Chinese Medicine, Your Health and Your Skin with Brodie Welch

Trevor:                    Hi there. I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. Welcome to The Spa Dr. Podcast. On today’s podcast, we’re talking about Chinese medicine. I invited today’s guest on to help you understand Chinese medicine, and how it fits in with other modalities and practices. We also discussed what your body, including your skin, tells you from a Chinese medicine perspective, which is quite different but very valuable information.

My guest today is Brodie Welch. She is a licensed acupuncturist, board-certified herbalist, Chinese medicine expert, group coach, and self-care strategist. She’s the founder of Life in Balance Acupuncture in Corvallis, Oregon. In addition to her clinical practice, Brodie helps caring high-achieving women put themselves on their own to-do list, so they can trade stress and burnout for energy, joy and vibrant health. She has helped thousands of clients improve their digestion, sleep and mood, dial in regular body and mind practice and step in to the next version of themselves. She’s also a creator and host of A Healthy Curiosity, the podcast that explores what it takes to be well in a busy world.

Today, we cover what is Chinese medicine, how to incorporate Chinese medicine into your healthcare and daily practices, and even how to find a Chinese medicine practitioner for you. Please enjoy this interview.

Brodie, it’s so great to have you on my podcast. Welcome!

Brodie:                    I’m really happy to be here.

Trevor:                    Yeah, good. Today, we’re talking about Chinese medicine. I think it’s fascinating to talk about Chinese medicine. I think Chinese medicine is such a complimentary part of when you’re working with a healthcare team, especially people that have a health condition or a skin issue or whatever they’re struggling with, it’s nice to have a healthcare team of different people that compliment each other. Chinese medicine is definitely one of those things I think compliments naturopathic medicines, functional medicine, as well as even conventional medicine. That could be a nice balance approach of complimenting these different modalities.

Brodie:                    I couldn’t agree more. It’s really that no one lens that you look through has a monopoly on the truth. And so the more you can see yourself through more than perspective at that Chinese medicine’s real strength is just being able to look at your [inaudible 00:02:18] through the lens of energetics. Yeah, it’s totally compatible with anything else that you might be doing for your health.

Trevor:                    Yeah. Let’s talk about what … let’s start very fundamental basics here.

Brodie:                    Sure.

Trevor:                    What is Chinese medicine?

Brodie:                    Chinese medicine is one of the oldest, continuously practiced systems of medicine on the planet. Ayurvedic medicine from India and Chinese medicine are kind of like arm wrestling for the title of who’s been around the longest. But basically, we’ve got evidence that where our textbooks go back over 2,000 years, and our oral tradition goes back at least 3,000 years that it’s been practiced in China. Essentially, it’s system of philosophy that human beings are ecosystems, and that we’re connected with the ecosystem outside of us, and that basically, in order to create health, is all about creating balance in the body. A balance between Yin and Yang. A balance between hot and cold. A balance between all of the different energies of the different organ systems of the body. Mind, body and spirit with a massive emphasis on being able to prevent health problems before they turn into bigger ones.

It has a few different branches. Probably people are familiar with acupuncture as the sexiest branch of Chinese medicine. But there’s also Chinese herbal medicine, which essentially is like doing the same job as an acupuncture treatment, but something that you can do every day on your self, multiple times a day that these recipes that have been passed down through the ages are designed to correct an overall imbalance in the body, not just aim at a particular symptom. There’s herbs, and of course, on that continuum, herbs are basically the strong food, so we can use diet to get balance or take ourselves out of balance and lifestyle. What we’re doing in our daily lives has a massive effect on how we feel, and contributes either in a medicinal way or not so medicinal way to whatever imbalances are present.

Then we also have exercise, and by that, the Chinese did not mean pumping iron and running marathons. They meant cultivating the chi, cultivating the life force through practices like qigong, which is energy exercise, energy cultivation. Probably people are familiar with tai chi, and that sort of the martial arts version of qigong. Cultivating energy for the purposes of fighting somebody off is a little different that cultivating energy for the purposes of self-healing or for expanding into the energetic realms that the sages and daos masters had access to.

