also opens up into the eyes.

So if I treat a patient for an eye problem, the first thing I do is look at their liver. If their liver and their gallbladder are not doing well, they could be pulling energy out of their eyes to actually try to help the liver. Because the liver is priority, internal organs are priority over any other tissue.

If your heart, kidney, liver, lung, bowel, if they’re not working, it really doesn’t matter if you have a finger or a hand, the kidneys open up into the ear. So hearing problems can be related to the kidneys. And I just had a patient in maybe an hour, hour and a half ago that that was part of the issue.

So it was a fear based issue, which in Chinese medicine affects the kidneys. And she’s had a hearing problem. And so we’re able to piece that together with the history.

So we’re going to prop up her kidneys, do something specifically for the hearing from a symptom standpoint, and help her body adapt to stress, because the fear is associated with the kidneys and Chinese medicine. When you look at the two systems, western medicine, Eastern medicine, and you start to blend the two together, it’s basically just detective work. And you start to find things and string them together in ways that you never would have figured out some other form of medicine.

Everyone is different. But liver and gallbladder is what is a very common area where the body gets congested. And so your emotions and who doesn’t have emotional things that they’re trying to work through at any one time that constricts your liver.

T which slows down the metabolism within your liver, and then that can affect the way that you metabolize drugs or medications and drugs, foods. And just basically everything that goes on in your body in some way is probably going to be affected by your liver function.