There are some basic things that need to occur for the human body to stay balanced and resilient and vital. So the word vitality I use a lot because that’s what people are really striving for, whether they know it or not. So there are a few basic things that need to occur.

You need to sleep and you need to get a reasonable amount of sleep and get good sleep while you’re sleeping. And your body needs to be able to adapt to stress. And then there are some just basic, I call it basic physiological functioning.

Your heart should be pumping strong and your liver and gallbladder should work well. Your gut needs to work. Your kidneys should be filtering and doing what they need to do.

And that all should be in Chinese medicine, holding electrical charges, staying vital. While I’m doing my screening or my testing, the first thing I do is I use Chinese medicine concepts to look for the weakest organ gland or tissue in the body. From there we can build a support system.

That could mean getting some food out of your life, or that could mean you have a chronic infection or a challenge to your immune system in some way, or an environmental toxin. All things we have in us and things that are going on, and we may have to do something with that. Then the next idea is I move on to whatever symptoms bother me the most.

Believe it or not, anxiety, sleep, stress, those come right to the top. So I can use Chinese medicine with acupuncture and or herbs and food. Food is an adaptogen.

Good quality food or food supplements help the body adapt to stress. And there are classic herbal formulas that have been used for hundreds, if not thousands of years just for this purpose. Because it didn’t all just start in the last 20 years.

In general, once I can do something to help understand your system, stabilize core basic issues and start with changing your primary symptoms, that’s what we want. We want our symptoms to go away so we can feel better. So we could do that with just a pill sometimes, just get that over the counter otherwise.

But if we do that, we’re going to bring back some balance to our system. But over the long haul, we’re not going to really help correct any of the imbalances. So then the goal becomes to do that as quickly as I can.

And so I really shoot for I hate to throw numbers out there, but maybe four to six weeks that I want something to feel different, better change. It may not be your PCOS may not be gone, but something’s different. You don’t feel as stressed, you’re sleeping better, just something like that.

In my mind, I tend to think of this as like a health restoration process. And so some patients were going to intervene and get the system balanced and they’ll follow through with some lifestyle changes and things that we’ve learned they need to do, and they may be under care for six months and things get balanced up and they have a little protocol they can follow. And I may check them again in three months down the road.