Patient: "Jane," female, age 32
Chief Complaint: Seasonal pollen allergies
Symptoms:
Each year, around the first week of May, Jane gets dry skin; bilateral sinus pain and pressure; a clear, runny and stuffy nose; and red, itchy eyes. The worst of it lasts about two weeks. She is lactose-intolerant, but she is Asian, and so this might not be indicative of Spleen qi problems, but rather genetic in origin. She has one formed bowel movement each day. She urinates about every two hours during the day, but is not sure exactly how often she goes. She has nocturia once per night since the birth of her child three years ago. Her urine generally is pale-yellow and she reports that it is darker in color lately. Her mouth is dry; she is thirsty and likes cool drinks. She gets colds and the flu only once a year.
Emotionally, Jane says she experiences guilt and fear the most. Upon further questioning, it appears she has difficulty expressing herself, lets her frustration build and then blows up. Upon getting to know her better over the course of the treatment, my general impression of her is that she is irritable, has quick mood swings and is quick to temper. She is friendly to those she lets get close to her, but keeps most people away with her crusty temperament. Her pulse is slightly slow, steady and strong and her tongue is slightly reddish overall, with red spots on the tip.
Diagnosis:
After the first treatment, I diagnosed her with Lung wei qi being blocked by an external pathogen, most likely heat initially, along with Liver qi stagnation turning to heat.
In the beginning of April, Jane came in hoping to stop her allergies before spring. (In Toronto, where Jane lives, pollen comes with spring around the beginning of May.) She came once a week for six total treatments.
Acupuncture points:
Herbal treatment: Jane was not comfortable taking decocted herbs, so I gave her a pill formula of yu ping feng san jia cang er san from Golden Flower, huang qi, bai zhu, fang feng, chi shao yao, lian qiao, cang er zi, xin yi hua, and bai zhi. She initially took one pill, three times a day. For financial reasons, we decided to just use this formula and treat the liver stagnation with only acupuncture instead of getting her another formula to address that aspect of her pattern.
The morning after her first treatment, she felt foggy-headed, congested and had slight pain and pressure. Except for a clear, runny nose, the other symptoms went away that day.
I found out more about her mood swings as well. I changed my diagnosis to add Spleen qi deficiency, causing dampness to manifest in the lungs, took out some heat points and added a spirit-calming point.
I used the same acupuncture points except for quchi (LI11), and added
By Jane's third appointment, she was clear-headed. During treatment, I discovered more about her general irritability and quick temper.
Acupuncture points:
On Jane's fourth appointment, she came in feeling the symptoms start that day, with a side headache too. Her nasal mucus was slightly better, but still flowing.
Acupuncture points:
Herbal dosage: Went up to two pills, three times a day.
On her fifth treatment, all her symptoms had disappeared except for her headache. I suspected her liver problems were contributing to her headaches.
Acupuncture points:
On her sixth treatment, during mid-May, while the pollen was flying everywhere, she had been symptom-free all week. She had the same acupuncture treatment as the week before and finished her herbs one week later. Jane has stayed symptom-free for three spring seasons now.
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
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One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
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