News Briefs – 03/13/2022

Amygdala will be of no use to him. Biochemistry, and diet/nutrition, and meditation, and yogi retreats, and other mechanisms are not complex enough to massage what he needs moved around. The only thing out there which will restore him to his track is the product of the 6000 years of observation and experimentation TCM has done.

In TCM, the source of anxiety is what they call the Kidney system, and the biochemical systems it describes control fear, inflammation in the areas of the genitourinary system, usually the knees and lower back, as well as hearing, and the bones.

Again, you need to find a good TCM doctor, who has decades of experience, ideally Chinese trained, and they should do both Herbs and acupuncture, as the two theoretical systems complement each other, giving greater understanding, and the complement each other practically, making the practice of it more effective.

A good TCM doctor won’t just heal you, he will change the trajectory of your life.

Try to find one with herbs too. Acupuncture can be powerful, but is is very fine tuning. TCM herbs are like high explosives. You need to see results quickly to understand just what is on the other side of the fence. I don’t want you to think it needs to be a slow process.

Bro – you have nothing else on your plate right now. This is the only step in your life you need to make. It will make all the other stuff happen. Without this, you are in deep shit. I can feel it through the computer screen.

Go to the appointment. Explain you feel too tired to get angry, explain how all this bothers you, and your concerns when you think about having to do stuff, and how difficult it is and why. Then understand it may take three weeks to really take effect and change you. But you should feel better early on.

AND MAKE SURE THEY DO HERBS.

This is the future of your life. Put the effort in for us on here. There are others on this site who are curious to see how this works, because it might help them.

You can’t guarantee anything, and this can fail to work. But when I see you went and got it done, I am very happy for you, because I think it highly, highly likely this will work.

When he says liver or kidney (or lung, spleen, or heart) it is not your actual organ. It is something the Chinese have seen that changes in people one way or another and produces specific changes in their whole system, and especially along certain lines in the body. It probably traces back to a specific biochemical balance in cells in the body, which when shifted will spread out and affect ways cells metabolize stuff, and that will affect how the brain works, how the body feels, and how everything operates through the effect on neurobiology. Oddly enough, though it was developed before modern science, there are correlates today when they look at it, between a lot of the organs and what the Chinese say. The one exception is Spleen, which many today say probably most closely approximates the pancreas.

The theory is complex, and a large part features a circle with the organs listed on it, and an arrow, showing each organ fuels the activity of the organ after it. In that model, the Kidney does its thing, and the product fuels the liver. What he is saying is you have no liver because your kidney is malfunctioning, and failing to give the liver the fuel to do its thing and generate drive. It make sense.

I feel hopeful and in some sense trust AC a lot but in the moments after I paid it felt like I’d been scammed.

When I went, I was really sick. I had been to the western doctor, who said I would be taking medication for the rest of my life, and it would probably get worse, and we’d deal with that then. Even my heartbeat was all fucked up, skipping beats and double beating, which feels really fucked up in your chest when it happens, and it was a constant thing. A family friend had sworn this guy had fixed her relatives with the same problem and said I needed to go. It was a hole in the wall place, I was surprised by the weird examination, and then he gave me bags filled with twigs and leaves and flower buds that I had to boil in water to make tea, and little packages of powders I would put on my tongue and swallow with water. I can remember driving home, and looking down skeptically at the little bags on the floor of the passenger side next to me, and thinking there is no way there will be enough of some potent drug leaching out of those twigs and leaves to do anything. But I had nothing to lose as it was a month to see the specialist so why not?

Literally, within two months I have never felt healthier, or more energized, or more bulletproof. My heart was solid and steady and I didn’t feel it, I was lifting and as strong as ever. You have to give this a shot, and see what happens. There are no guarantees. But I will say you can fuck with nutrition, and vitamins, and diets, and all sorts of shit, and none of it will have the effect this will. I think like me, you will be surprised and become a convert.

And I am very happy to see you on this path. Give it a chance and report back.

They say Dairy creates dampness, which I see as bacterial imbalances, so I agree on the milkfat vs lactose and protein.

Go slow, and don’t shock the body.

Also, you can go too yang. Yin is like the wood, and Yang is like the fire. Too much fire and you burn away the wood, and you will get a hot, amped, exhausted, empty feeling. It can be like you are on a treadmill on high, and have to run, and the treadmill won’t stop, but you are running out of energy. Only you don’t get the choice to stop. Your body just keeps running and running without offering you an option, and you feel emptier and emptier, and weaker and weaker, and when you need to put a push on there are just no reserves. Over time, you can get hyper-thyroid, and start having exhaustion headaches, and feel hot and dried out all the time, and you start pulling muscles, and your heartbeat gets fucked up, and your body gets tense and stiff, and doesn’t move well without pulling muscles.

