Let’s Talk About That Sleep Score

I have a patient who I’ve been treating for chronic insomnia and low energy during they day. The treatment is going well and they have been feeling better—more rested, more clear-headed, more resilient during the day. But at our evaluation lat week about their treatment plan, they said to me:

“I’ve been feeling great… but my Oura ring still says my sleep is terrible.”

And they are not the first person to tell me that their experience of sleep is so much better but their app is telling them that its not. Sometimes it’s the opposite. For some people, their sleep score is high, but they wake up groggy or crash by mid-afternoon. But in either case, they’ve been trained to trust the app over their own experience. And when the app doesn’t validate how they feel, they start to second-guess the progress we’re making. Or worse—they feel discouraged, like their body isn’t cooperating despite their efforts.

Sleep monitors like Oura and Fitbit are everywhere now, worn as badges of health optimization and self-awareness. But when they start to dictate how we feel about our own bodies, it’s worth asking: What are these devices actually measuring? How accurate are they? And what’s the cost of outsourcing our internal sense of rest to a commercial algorithm?

Let’s take a closer look.

What Are Sleep Trackers Measuring, Really?

Sleep, as it's commonly understood in modern science, is divided into several stages: light sleep, deep sleep (also known as slow-wave or N3 sleep), and REM sleep. These stages are primarily defined by patterns of brain activity measured through electroencephalography (EEG). Light sleep is a transitional state, where brainwaves begin to slow, muscles relax, and awareness of the outside world starts to fade. Deep sleep is marked by delta waves—slow, high-amplitude brain activity associated with physical restoration, tissue repair, and immune function. REM sleep, on the other hand, is paradoxical: the brain becomes highly active, almost wake-like, while the body remains effectively paralyzed. This is when dreaming occurs, and it is thought to be key for memory consolidation and emotional processing.

This structure gives researchers and clinicians a way to analyze sleep in measurable terms. EEG provides a visual record of what the brain is doing moment by moment, and from this we’ve built a framework that assigns meaning to each phase. That framework is valuable. It gives us a shared language to discuss sleep quality, to compare states across time and populations, and to identify patterns associated with dysfunction.

More fundamentally, the idea that sleep can be fully understood through a chart of waveforms may itself be too narrow. EEG can tell us what kind of electrical activity is present in the brain, but it cannot tell us how that sleep is lived. It doesn’t know if you felt safe, or if your dreams left a residue of sadness. It doesn’t know if you woke feeling held or fractured, restored or restless. These are human experiences, and they are part of sleep, too. Nonetheless, EEG and its clinical assessment partner polysomnography (PSG) are the biomedical tools we have and they are the assessment metrics that sleep tracker devices are trying to mimic.

When it comes to the at-home sleep monitors like Oura and Fitbit, those devices rely on a small suite of biometrics, mostly collected through sensors on your finger or wrist. Here’s what they’re actually recording during the night:

• Heart Rate (HR): Tracks how many times your heart beats per minute. Typically lower during deep sleep.

• Heart Rate Variability (HRV): Measures the variation in time between heartbeats, associated with parasympathetic nervous system activity (rest and recovery).

• Movement (Actigraphy): Uses accelerometers to detect tossing, turning, and stillness, often interpreted as sleep depth.

• Skin Temperature: Relative changes in peripheral body temperature, often correlated with circadian phase and recovery.

• Respiratory Rate: Estimated from subtle physical signals like heart rate patterns and temperature variation, but not actually able to read the movement of air into and out of lungs.

• Blood Oxygen (SpO₂): On some devices, measures how well your blood is carrying oxygen during the night.

These are the ingredients. From there, proprietary algorithms infer sleep stages (light, deep, REM, wake) and calculate a composite “sleep score” meant to represent your sleep quality on a scale from poor to excellent. Note the word proprietary here because none of the companies in this space will tell you exactly how they calculate your sleep score — “trade secrets” and what not…

Notable though. when sleep trackers attempt to recreate the EEG system using proxies like the ones listed above, they step even further away from the source. A Fitbit-type device cannot measure brainwaves directly. It can only infer, based on surface-level data, which stage a person might be in. And while those inferences are sometimes correct, they are also often wrong—particularly when it comes to deep sleep and REM. The body may be still during both, but the internal experiences are radically different. To a wristband, they can look the same.

When patients come in saying they feel rested, but their device disagrees, we often encourage them to believe their body. That doesn’t mean we ignore data—but it means we don’t let it override lived experience. Sleep, like health more broadly, is not just what we can measure. It’s also what we can feel.

But here’s the critical thing: none of these devices are reading your brain.

In a sleep lab, clinicians use polysomnography (PSG) to track brain waves, eye movements, muscle tone, breathing, heart activity, and more. This is how sleep stages are defined—not by heart rate or motion, but by patterns of electrical activity in the brain.