There is herbs, there’s body work. Basically, you can use, there’s something magic about a needle. The magic is in the point, like the body has an intelligence, and so an acupoint, a place where an acupuncturist plant a needle is like a portal of consciousness. And so if you access that portal, you can do it with yourself. You’re just like pressing on a point using thumb pressure or finger pressure; massaging the channels, the meridians that we call them where energy runs through the body like little highways all over the place. You can use that access that with body work. You can access it with an essential oil. You can access it by meditating on it. There’s so many ways of dealing with the energy of the body.

Acupuncture is kind of like if you’re pressing on a keyboard and you’re typing different letters, like you could spell a word or you can press all at once, like control + alt + delete, and that will do something very different than pressing those keys sequentially. There is something really special about acupuncture versus the other ways of accessing points that makes it particularly interesting.

But in any case, all of those are branches of Chinese medicine. Some people might even include things like feng shui or the energy of the environment having an impact on the energy of the individual, and also meditation.

Trevor:                    Great. These are all part of what’s used. Also Chinese medicine has a different way. When somebody goes to see a Chinese medicine practitioner, and I would love for you to explain what to look for for a Chinese medicine practitioner, but also the diagnostic tools, what you use to figure out what kind of practice to have. In naturopathic medical school, we get some Chinese medicine courses, so I know a little bit about this, so I know to ask you. I know when we did these classes, it was very different from what is traditionally done to find out what’s really going on with someone’s body.

I’m sorry, I just asked you two questions in one. You can answer them in whichever order you want.

Brodie:                    Sure. It sounds like you’d like me to explain a little bit about how did the practitioner know what to do with somebody. [crosstalk 00:06:54]. All right. There’s a lot of similarities between seeing a functional medicine practitioner or a naturopathic practitioner in that we ask the 10,000 questions, like lengthy intake form that we want to know about the health of every single system with the body, because things can be tied together in ways that you might not have any ability to project if you’re just looking at yourself from the Western perspective. In other words, when we assess the health of different organ systems, we’re interested not only in what we’re experiencing in that system of the body, but also in the emotions, also in the mind, the overall experience.

The more information someone can give me about she’s experiencing herself, the better I can treat her. And so the idea is that we ask a lot of question; we also ask the body in the form of we look at the tongue, and we take the pulse. We take the pulse not just for the rate to get a sense of how fast the heart is beating, but there’s actually three different positions at three different depths on each side of the radial artery at the wrist. A practitioner will feel at the wrist and will listen at three different depths of pressure. That so on the right side, we’ve got the heart and small intestine, the liver, gall bladder, the kidney and bladder; and on the left side, we have the long, large intestine, stomach and spleen, and also the pericardium and triple burner. These are sort of other organ systems that are a little less familiar.

We use the idea of what’s the quality of the pulse like. Is it tight like a guitar string? Is it wiry like it’s a stressed out, tensed pulse? Or is it just a lazy pulse? Or is it an empty pulse? Is there not very much energy to the person? Or is it beating really fast? We try to get an image from the pulse and get a sense of the relative strength and weakness of the different organ systems that we’re assessing.

Similarly, we’re probably the only people in the world who are psyched to see your tongue. So yeah, may I see your tongue please. People usually get a little tongue shy and start explaining what they had for breakfast, and really it’s okay. We’re able to look at the color, the coating, the moisture, and the shape of the tongue. That tells us … It’s like our MRI or X-ray or a way of figuring out what’s going on with the internal organ systems.

The tongue is representative in terms of where things show up. There is, like the heart, is at the very tip. The kidneys are at the back. The digestive system is in the middle. Liver, gall bladder on the side. You can just a quick sense of looking at your own tongue at like what areas might be challenged in various ways, and how you might tell us if the color is really different in that area. If it’s pale; if it’s purple; if it’s bright red. If there is a coating that’s very thick and you can’t see the color of the tongue underneath it, or if the coating is non-existent or patchy. Whether the tongue body is swollen and has little scallops like teeth marks around the edges; or whether it has a crack in the surface. All these different ways of assessing what’s going on in the ecosystem in front of me.

And then of course, we look at the person’s face. We look at the coloring of the face. We look at the shen or the spirit that shines from the eyes. We look at how they’re holding themselves. And we listen to the quality of the words behind the words, like the tone of voice that someone’s using, whether it’s introduced with laughter or singing or whining or groaning, whatever it tells us a little bit about what’s going on for that person deep down.