Don’t go overboard on anything. Shift your diet gently, take the medicine, see the doc when you have to, and wait. As you get stronger, you will feel less drive to act to change things, and you will eventually feel great and then you can find a pattern which maintains it. Follow the plan, don’t go improvising yourself too much.

He is advising a shift toward it, and most people will not change their diet entirely. When I went to my doctor way back, I was told to alter my diet, and initially did not, because I really wasn’t a believer in any of it, and food was food, IMO. The herbs worked regardless, and and as time went on I began to make the shifts he suggested.

You are an extreme personality, I understand that, I can be too. So I would just advise taking it slowly. Your body there is a laboratory now, and you understand hot vs cold. So I would advise make changes gently, with the idea in your mind neither yang nor yin, nor hot or cold, are good or bad in and of themselves. You need both, just like you need wood and fire to make a fire that burns strong for a long time.

So as you experiment on yourself, keep in mind if you go too yang or too hot, you will get burned out like a marathon runner who pushes themselves too hard, 25 miles into a race, and needs to collapse, but their body will nto stop when they tell it too, and they just get more and more exhausted all the time. If you go too yin or too cold, you will slow down, and not have the energy to move to begin with, and you won’t be able to get going. Knowing that, adjust your diet looking for the balance where you are running strong and easily, but not too strong. If you start to feel too spun up, or even begin to get manic, and it feels good, back off a little to save some for later, because if you do not you will crash.

I give you this advice, but this is like anything else. You have to ultimately do it to understand it. So you are now on the path many have taken, and you should charge forward, but do it with an eye to learning the nuances. Understand whatever you think you know, you will learn more, and you might even make a mistake or be wrong here or there, and need to adjust and change your understanding. You will not learn this stuff fully in a few weeks. It is very complex, and even the experts still are learning new things all the time, and finding stuff they thought they knew in the past needed to be adjusted.

Who knows, in five years you may decide you want to go to school and learn all of this and be a practitioner. You would not be the first.

There is still the possibility you are a target, and a lot of your health issues are not by chance. You can’t assume that, continue with the plan, but just for complete planning, keep it in the back of your mind it is always possible there is something else you will need to be open to the possibility of at some point in order to deal with the problem. If you are a target, and they are putting you on ice for some reason, maybe with tech, the TCM would not help.

It is unlikely, but this quote did jump out at me: “Perhaps with diets I chalked it up to other people not having health problems…”

I am always suspicious with statements like that, because it means a smart mind has been obsessed with a problem, which is unusual to begin with (given the adaptability of the body normally), they have been varying variables purposely, which should make the likelihood of the problem remaining even less, and have been running into a wall continuously. If you go to an expert which should fix it, and they fail, then I would open myself to the idea of hostile action from some corner adapting itself to what I was doing.

Don’t sweat it for now though, just follow the plan and it should fix it.

It is tough to justify the food recommendations to someone who has not yet seen these guys know what they are doing. I know it seems to make no sense, and sounds inconsequential. But you have to factor in this art is 6,000 years old, and for that time very observant people, very disciplined, taking notes and noting every small change. Somehow they have identified these foods somehow change digestion, change the bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract, and that alters health in very specific ways one way or another. Cooked vegetables are very different from raw, and enter the GI tract and digest very differently. Cooked are almost like pureed, and digest very quickly, while raw will hold a lot of nutrients and carry them into the lower levels of the gastrointestinal system where they will feed different bacteria and produce different microbial ecosystems

That said, don’t freak out. Stick to what he said as much as you can. His herbs will gradually kick in, and you will begin to change, and you will find following his recommendations easier, and you will want to do it more.

It is like Q – keep the faith, and stick to the Plan.

Three weeks is actually not that long for TCM. Chinese medicine is very slow, but longer-lasting than trying to throw yourself onto the precise spot of balance, overshooting because you pushed too hard too fast, having to stop because you went too far, falling back to where you started, trying to hit the spot again, not going far enough, then going harder and overshooting and so on. It changes you, slowly but surely, and pushes you non-stop toward that balanced point which is perfect. Once you hit it, they slow down, and hold you on it, while your body adapts and adjusts itself to exist on that point, like practicing math all the time makes you good at it, and then they slowly wean you off the herbs so you stay on that point yourself.

Granted I was sicker when I went to mine, but I was about six weeks to feel the first real improvement where I could say, yeah, this is doing something. but two months later, 8-9 weeks, I was feeling really energized. Also note, he is treating the kidney deficiency, which will take time to fix, before the kidney fix will begin producing changes in liver, which will produce your drive.

If there is something specific you want, you need to talk to the doctor, and tell him what you see that you wish he would improve. He may just tell you to take time and let it work or he may add other herbs to address that.