By contrast, commercial devices are just guessing at those stages based on peripheral proxies. Their accuracy in doing so is… mixed.

Validation Studies: The Data Doesn’t Quite Match

Several independent studies* have compared consumer sleep trackers like the Oura Ring and Fitbit to clinical-grade sleep testing(PSG). These studies generally show that while wearables can track general trends, they fall short when it comes to accurate sleep staging and nuanced interpretation.

The most common issues include:

• Total sleep time: Both Oura and Fitbit show high agreement with clinical measurements here. Most devices can detect when you are generally asleep versus awake.

• REM sleep: Oura's Gen 3 ring performs reasonably well at estimating REM duration, though its accuracy varies by user.

• Light vs. deep sleep: Both devices tend to overestimate light sleep and underestimate deep sleep, with Fitbit in particular detecting deep sleep correctly only about 50% of the time compared to EEG measurements.

• Wake after sleep onset (WASO): This important insomnia metric is routinely underestimated by both devices.

• Overall staging of sleep: The further a metric gets from total time asleep, the more the accuracy drops.

These discrepancies have real-world effects. When a patient comes in saying their Oura Ring reported zero deep sleep, but they woke up feeling clear and rested, they’re often confused. And understandably so. The device’s conclusion doesn’t match their experience. In cases like this, the tracker probably missed the signal. These tools rely on proxies like heart rate, HRV, and movement—not the brain activity that actually defines sleep stages.

Deep sleep, for example, is defined by slow-wave EEG patterns, something a wearable cannot directly detect. REM sleep involves high brain activity and vivid dreams while the body remains still. A wristband can’t see what the eyes are doing. It can’t monitor brainwaves. It can only measure what’s happening on the surface—and then infer what’s happening inside.

So the algorithm does its best. It guesses. And often, it guesses wrong.

The danger is not just in technical inaccuracy. It's in the impact those guesses have on the person wearing the device. We’ve seen patients feel discouraged by a low score, even when their subjective experience of sleep was good. Others spiral into anxiety after one “bad night,” despite no change in energy, cognition, or mood. In some cases, people have begun to structure their entire day around the number on their screen—eating differently, canceling plans, or even skipping exercise based on what the ring told them.

In that context, the data has usurped human experience and understanding, and we have ceded our agency to a machine that is wrong 25-40% of the time. Once we hit that point, the abidication of our relationship to our bodies is not so much a technological problem as a psychological one.

The Psychological Toll of Quantifying the Unconscious

Sleep is one of the last frontiers of health that happens entirely without conscious effort. It’s mysterious and restorative, an internal process that unfolds beyond our control. And perhaps because of that, there’s a particular vulnerability in trying to pin it down with numbers.

When a wearable device offers a neat little score each morning, it’s tempting to take that as truth. Over time, people begin to check their app before they check in with themselves. They start to wonder not “how do I feel this morning?” but “what does the ring say?” As we’ve discussed, a bad score can color the whole day—even if the night felt restful. A good score can override a lingering sense of fatigue.

This gap between subjective experience and algorithmic output creates a subtle but profound shift: people begin to trust the data over their own bodies. We’ve seen patients who are sleeping better by every meaningful measure—more energy, fewer night wakings, calmer mornings—start to question that progress because their sleep score hasn’t budged. Others have reported a sense of deflation after a single “bad” score, as if their own sense of rest had been invalidated.

There’s even a name for this phenomenon: orthosomnia—a condition where obsession with sleep data creates anxiety and, paradoxically, worsens sleep. The numbers become not a support, but a source of stress. In trying to optimize the unconscious, we end up bringing more tension into the very system we’re trying to soothe.

This isn’t just about the accuracy of the data. It’s about how we relate to it—and whether we still allow ourselves to trust the quieter signals of our own physiology.

Who Benefits from This System?

When a patient’s sense of healing begins to unravel because of a number on their phone, it becomes important to ask a harder question: who, exactly, is this system serving?

Technology companies like Oura and Fitbit present themselves as partners in health. They suggest that wearing a device will deepen self-awareness, encourage better habits, and provide meaningful insight into the body’s rhythms. The branding is subtle but persuasive—language that frames the product as a mirror, as if these companies are simply helping you see yourself more clearly.

But clarity is not the real commodity here. Engagement is.

These devices are designed to encourage daily interaction. Sleep scores, readiness rings, temperature trends, recovery insights—each one is a prompt to return to the app, to re-enter the loop, to keep checking. That behavior is not accidental; it is engineered. The more you interact with the app, the more valuable you become as a user. Not because you are getting healthier, but because your attention, your habits, and your data are monetizable assets.

For example, Oura requires a paid monthly membership to access detailed metrics, including many that the ring is already collecting. Fitbit offers a “premium” tier that unlocks expanded analysis and coaching tools. In both cases, your own body’s data is held behind a paywall. What you are buying is not just a health device—it is ongoing access to information about yourself, packaged and interpreted by someone else’s algorithm.