Traditionally, smelling was another useful diagnostic tool. We don’t quite use that so much in modern practice because people bathe.

Trevor:                    Right, people bathe [crosstalk 00:10:35] and we also use fragrances and different things, essential oils …

Brodie:                    Exactly, right. That tends to be the least useful method of diagnosis. But the most important thing is to get a sense of all the different pieces and aspects of the person’s lifestyle as well as what they’re experiencing in all different systems of their body. We put all the signs together and then we palpate the body. We’ll check for tenderness at different points. A lot of times, that also gives us a sense of where energy is too much, and where it’s not enough. From there, we go to building a treatment plan that is a suggestion about how the body might come back into balance. Usually, again, if there’s qi that’s stagnating in a certain area, you want to get it to flow freely. If there’s not enough energy or qi in a particular organ system, we want to support it or supplement it. Or if there’s too much in another area, we want to disperse that and vent it.

It’s basically like looking at a garden and thinking how do we get all the plants in the garden to thrive as opposed to just looking at them as individuals. We think about does, overall, this garden need more sunlight, more shade? Do we need to pull some weeds? Do we need to add some better quality soil? What is it going to take for this whole being to really just be its most vibrant self?

Trevor:                    Yes, perfect. Thank you for explaining that. And then with after your name, you have LACMSOM. Explain to everybody what those letters mean.

Brodie:                    Sure. The licensure for acupuncturist varies state by state, in terms of what we might be titled. I have the same education as someone who is a doctor of oriental medicine, if they happen to be practicing in New Mexico, for example, because that’s the state a word entitle. But I am merely a licensed acupuncturist here in Oregon, which is a title that I don’t really care if I’m being called a doctor or not. It bothers me that it sort of obscures. The title acupuncturist obscures the fact that I do herbs and qigong and lifestyle and diet counseling, all these other goodness that is wrapped up in the oriental medicine. Very un-PC term, but that actually is masters of science in oriental medicine is what those other letters are.

An acupuncturist who has gone to school for Chinese medicine, typically, has about a 3,000-hour master’s degree, with about 1,000 clinical hours. In some states, it’s just good to know that sometimes doctors or chiropractors or physical therapists even are allowed to do needle insertion like acupuncture with like a weekend workshop’s worth of training. It’s not necessarily the same thing as you might get from someone who has deeply studied this medicine that is 3,000 years old and has changed over time. And has obviously, a whole, like within Chinese medicine, there’s so many subsystems and deep ways of practicing that are very different from one another. And so really, just Chinese medicine alone is many lifetimes of study.

Trevor:                    That’s true. I wanted to explain that because I know what my … At naturopathic schools, a lot of them have dual degree programs where you can also get a master’s degree in oriental medicine, become a licensed acupuncturist. So I have a lot of friends that were going through the school. I know how much work is involved in that program, and just to be able to tell what to look for when you’re looking for a Chinese medicine practitioner. So I wanted to make sure that we mention that. If you see somebody that’s a doctor that says they do acupuncture, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve gone through the same amount of training. It’s just good to know people’s background. Ask questions. [crosstalk 00:13:58]

Brodie:                    It’s really good to ask questions, exactly. And a good resource for people if you are wanting to find a qualified practitioner of Chinese medicine, you can go to the National Certification Organization’s website, which is nccaom.org, and you can do a find a practitioner by zip code. People on that website, they’re either going to be certified in acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, or oriental medicine, which encompasses the bio-medicine piece, the herbs, and the acupuncture, all three.

Trevor:                    Perfect. All right, thank you. I want to talk about skin and the messages that you pick up from skin, because it is similar in a way to what I do in that we look at skin as giving us information about a person’s health. My followers know, my audience know as I talk about skin is our magic mirror. It gives us great information about our health. From a Chinese medicine perspective, how do you use skin as gaining information about your clients or patients?