Also note he said your problem was cold, which is also absorbed by the body from the environment, and you slow down and get worse when there is cold around you infusing your body, and it gets better in the summer when you are exposed to heat from the environment around you. Keep going and interact with your doctor, telling him how you are doing and what you wish were happening.

But I am glad you are seeing the benefit.

I would trust him if you have already seen benefit. And do not think I can even begin to diagnose you, or have any expertise beyond knowing this stuff works, and vaguely understanding their theories. I had no idea you were only sleeping a little, which is very significant. He probably knew it the moment he laid eyes on you.

The thing with TCM is you have to balance both sides, the action of energy, and the passiveness for recovery, and you have to separate them. That is how you end up walking around each day on fire and ready to go. If you are sleeping less and less, then you are not recovering, and that is why you are tired and worn out, and not moving as fast as you want all the time, and feeling overwhelmed. You are burned out, and moving slower, so you are always trying to maximize your time usage. If you get balanced, you tear through things faster, and get a lot more done, and feel less overwhelmed. It is also why you need an expert who ahs seen thousands of cases, and can separate one from the other clearly.

They also always say, these imbalances are cumulative, and work their way along the chains of organ interactions, and the longer they run, the longer it takes to fix, because you have to reverse everything step by step in reverse order. So if you have a problem in one organ like the kidney, and you do not fix it, that will wear on other organs, and soon you will have problems with them, and if you don’t fix it them, they will affect other organs, and so on. When you finally fix it, you have to go backwards, reversing everything in the reverse order, and that takes time. The longer you take to get treatment, the longer it takes to reverse everything, because you have to go step by step, which appears to be what he is doing.

I really cannot overemphasize how much, even an average guy who does this day in day out for a few years, is like a PhD biochemist, and I am like a first grader who knows chemicals do stuff. The depth and complexity and breadth of his understanding will dwarf mine. I have not professionally studied it, and I do not treat people with it every day. The difference is immense.

Let him do his thing, and see where you are in a month. If you have already seen improvement, it is very, very likely you will see much more. It is tough to explain to people what true balance is.

When I went to mine, I had been run down for a long time, and constantly got little colds and every little bug. When I finally got balanced out after a few months, I could almost feel what I think they call “Wei Chi,” which is when you get so balanced you have extra chi above and beyond what your body needs, and it rises to the skin and envelopes you like an armor to shield you against disease. I had red about that, but thought it was some theoretical explanation of why people in balance did not get sick. I had no idea it was describing the way you would feel, and not getting sick was secondary. True balance is a trip, and will change how you view the body, and the material world to some degree.

Hang with him another month. I am very pleased you seem to be coming around. I like seeing people see this stuff actually has benefits you cannot get elsewhere, and I am hopeful in addition to getting you on your path, you will be an excellent example for everyone here. It is frustrating when your spirit wants to zig, and your body just ignores you and zags, and you feel like there is nothing you can do but take the ride, because you have no power over your own body. TCM is a way you can try to get that power back, and bring your body under your control, so you can pursue the destiny you want to. That is a huge thing.

The communication thing is probably cultural. In Japanese martial arts, if you trained under an American, they would teach a technique very technically and scientifically. “Here is where your foot goes, the toes point just like this because if you go to far this way it does this, too far that way it is bad like this,” and so on for every little nuance. Then they may even go into little modifications and variations on it.

I thought if you grabbed a Japanese instructor just out of Japan it would be even better, but it isn’t the case. They demonstrate the technique at the front of the class, and then motion to send you off to do it with a partner. And there can be a lot of details you need to know about what goes where to get all the right angles and forces. But they will just do it a couple of times and then they will walk around as everybody is doing it. Maybe they will stop you and pull an arm somewhere different, or push a foot into a different position, but they pretty much have a philosophy you have to learn what works and doesn’t by doing it yourself and experimenting, and finding it out yourself. It is very weird if you start training under Americans, but it is just how they do it.

Give it time. If he has already shown benefit I suspect he knows what he is doing, and in a month or two you will be very happy.

Also, I should add, getting balanced out may not always be permanent. In China, they will often view going back to a Chinese Doctor for a tune up every year or two for a few weeks as normal. You may get balanced out and be good for the next two decades, or you may want to go back every once in a while to get nudged back into balance.

The truth is I think very few people are perfectly balanced. Perfect balance like I hit, is really almost a supernatural state, and even I did not maintain it. Normal function is almost always a little out of balance, and what I think most will view as normal. You may get near balance and figure it is good enough and leave it be, or you may experience complete balance and become almost addicted and go back more frequently. It will depend on your personal system, your personal taste, how your body works, and how much time and money you want to use up to get balanced.