Beyond subscriptions, there are additional layers of value extraction. Your biometric data—whether or not it is personally identifiable—can be aggregated, analyzed, and repurposed. These data streams are useful for machine learning development, corporate wellness programs, health research partnerships, and future product rollouts. In this economy, the body is not sacred. It is a resource to be mined.

It is easy to forget that these companies do not exist to support your healing. They exist to generate returns for investors. That is not a cynical interpretation of their efforts; it is the legal obligation of a company to make money for investors. Publicly traded companies are required to prioritize shareholder value, and their boards are bound by a legal fiduciary responsiblity to work in the best interests of their shareholders financial welfare, which means decisions around design, data use, and product development are ultimately driven by profitability—not by human wellbeing.

The impact of this model is not always visible right away. It reveals itself slowly, in the gradual erosion of trust in your own sensations. Over time, the app becomes the authority. If it tells you that your sleep was poor, you may start to doubt how rested you feel. If it gives you a high readiness score, you may push through fatigue that your body was asking you to respect. Each time that shift happens—each time an external score overrides an internal signal—the technology becomes a little more central, and you become a little less sovereign in your own experience.

This is the deeper concern. Not that the metrics are imperfect, though they are. Not even that the business model relies on dependence, though it does. The concern is that, under the guise of empowerment, we are being conditioned to hand over the most basic elements of bodily wisdom to systems that do not know us, do not care for us, and are not designed to support healing in any real or relational way.

The more we rely on these devices to tell us how we feel, the more difficult it becomes to hear what the body is saying on its own.

Returning to the Wisdom of the Body

There is a kind of medicine that lives outside of screens. It does not need scores or apps or predictive algorithms to tell you how you are doing. It begins with something much older, and much more intimate: your own felt sense of being alive.

This is not romantic nostalgia. It is a call to remember that your body has its own language—one that can be learned, listened to, and trusted. Every day, your system offers signals about what it needs and how it’s doing: the texture of your energy, the steadiness of your breath, the clarity of your thoughts, the quality of your rest. These signals are not noise. They are the foundation of real self-knowledge.

At Root & Branch, this is where we begin. We practice a form of medicine that does not extract you from your experience but guides you more deeply into it. Chinese medicine has always been rooted in observation—not just by the practitioner, but by the patient. The pulse, the breath, the sleep, the dreams—these are meaningful data points, but they are not reduced to numbers. They are read in context, with care and curiosity.

When patients come to us, we are not trying to optimize them. We are trying to help them feel at home in their bodies again. Sometimes that means sleeping more deeply. Sometimes it means waking with clarity. Sometimes it means understanding what fatigue is trying to say, rather than overriding it. We do not measure success by how well someone fits a norm. We measure it by how clearly they can hear themselves—and how gently they are able to respond.

There is a place for technology, but it should never replace your own inner sense of knowing. You do not need permission from a device to trust how you feel. You do not need a score to validate your rest. What you need is space to reconnect—with your breath, with your rhythms, with the signals your body is offering every day.

If you are ready to come back to yourself, we are here. Root & Branch is a place where your experience matters. Where we listen. Where we help you learn to listen, too.

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Sources*

Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “Wearable Sleep Trackers Put to the Test: Oura Ring, Apple Watch, Fitbit Compared to Gold-Standard Sleep Study.” Sleep Review, 7 May 2024, https://sleepreviewmag.com/sleep-diagnostics/consumer-sleep-tracking/wearable-sleep-trackers/oura-ring-apple-watch-fitbit-face-off-sleep-accuracy-study/.

Jeon, M., et al. “Validation of Fitbit Inspire 2 for Sleep Staging Against Polysomnography.” Journal of Sleep Medicine, vol. 21, no. 1, Jan. 2024, pp. 15–22. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9985403/.

Lee, S.Y., et al. “Accuracy of Fitbit Sleep Staging Compared With Polysomnography in Healthy Adults.” Journal of Sleep Medicine, vol. 18, no. 3, Mar. 2022, pp. 131–139. https://e-jsm.org/journal/view.php?doi=10.13078/jsm.220019.

Oura Health. “Oura Ring Validated Against Polysomnography by University of Tokyo Researchers.” Oura Blog, 18 Oct. 2023, https://ouraring.com/blog/oura-ring-accuracy-validation-study-university-of-tokyo/.

Why Word Of Mouth Matters

When someone finds something that really works—whether it’s a great plumber, a dependable mechanic, or a clinic that actually helps them feel better—they often tell a few people about it. These small acts of sharing are how most of us discover the things we come to trust. But in today’s world, it’s easy to assume that businesses grow because of digital advertising, clever algorithms, or a strong social media presence. That might be true for products or viral trends, but it’s not how real, local, service-based care actually grows.