Brodie:                    Well so many ways. First off, looking just at the color of the person’s face, skin color or ethnicity aside. We’re looking at is there a shine to the face? Is there a certain level of radiance? Or is there a dull quality? If there is that sort of dull quality, we might need to nourish the blood. If it’s shiny but pale, we might need to nourish the qi. If it’s very red, maybe the person has too much heat overall in their ecosystem. If there’s specific patches of redness that can indicate that there’s inflammation in a particular system; or that, just like in allopathic medicine, the skin is an organ of detoxification, as well as one of protection.

And so we want to make sure that, for example, if someone is constantly breaking out, like around their eyes, for example, that we associate the eyes with liver in Chinese medicine. We could look at like what’s their liver trying to push to the surface by giving them that redness around the eyes. Or if someone has redness around the mouth, like perioral dermatitis. The mouth is the organ that connects with the digestive system. It’s the opening of the digestive canal. We think about is there something in this person’s diet that is creating inflammation. Or if the person has a lot of acne, for example, where there is something that’s raised and red, but also something that’s postural or that has substance to it really. It’s not just flat against the skin, but there’s a raise aspect to it. That a lot of times indicates that the person is dealing with what we call dampness. Dampness, I like to think of is like this fog in the body, or it’s like residue.

Even if you’re eating totally beautiful food, like all-organic green smoothie yumminess all the time, if you are not digesting well, you’re going to be leaving behind a residue that the body isn’t sure what to do with. It’s going to try to vent it to the skin, or it might store it as nasal congestion, or it might stick it somewhere just like [inaudible 00:17:10], some sort of little useless blob that gangs up the works and gets in the way of us feeling vital; and gets in the way of us optimizing our energy.

If someone is dealing with issues that are raised or have any sort of full quality to them, that we could look at is this person digesting optimally, and are they giving themselves proper nutrition, because that’s the other thing, too. Your digestive system could be rock-solid, but if you’re giving it Cheetos, potato chips and doughnuts all day long, then it very well could be that the body is trying to put this out through the skin. Keep the internal organs happy.

Trevor:                    Great. And then also heat, internal heat shows up a lot on the skin, too.

Brodie:                    Yeah, it sure does. Anything red and rashy. Anything itchy. A lot of times, we’ll look at is there heat coming from somewhere in the body. That heat could be emotional heat like irritability or rage. We consider a form of liver heat. It could be nightmares or anxiety. Those could be more heat in the heart, heat affecting the heart. A lot of times, an easy way to tell if you have heat in the heart is just to get your tongue, and if the tip is very red, it’s very likely that you’ve been dealing with what we call … not saying that there’s anything wrong with your heart organ itself, but the things that the heart or the consciousness is responsible for. Her ability to focus, concentrate, maintain calm emotions, to get enough rest, that might be too much heat in the heart system that could be leading to inflammation overall.

Liver heat, we just see so often in our culture because we live in such a toxic world, where we’re exposed to chemicals, and we’re constantly being assaulted by chemicals all the time. Our livers and our kidneys have to filter those out. Plus we add things like alcohol or caffeine that tends to heat up our livers energetically. Or even spicy food can create too much internal heat.

Making sure that if we are exposed to a lot of toxins that we’re also detoxifying our body with lots of green leafy things, things that involve a cooling quality dietarily. Just as we think about food as containing fats, carbs, proteins, vitamins and minerals, it also contains heating or cooling properties. Those are really a lot of times very intuitive like most of us aren’t craving a hot chocolate on a hot summer day, and most of us are also not craving ice cream in the middle of winter necessarily. That there are some things that we know that are irrespective of the temperature to reserve that are going to have an overall heating or an overall cooling effect on the body.

And so making sure that we’re eating a balance of the Yin and Yang, the heating and the cooling, the building and the dispersing. All of that is something that we all need to think about. And that balance is going to look different depending on who you are, what else you have going on physically, what else you have going on in your life, what stage of life you’re in, all kinds of things.