Two women talk over breakfast

We’re often asked why we don’t post more on social media, or why we don’t invest in digital ads to “get the word out.” And the answer is fairly simple: digital marketing is expensive, competitive, and poorly suited to the kind of work we do. We’re not selling a quick fix or a single-use item—we’re offering care that takes time, relationship, and trust. And those are not things that people usually buy because they saw a well-placed Instagram ad.

The truth is, even if we wanted to pour energy into online advertising, we’d be competing with large health systems, national supplement companies, and digital health brands with marketing budgets that could cover our entire operating costs many times over. The internet is noisy. Attention is fragmented. And the kind of depth that Chinese medicine offers doesn’t lend itself easily to short-form content or click-through campaigns. What we do is slow. It’s personal. It requires a willingness to sit with someone and really listen. That’s not something you can package into a sponsored post.

And even if you could, it still might not work. There’s an old rule of thumb in marketing that says it takes about seven times for someone to hear about something before they decide to act. That number isn’t precise, of course, but the underlying point holds true. People rarely make decisions the first time they hear about something new. They need reminders. They need to hear it from someone they trust. They need to feel like the choice is safe and the path is familiar. And in our experience, nothing moves that process along more effectively than word of mouth.

When someone you trust says, “You should check them out,” it means more than a dozen glowing reviews online. When a coworker tells you that acupuncture helped their headaches or that their digestion finally improved, it creates a kind of opening. You don’t have to understand how it works—you just start to wonder if maybe it could help you, too. That small opening is where the real momentum begins.

And for clinics like ours, that momentum is essential. We don’t have investors. We don’t have billboard campaigns or prime-time ad slots. We grow because people like you have good experiences, and then tell someone else. That’s it. That’s the whole engine.

So when you recommend us to a friend, or share a blog post that resonated, or casually mention in conversation that acupuncture helped you sleep through the night for the first time in weeks—you’re doing more than passing along information. You’re actively supporting our survival. You’re helping to keep a small, local business open. You’re helping a clinic stay available for the next person who needs care. And you’re helping grow a model of healthcare that still believes in time, attention, and personalized support.

It doesn’t have to be a grand gesture. You don’t need to post on social media or deliver a speech about Chinese medicine to your book club. Sometimes it’s enough to say, “I think my acupuncturist might be able to help with that,” or to hand someone a card, or to write a few honest sentences in a review. These small, direct, person-to-person exchanges do more for us than any algorithm ever could.

In a time when people are inundated with ads and recommendations from all directions, a real voice still carries weight. Your voice—genuine, human, and grounded in your own experience—is what makes people listen. And in a landscape where small businesses are often drowned out by louder, better-funded ones, that kind of word of mouth matters more than ever.

So if our work has helped you, if you’ve felt better in your body or more steady in your mind because of the care you’ve received, we hope you’ll consider sharing that with someone. Not because we’re trying to grow fast, but because we want to keep doing this for the long haul. We want to stay open, stay available, and keep offering care that is thoughtful, effective, and rooted in something more lasting than trends.

The future of small, relational, whole-person medicine depends on people talking to people. And that kind of support can’t be bought. It has to be offered freely, one conversation at a time.

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What Can We Help With?

There is a moment we see often in clinic. It usually happens between the second and third visit, during a quiet pause between questions, or sometimes after the first few needles are placed. The patient exhales, softens, and says something like, “I didn’t know you could treat this.”

It’s a common misunderstanding. Many people believe that Chinese medicine is only for back pain, stress, or problems that have not responded to anything else. That it is a last resort, or something to try when nothing else has worked.

But Chinese medicine is much broader than that. While we are not considered primary care providers in the legal or conventional sense, we often function in that role for our patients. We are the person someone calls first, the one who tracks the bigger picture, and the one who remembers the story—not just the symptoms. For many people, that feels like primary care. Because it is care that comes first, and it considers the whole person.

We treat pain, of course—back pain, headaches, neck tension, joint aches. But we also treat the quieter things: the digestion that has never felt quite right, the sleep that comes but doesn’t hold, the cycles that are irregular or painful, the hormones that feel off. These are the kinds of issues that may not show up clearly on lab work, but still affect day-to-day life.

We often support people through the in-between times. When you are not acutely ill, but not quite well either. When things are not “urgent,” but they are persistent. We see people with low energy, foggy thinking, fluctuating digestion, lingering fatigue, or recurrent infections. These concerns may not seem serious at first, but they can quietly interfere with your quality of life. We work to help shift those patterns in a lasting and gentle way.

We also treat acute conditions—colds, coughs, stomach bugs, seasonal flus. Some people come in at the first sign of something, hoping to recover quickly or avoid antibiotics. Others come in afterward, when a lingering cough or fatigue will not go away. Chinese medicine can help at both ends of that process: it supports the immune system, clears what the body is having trouble resolving, and helps people return to a place of ease.

We treat cycles—menstrual, emotional, seasonal, and those that arise from major life changes. We work with people during menopause, postpartum recovery, chronic stress, and fatigue that builds from years of doing too much. These are slow processes. We meet them with patience and consistency.

We approach anxiety not as something to be erased, but as something to be understood. We treat it by working with the nervous system, the breath, and the body’s deeper rhythms. We don’t promise to “fix” anxiety. But we can help regulate the systems that underlie it. That work is meaningful, and often transformative over time.

Our medicine is not built around quick fixes, although sometimes relief comes quickly. Most of the time, change is gradual. We listen, we track, and we respond. We pay attention to how the body speaks through patterns, timing, and symptom clusters. We are not just looking for what hurts. We are trying to understand why now, and how it all fits together.

If you have ever wondered whether Chinese medicine could help with what you’re experiencing, the answer is probably yes. Not because it is a cure-all, but because it is a system designed to understand the whole of a person. It meets you where you are and works from there.

Some people come in with one clear concern—headaches, reflux, painful periods. Others come in with a collection of things that seem loosely connected—fatigue, poor sleep, low mood, or trouble focusing. Some come in because they want to feel more like themselves, more balanced, or more steady. All of that is welcome.

You do not need to have a diagnosis to start. You do not need to explain everything perfectly. You just need to have the sense that something could feel better, and the openness to explore that with us.

So what can we help with?
Quite a lot.

And if you are not sure whether your concerns fit, that’s okay too. Reach out. Ask. Share what has been going on, even if it does not fit neatly into a category. We are here to listen.

We may not carry the title of primary care provider, but many of our patients rely on us in that way. We are here for the long-term relationships, not just the acute flares. For the slow improvement, not just the symptom management. For the full complexity of your life, not just the parts that feel medically urgent.

That is the kind of care we offer. And for many people, it is exactly what they have been looking for.

You Are Enough

Listen to Travis Kern talking with friend, colleague and host of the Acusprout podcast Stacey Whitcomb as they discuss how Root & Branch got started, what it’s like to run a Chinese medicine pharmacy, and what the joys and challenges of this business can be.

Listen to more from Stacey at Acusprout by visiting their website here and then liking and subscribing to her show! Enjoy!

Covid-19 and Natural Medicine

The rapid spread of the novel coronavirus across the globe caused a certain kind of existential panic that many of us were not used to entertaining. Runs on toilet paper and hand sanitizer were the first markers of our terror followed with increasingly dire warnings, recommendations, and mandates to stay home, shelter-in-place, and avoid all unnecessary contact. Now we are living with the constant threat of infection and tragedy. We are burned by it while also feeling like we can’t continue to care about this thing that has been going on for so long. The struggle is real. Let me begin the content on this page with this important statement:

Covid-19 is a serious condition that should be treated with all the gravity that it is due.

Once we internalize the reality that we will be dealing with this virus for many more months to one degree or another, a different sort of anxiety can start to take hold and a series of questions starts to emerge:

• How are we going to survive the economic impacts?

• How will I make it through the continued onslaught of isolation, cancelled plans, and working from home?

• How can I continue to protect myself and my family?

• What medicines or supplements can I take to stave off the virus?

Social distancing and face coverings are for your protection and especially for the protection of vulnerable populations. Take this situation seriously.

These queries are totally normal and what all of us are wondering. Since my expertise does not extend into the economic or psychological realms, I can just say that we are all in this situation together and with some practiced calm and reaching deep for compassion and patience, we will weather the realities of paying mortgages and rents, car notes and credit card bills. There will be continued pain but it will eventually give way. It will also take some effort to remind ourselves that we need to remain vigilant and even if Thanksgiving doesn’t look like usual this year, try not to worry too much. There will be another one next year.

Where my insight and experience become relevant are on the subsequent questions about health and protection. As a person who practices medicine and deals with patients from all walks of life, many of whom are dealing with serious and sometimes life-threatening diseases, I want to underscore that it is important to take the guidance from state and local governments seriously as well as making the things we’ve heard about from the CDC about handwashing and face-covering as part of your daily and recurring habits. While you may be young or healthy, the transmission of this disease is not only about your health. The rapid transmission rate of the virus and the fact that we still do not fully grasp how and in what ways it moves through our environment make it essential that we all take precautions to minimize person-to-person contact outside of the people we live and share space with already. And when we do interact with other humans, cover your face. I know it feels restrictive or that you can’t breathe very well. You are fine. Cover. Your. Mouth. AND. Nose.

Next, THERE IS NO SINGLE HERB OR SUPPLEMENT THAT WILL STOP THIS VIRUS. Let me say that again: NO SINGLE HERB OR SUPPLEMENT WILL SAVE YOU. I want to be emphatic about this point because in crises like this one, many people who live in the often ethically-gray space of nutriceutical distribution are looking to sell you something “for your immune system” or to “keep your body in top shape” to stop the virus in its tracks. While it is certainly possible to use herbs and supplements to help keep your body in peak condition, this “health banking” mindset primarily works for people who are already mostly healthy. Let me explain: how many times have you read something online, or heard something on the radio, or got told something by the hot guy at your gym that sounded like something like this: “Well you’ve got to start turmeric. I mean it is so great for dealing with inflammation. All kinds of inflammation. I mean more research is showing that inflammation is the root of all diseases so getting turmeric in your juice blend or in a capsule is going to be clutch for dealing with (insert idiopathic condition here like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, restless leg syndrome).”