Trevor:                    Yeah, perfect. Well thanks for sharing that. I want to clarify something that I think can be a little bit confusing with Chinese medicine. When you’re talking, you were talking the skin, you’re talking about the pulse and the tongue; and you’re talking about the spleen, liver, stomach, kidneys, but it is different. It’s not exactly like if you feel a weak kidney pulse, it doesn’t necessarily mean that someone’s kidneys are weak, but comes along with it, but it can mean. It’s little bit confusing, so can you help us have some understanding around that or what exactly that means, so people don’t just go, “Oh, if I see this or I feel this, that means …” I mean really what it means that you need to go see a Chinese medicine practitioner [crosstalk 00:20:50], but …

Brodie:                    You’re curious about that. Like what you’re talking about is that a really common area of confusion. I like to think about our internal organs as having mystical powers. Our liver that we know and love, this organ that sits under the ribcage on the right side of the body that’s responsible for cleaning our blood, and helping us digest fat and all that. That’s our liver with a lowercase l. So that’s your lowercase l liver. Our capital L liver is all that and more. It does all of the same stuff pretty much, except in Chinese medicine, it’s also connected with a taste, a season of the year, color, an emotion.

All of that relates to like, if I can explain a little bit about five-element theory, I think that this can help put into perspective for people. If everything in the body is energy, it becomes really hard to talk about it. It’s like if it’s all just qi, we need to subdivide that into various categories. One way that we subdivide it is to talk about yin qi and yang qi. Yin is like the cooling, the restful, the moistening, the nourishing. And the yang is the active, heating, warming, protective, transforming. We need both, obviously, in order to function.

And then if you were to refract light through a prism, so if the qi is light, and you refract that light through a prism, it can separate out into the colors of the rainbow. Similarly, we can subdivide qi in the body as having to do with each of the different organ systems, which we throw in under the different elemental headings. We can talk about wood, fire, earth, metal, and water as elements of nature that are also elements in the body. And so for example, we’re talking about the liver.

The liver is part of the element of the wood type, the wood phase, the wood element. In the wood element, it relates to the season of spring where new little shoots and leaves and trees are busting up out of the grounds. The direction of the wood element is upward and outward. Upward and outward energy is the same direction as anger. When we get angry, we get big. We want to stand up for ourselves. We want to be powerful. That’s what anger does. In addition to upward and outward energy, it has to do with creativity. There is that aspect of the liver that has to do with, “What do want to create in the world? What do we want to strive towards? What are our goals?”

The liver connects with the eyes. As I mentioned before, impurities that are coming out around the eyes in the form of redness. But the liver is also about the vision. What vision do we have for our lives, for our selves?

Our gall bladder is about the courage to decide. It’s actually make decisions and move in that direction. If we go back to five-element theory, it corresponds with the season of the spring. In the spring, when you taste fruit, it’s not quite ripe yet, it’s usually sour. The taste that correlates with the liver is sour, which is why like liver tonics, having a little hot water with lemon in the morning, or having a little apple cider vinegar to rinse the liver, to get it to pretty [inaudible 00:23:53], to get it to help detoxify the body. Those are such great ways of cleansing. We think about the little bit of a taste of sour is good for the liver. A lot is going to stress out the liver, so you don’t want too much of that.

For this upward/outward energetics, the energy of new, fresh life in the spring, the taste of sour, the color green that resonates with the wood elements, pretty much anything green and leafy is going to be good for your liver; it’s going to help the liver. And so we can start to see these correspondences that are not arbitrary. They’re connected with an energetic understanding of the world around us with natural cycles and with the cycles in the body. Does that help?

Trevor:                    Yeah, that definitely helps. Then there are also meridians in the body that helps you with the acupuncture points and body work too, working with the different organ systems.

Brodie:                    Yeah, exactly. If you’re wondering like how do we actually affect the health of the physical liver, we can, but we don’t stick needles in the physical liver because that would be crazy. What we do instead is that in Chinese medicine, we’ve identified the pathways of energy that run through our major organs and really through everywhere, like our shoulders, our backs, in places that we might have muscle tension. Basically, how an acupuncturist might see that is we consider, “Okay, what systems are involved here? What channels are involved here?”

If your liver is affected and you’re wanting to help your liver, we’re going to use points on the liver channel very likely. Of course, many other points that could clear heat or nourish yang, or whatever it is that’s out of balance. But if we’re wanting to talk to the liver directly, the liver has a pathway. When you go into an acupuncturist office and you can see a chart of lines all over the body, those are access points on the surface that we use, that connect deeper with the internal organs.