Now, don’t interpret my glib tone as diminishing the conditions above. We treat them regularly in our clinic, and they are sometimes debilitating problems for patients. But I use this example to underscore the fact that these kinds of supplement recommendations are not based on any real expertise. Turmeric is a very useful herb for a variety of conditions including body pain, irritable bowels, post surgery recovery and more. But using that herb requires more than taking a trip to your local health food store to buy a bottle of standardized Turmeric and taking the label dosage because you heard it’s “supposed to be good for joint pain.” What are you looking for while taking it? How will you measure its effectiveness on your condition? How long will you take it for to decide if it is helping? And all of these unexamined questions are just to see if turmeric is going to maybe take the edge off of a non-life threatening condition. With regard to Covid-19 and herbal promises to keep you safe, relying on uninformed or worse, ill-informed, advice could have mortal consequences.

“Having the legal authorization to prescribe herbal medicine does not automatically confer the knowledge and skill to do so successfully.”

Qualified and experienced Chinese Medicine practitioners who use herbs regularly in their practices will have the requisite training and clinical application to prescribe herbal formulas that are targeted and that have measurable outcomes. While the scope of practice for licensed acupuncturists in most states allow those practitioners to use herbal medicine, having the legal authorization to prescribe herbal medicine does not automatically confer the knowledge and skill to do so successfully.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF ACUPUNCTURISTS IN THE UNITED STATES DO NOT HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE OR EXPERIENCE TO PRESCRIBE HERBS EFFECTIVELY. This is not just my opinion and observation. The American Society of Acupuncturists even mentioned this point explicitly in their guidance to the profession during this pandemic. What that means is that if you’ve heard that you need some Chinese skullcap or some ephedra (called ma huang in mandarin) or maybe just get a little teapill of this or a powder of that, STOP. These herbs that we use to help people with real problems are serious medicine. What you are taking on the advice of well-intentioned but no less ill-informed practitioners at least could be a waste of your time and money or at worst could have severe side-effects from incorrect administration. These are herbs are not some mild elderberry extract your cousin made or a great herbal tea Gweneth Paltrow sold you. Know your medicine and know what it’s for.

The Rub

I want you to use herbal medicine. I want you to treat your body with respect and love. I want you to lean on its incredible ability to heal and repair. And I want you to do all of that with a qualified Chinese Medicine physician in your corner. The universities of Google and Facebook have given us so much knowledge but they have also made it difficult to know what to believe, what to trust, and what steps to take. But remember that expertise is real, training is real, and there are practitioners out there who can keep you healthy during these difficult times.

Please find a qualified Chinese herbal practitioner in your area who helps patients with internal medicine problems. You can ask them how many of their patients use herbs as part or all of their treatment plan and if that number is less than 65%, keep looking. Ask that practitioner if they have a well-supplied pharmacy company that they work with or if they fill the formulas themselves, and then ask if they can get herbs in lots of forms like granules, whole herbs, and/or pills. Your goal here is to assess whether or not they have systems established around herbal medicine and how deep their use of that modality is. It doesn’t matter if you’re not sure what you’re asking about; what you are trying to assess is the practitioner’s ease (or lack thereof) with answering.

Chinese medicine is well-suited to helping patients reduce the intensity of infections and to ease the symptoms of people who are really feeling the weight of their illnesses, whether that illness be Covid-19 or any of the other hundreds of conditions that we treat in our field. Get someone in your corner who knows what they are doing. Ask them a million questions and then do what they ask you to do. Health is not a mystery.

Wishing you the best during these difficult times,

Travis H. Kern, MAcOM, Dipl. OM, LAc
Founder, Root & Branch Chinese Medicine Pharmacy and Clinic

Why You and Your Parents Don't Need To Suffer As you Age

By
Travis Cunningham MAcOM LAc

To listen to the audio recording of this article, click below.

The Curse of Aging

Does it bother you to think of yourself getting older? It bothers me. I can feel the aches and the pains already. I can feel the slow but definite decline in energy, flexibility and strength of my body. I can sense the descent of my intellect and the clouding of my memory. Fewer adventures and more routines. More trips to the doctor’s office and more need for my friends and family to take care of me. But that’s the reality, isn’t it? I mean, I guess we’re all going the same way, so why not just accept it?

If the above narrative doesn’t sit well for you, then you have made it to the right place. Somehow in the vast expanse of internet land, you made it here. Congrats!