And so each point on the channel, there’s 365 classical points on the channels that are names through the organs. Of course, there’s extra points everywhere and tiny little microsystems, like we can use the ear, the hand or the feet, or the scalp, the face for that matter. Any system can be a microsystem for the whole body because we are fractile beings. We live in this universe where if it’s out there, it’s in here, and if it’s in here, it’s in here, that we can get smaller and smaller with it.

We can look to a meridian to find points on the channel that do a particular job, that send a particular message. Pretty much they correlate one to one, like the heart is the heart, as we know and love it. The only weird one really is the spleen, where I think they were aiming at pancreas, because it has to do with the spleen and stomach are like the captains of the digestive team. Obviously, the pancreas regulating blood sugar, and secreting insulin, keeping our blood sugar regular. That’s certainly a function that we would associate with the spleen system in Chinese medicine.

Other than that, like the lungs are the lungs. The kidneys are the kidneys. The bladder is the bladder, just these kinds of things. But there’s usually a broader conception of it as well. As I mentioned, there’s a sense organ that connects with every organ. There’s a particular layer of tissue that connects with every organ. The skin, for example, has to do with the lungs. And so having issues on your skin doesn’t necessarily mean that you have issues with your lungs, because again, we can look at it in all these different ways about what is it telling us.

What the lungs have in common with the skin is that it’s the most vulnerable to invasion by the outside world. Just like we take in oxygen, we take it directly into our nose and it hits our lungs, that any barriers in between that our skin is also likewise exposed to the outside world. And both the lungs and the skin have a process of keeping us safe from what might screw up our ecosystem from the outside. In that sense, there is a connection between the health of the skin and our immune system, and our ability to fend off things like colds and flus that are coming at us through the air.

Trevor:                    Yeah, perfect. I always think the bottoms of the feet, in reflexology, are a good place to get it, if somebody wanted to get a feeling for points that correlate to different areas, that that could be a good place to start. Because learning the whole, it’s a lot of points. I always feel like the bottoms of the feet, massaging certain points, it can be a safe place to start if somebody wants to start learning about this. What do you think?

Brodie:                    I think that the feet are really accessible way of talking to the whole body at once. At the same time, I just encourage people to do self-massage, just check out, like how does my neck feel, how does my shoulders feel. If you find a really interesting spot, that can also be a way to learn. Just go look it up. For example, we’ve been talking about the liver, so we’ll keep talking about the liver here for a minute.

The liver and gall bladder are a yin-yang pair. They’re like a husband and wife team. The main job that the liver has in Chinese medicine is the free flow of emotions and the free flow, in general, of energy around the body. The number one enemy of liver qi flow is stress and doing too much, and not having enough time to process all that we’re feeling and experiencing in our daily life. A lot of times, what will happen when the liver qi gets stagnant is that we feel it in its yang partner, the gall bladder’s area. The gall bladder goes right up through the shoulders and to the back of the head. That chronic neck and shoulder tension, the chronic migraines, the chronic, sort of like energy rising to the upper part of the body and getting stuck, can have everything to do with stress and this liver/gall bladder relationship.

A lot of times, just finding the stuff that’s sore and massaging it and working it out can be a really great way of just experiencing what channels might be involved for you. Yeah, I’m just a big fan of getting your hands on your body and getting curious.

Trevor:                    Perfect. Yeah, our body gives us a lot of information that we can use just like our skin gives us information. I’d love to talk just a couple of minutes about Chinese herbs. Do you have some tips on that? Because I know that there are some concerns about purity of Chinese herbs, quality, there’s such a variety, because a lot of these come from China. There are concerns about and even in California, the herbs have to have special labels on them, because of concerns about heavy metal toxicity. Anything you want to share about Chinese herbs and what to look for?

Brodie:                    First off, I want to dispel any unnecessary fear because everything that you’re mentioning is true of any supplement, like we don’t know where it’s coming from, it’s like then [inaudible 00:30:28]. But that said … and the thing that’s particularly concerning about Chinese medicine coming from China, it’s a total integrated system. If you go to a hospital, for example, and you have a sprained ankle, you might well get acupuncture, and then be x-rayed and sent home with whatever; or you might be given a prescription to the herbal pharmacy and that would be filled for you.

Sometimes, in terms of the pills and bottles, like they ready-made formulas that people take, that in China, it’s legal for them to mix pharmaceutical ingredients with herbal ingredients. For example, treating a common colds, you might get something that has an over-the-counter cold medicine and Chinese herbal medicine combined in one, and we definitely don’t allow that here in the United States. But that said, there’s plenty of really excellent and reputable suppliers of Chinese medicine that adhere to good manufacturing practices, who do their due diligence with heavy metal testing, and can provide you with that information.

It’s just one of those and usually somebody like me, it’s like the herbs I carry in my clinic, I don’t want anything on my shelves that’s going to hurt somebody. Usually, going to a Chinese medicine practitioner, it’s their livelihood and their reputation that is very much intertwined with the quality of their herbal products, so it’s not the kind of thing that I would buy at Whole Foods. It’s not the kind of thing that I would just pick up and self-prescribe. Again, because your colds may be different than somebody else’s colds, which is based on the fact that we differentiate everything. Literally, the right thing for you could be the wrong thing for someone else.

There are certainly, just like anything, just like with food, there’s going to be some things that are certainly beneficial for certain conditions, and just merely okay for others. But there could be some things that are actively not a good idea to do. You definitely do want to. It can be an incredibly powerful medicine. Let’s not forget that pharmaceuticals prescribes properly for the condition that they are intended for is tied with stroke as the number four killer in the United States, according to the CDC numbers. And so if we just look at adverse effects from herbs versus adverse effects from drugs, it’s just like a handful compared to this massive problem that we’re experiencing.

I really want to empower people to recognize that Chinese herbal medicine, these recipes that have been around for thousands of years. And now we have ways of … we have even more information as people are getting curious about the power of herbs to heal the body that there’s even more information out there about what these things might be good for, and who it might not be a good idea for. But always, like anything, check with your practitioner. Just know that there’s this whole world of potential support that can be available to you for pretty cost-effective rates, because just going to see a practitioner is going to be about twice as much as a month worth of an herb formula, for example.

Trevor:                    Yeah. One of the things, one of the big root causes behind skin issues, or one of the big things that I oftentimes see in my practice is hormone imbalances. I think of Chinese medicine as being really helpful for a number of different hormonal imbalance issues. Anywhere from fertility issues to menstrual irregularities, painful [inaudible 00:33:44], PCOS, cyst, those fibroids, those are some of the things that I have seen in my personal practice, what I’ve referred out to Chinese medicine practitioners to see some of the greatest results. I mean, I’m just mentioning this because I have seen how powerful it can be in that area. I don’t know if you want to add anything to that.

Brodie:                    Oh yeah, thank you so much for mentioning that. Yes, all of those things and more, especially menopause, like impairing menopause. When things start getting wonky and you don’t necessarily know if bioidentical hormones are the route that you want to take, Chinese medicine can be amazing. Plus, just remembering that there’s this amazing interplay between the stress hormones and the sex hormones. And so anytime women are feeling out of balance with their cycle or with their fertility, or with menopausal transition, that it’s an invitation to look deeper at what’s going on with adrenaline and cortisol, and what’s going on with insulin, and what’s going on just with all of our hormones in the body, thyroid, everything.

A lot of times, you could go micro and try to figure out what exactly is out of balance, and maybe if I tinker with this and I give myself a little extra of this that I’ll feel better. Or you could pan back and say, “What all of these things have in common?” If you look through the lens of Chinese medicine, a lot of times it can be pretty simple and take really just a couple of months to really turn things around that have been a problem for a while. Yeah, incredible medicine.

And then of course, things that we can often prescribe for someone to be doing on their own in terms of lifestyle or breathing, or meditation, or just these things that Chinese medicine practitioners are often trained in that we can help empower you to take care of yourself when things feel crazy.

Trevor:                    Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. I just wanted to bring that up about some of them are [inaudible 00:35:33]. I’m glad you brought that about menopause because women going through menopause, everyone goes through differently. And so having something that’s very customized as a treatment plan I think is very helpful for us. Of course, Chinese medicine is very customized to the person and that’s great.