Everything I have seen in my short but lively career as a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner suggests that most of the negative experiences we associate with the aging process need not come to pass. But in order to understand how our experience may differ from the common definition of aging, we must look at why suffering is a possibility as we age. Once we understand the problem, then we may understand its solution.

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Why We Suffer When We Age

Chinese medicine relates good health to the principles of change and transformation. When we can change and transform, we can grow. And as long as the possibility of change exists within us, the opportunity for growth remains. Each new experience provides opportunities to create and re-define ourselves. And when we do so, our lives become works of art.

When we cannot change, we get stuck. When stuck-ness exists in a person — in our bodies, in our organs, or in our emotions, problems inevitably occur. Because life is dynamic and ever-changing, when we are stuck and cannot adapt to those changes, we find the spontaneous movements of life turn to hazard and harm. We coil around and protect the stuck parts of ourselves hoping that they will not be touched. We try to control our experience and keep it from changing. And when the tender places within us are inevitably approached, we suffer the reminder of dis-ease that sticks within them.

Stuckness can occur in many forms within humans. Aches and pains in our muscles, joints, and bones result from poor circulation and blood supply. Our bodies may have a hard time regulating our temperature resulting in fever and chill sensations. Or we may have shallow sleep and have less energy throughout the day. We can think of these symptoms as a kind of hormonal stuckness. We may feel our thoughts becoming sluggish or foggy with a decreased desire to learn and understand which is a distinct type of mental stuckness. Even our hearts may stop pumping so well, and we resort to medications in order to remedy organ stuckness.

Luckily, There is Hope!
The Remedy to Stuckness Is Simple…

As we move through the years of our lives, collecting a wide variety of experiences across the entirety of the emotional and physical spectrum, we have the continual opportunity to cultivate wisdom. Wisdom requires the discernment to know which actions help us toward our goals and which actions are less supportive — a key skill harvested from our life experience. However, in order for wisdom to truly form, discernment must partner with a second quality: grace.

Grace comes from the ability to be soft and open to new ways of perception and action. Grace is a fluid quality, reaching into both the physical and psychic aspects of our lives. It comes easily to us as children when we are less certain and more trusting of our innate experience. But as we age and form belief structures, grace must be continually practiced or it will begin to fade.

As we age, we tend to lose touch with our sense of grace. We move less physically and do fewer new things. We stick to our routines, eat the same foods, and see the same people. The newness of our lives lessens, and so does our flexibility in managing it. This nascent rigidity is the root of future health problems.

While it’s true that there are natural consequences to the aging process, many of the aforementioned fates need not come to pass. With simple and gradual adjustments to a person’s lifestyle, the woes of aging can be lessened or avoided by a more graceful form of living. If grace can be adopted, then we may see the benefits of aging truly shine!

The Benefits of Aging
(What No One Talks About)

The benefits of aging lie within the possibility of cultivation. Because human beings have the opportunity to cultivate wisdom through life experience, we have the potential for greater levels of happiness, satisfaction, and discovery as we age. As our years pass, we can learn to harmonize the stability and creativity of human experience. We can become healthier this way, knowing ourselves in great depth and channeling the power of this depth to serve ourselves and others.

While our physical bodies become less abundant in mass, they may become more refined in quality. We may learn to require less in order to give more. Smaller amounts of food and fewer hours of sleep may be the result of this refinement, so long as does not cost us energy and clarity. Aging well gives the possibility for our minds to open, enhancing our contemplative powers as well as our spiritual ones. As middle age passes, the possibility of becoming not just old but an elder, arises. What a fantastic opportunity indeed!

In order for humans to see the benefits of aging, we have to participate in the things that make us human. In Chinese medicine, these areas of participation are the things that we must do in order to survive - breathing, eating, sleeping, moving, and resting. Participation may be thought of as a kind of rhythm, for when activities are practiced consistently, a power comes through them that begets more significance than that of a single beat. These activities compound in their effects and give strength to one another like links in a bond. They are the basis of good health, wisdom, and grace.

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Building A Foundation

In traditional Chinese arts, the foundational practices are where you start and often where you end. No matter how advanced you get within the art, good can always come from refining the fundamentals.

Breathing
As the most essential and immediate ingredient for health and vitality, breathing should be a priority. From time to time, check in with your breath and make sure it isn’t being held. Let your mind settle and let your breathing come naturally from your belly. Get out in nature by trees whenever possible and breath in that fresh air!

Eating
Keep eating as simple and as enjoyable as possible. Eat with people you love when you can. Eat at regular times. Slow down and chew your food. Eat lots of vegetables, with moderate amounts of grains and/or meats. Figure out what works and feels good in your body. Minimize overly heavy and sweet foods (but enjoy them when you do eat them). Breathe easy when you eat. Cook the majority of your foods (especially vegetables). If you have a digestive weakness, cook everything.