Another thing that I found to be really helpful when it comes to Chinese medicine is pain management. I know that if I get a headache, the fastest thing to relieve a headache for me is acupuncture. It is fantastic at helping with pain management, and then also some of the Chinese herbs that go along with it that have definitely helped a lot of people in pain. We certainly want to avoid the prescription pain medications as much as possible, because of the addiction issues, the side effects. So any time we can think of things that can compliment or help us with managing pain, certainly something I definitely want to bring up to people’s awareness.

Brodie:                    Oh yeah. That is the bread and butter of my practice, these people in pain, where they don’t necessarily want to take pain killers of any kinds for the rest of their life, and maybe they don’t want to have a surgery. So what’s left? It’s like what’s left is how we use our bodies, and so being able to use them, making sure that we’re getting a balance of yin and yang activities. If we’re doing all sorts of hard strength training that we’re balancing that with softening practices like stretching and opening, things like yoga and qigong.

Also, acupuncture is phenomenal at basically anything that ends in -itis, like anything that is painful, anything that is inflamed. It works on so many levels. With just a few of those ways it can help the body. It releases the body’s own neurotransmitters and feel-good chemicals. Our endocannabinoid system, are natural chemicals that are like our endogenous morphine and like endogenous marijuana. They can help us feel like we’re in less pain, and like we’re more mellow. At the same time, it can also be very energizing.

Acupuncture can put the nervous system in the state of rest and repair that needs to be, and to heal. It can also affect our perception of pain by influencing adenosine levels. It just changes how we perceive pain. It’s profoundly anti-inflammatory. It can even speed the healing of injuries and even old chronic stuff, because we’re getting the body’s attention. We’re saying, “Hey, you weren’t quite done with this. Put the energy here. Put it in the lower back. Let’s get this healed. Let’s get this, once and for all, better.” And of course, if something has been going on for decades, it may take a while. You could say like give it … if something has been going for 10 years, maybe give it a year of treating every other week, or something like that.

You could be totally done with that pain for the rest of your life. There’s nothing that is too far gone necessarily to be benefited. I’ve treated people in their 80s with spinal stenosis, for example. They are able to stop walking with a cane, and to feel the bottoms of their feet again. It’s the kind of thing where like if you were to look at that x-ray, you would say there’s no hope for you. I just want to really open that door that like yeah, there are definitely conditions. We’re not really good at reattaching tendons that have been severed or things like that. For that, yeah, you’re going to need surgery.

If it makes sense, that if it’s the kind of thing that has all this other benefit for the whole rest of your body to go and get acupuncture and an opportunity to look in the mirror and get a sense of what’s out of balance in your body, then why not do that on regular basis as opposed to doing something invasive and risky?

Trevor:                    Right. Again, this brings us back to a full circle from the beginning of this as being part of one of the tools that people can have to help get their bodies back in balance, and to look at things like Chinese medicine before resorting to surgery. The earlier you look at this approach, the better, because the longer you wait, it’s harder to implement these things and get the full benefit of it.

Brodie, thank you so much for your information today. Tell everybody how they can find out more about you.

Brodie:                    First of all, thank you for having me back, Cates. This has been really fun. Yeah, I would love to stay in touch with anybody who is interested in learning more about Chinese medicine. I have a course on the basics of Chinese medicine that runs a couple of times a year. If people want help in using the habits of the yogis and sages in their daily life, I have group coaching programs. I have an online qigong class, and a podcast called A Healthy Curiosity. These are all things that you can check out at my website, which is brodiewelch.com, that’s Brodie with an I-E and Welch with a C-H.

Trevor:                    All right, perfect. We’ll have up links for your website and your podcast. We’ll have those up on my website under your podcast interview, so everybody can easily access them. Thank you so much for the interview today. I really appreciate your information.

Brodie:                    Thanks again.

Trevor:                    I hope you enjoy this interview today with Brodie. To learn more about her and the information that she shared with you and the links that she mentioned, just go to thespadr.com. Go to the podcast page with her interview, and you’ll find all the information and links there. While you’re there, I invite you to join The Spa Dr. community. You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, so you don’t miss on our upcoming shows. If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend you go to theskinquiz.com to find out what information your skin is trying to give you about your health and what you can do about it. It’s free online quiz. Just go to theskinquiz.com.

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