Sleeping
Go to bed as early as you can with consistency. Ideally, you would be asleep before 10:30 PM every night. Do the best you can with this. Sleep through the night, and make time in the day for a short nap (if possible). If you have difficulty sleeping through the night, try soaking your feet in hot water (described in greater detail below) before bed, and limit your food intake late at night.

Moving
Move every day without question. Do as much as feels good in your body. A little bit of pushing yourself in movement is good; alot of pushing is not good. Moving promotes circulation for the body and mind. Moving in natural environments is even better. Find something you like to do, and do it with regularity.

Resting
Throughout your day, plan periods of rest from your activity or work. These may be momentary at first - lasting 5 to 10 seconds. But hopefully will expand to a bit longer (15-30 minutes is about perfect). Do very little in your periods of rest. Avoid social media and mind stimulation. The basic idea for resting is to rest - not to be doing something. This practice will conserve your energy throughout the day and hopefully allow you to recycle it at night. This will both extend your life and enhance its quality.


Communing
Get your relationships in order. No, seriously! Good relationships can hold you together when you have no strength left. Bad relationships can demolish you even when you feel high and mighty. You can’t do this life all by yourself! Developing good relationships is essential to being a healthy human. If you don’t know where to start with people, try nature or animals first. Nature/Forest Therapy is an excellent place to start. Conventional therapy is also great and not only for advanced mental/emotional problems. If you need help, get yourself some help. You are a pack animal, you deserve to be with your pack.

Focusing
Humans need something to do in order to be happy and healthy. This need can be satisfied with something as elaborate as creating a non-profit to as simple as knitting a scarf. But you need something to do. And the more people feel that their work has value, the happier they tend to be. If you don’t know what your life’s purpose is, don’t worry about it! You don’t have to know all the secrets to be happy. Just start with today and do something that’s valuable to you.

Creating healthy habits in life without internalizing guilt and shame in the process is an art form.

Be easy on yourself, but do the best you can :)

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How to Refine Your Health
Or
Get Back Your Health
(When You’ve Lost It)

Step One: Build Your Foundation

As stated in the previous section, building a foundation of positive participation in life is essential for both getting your health back and maintaining (as well as improving) it. This can be done in the smallest of ways to begin, and it will compound and multiply as you continue. Follow the guidance in the above section to get started. If you feel you need assistance or further evaluation before you begin, make an appointment with a qualified healthcare practitioner. You can schedule an appointment with one of our experts here.

Step Two: Increase Your Circulation

Far and away the biggest problem I see in the clinic when people come in with age-related complaints is lack of circulation. As we age, we move less and the parts of our body that rely upon circulatory actions (like the heart) get tired. These organs work less efficiently the more tired they get, and the obvious problems of blood pressure, cholesterol, and fatigue, arise.

Poor circulation robs organ systems of their health by withholding the precious resource of nutritionally-dense blood. Anxiety, depression, and insomnia are only the beginning of the list of problems that can result. Similarly, old injuries with damaged tissues receive fewer resources because of this lack of fresh blood in supply. The tissues become achy and malnourishment or even form calcifications and masses which lead to further problems.

To stop this increasingly damaging cycle and begin turning the wheel in the opposite direction, you can start by working on your circulation in fun and simple ways. The most popular way to do this is by gently increasing your activity. Traditional exercises for circulation include walking, running, biking, swimming, lifting weights, playing sports, and other like activities. Softer methods can also be useful especially when the energy of the body is low. These allow for an increase in circulation without employing a taxing effect on the body’s resources. Yoga, tai chi, or traditional stretching are excellent places to begin.

Foot Soaking

To supplement your circulation even further, you can try one of my favorite time-tested treatments for the regulation of all human cycles: soaking your feet.

Soaking your feet in warm water helps the blood to flow all the way down to the furthest part of the body from the heart. During this transit, the blood passes around and through vital organs, cleansing and nourishing them before finally settling in the feet. Afterwards, the blood returns by way of the veins and a gentle pump for the whole body has just been created.

From a Chinese Medicine perspective, transferring heat to the lower extremity is considered highly beneficial and allows the Yang Qi of the body to go into storage, making it easier to fall asleep and allowing for more restful sleep. This knowledge may even have served as an inspiration for the Chinese adage, “Keep your feet warm and your head cool.”

How To Soak Your Feet

A) Choose A Basin
Use a container large enough to accommodate both your feet and deep enough to cover your ankles. Wood is best, plastic works as well. Do not use copper or iron containers.

B) Prepare The Soak
Bring 2 quarts of water to boil in a pot or kettle
Good Medicine: You can use hot water for your foot soak and receive many benefits.
Better Medicine: You can add medicinal ingredients to increase the effect of the foot soak. Simple medicinal add-ins are epsom salts or slices of fresh ginger.
Best Medicine: For an extremely potent foot soak, ancient formulas of herbs are used to increase and specialize the effect of the soak. To find out more of the specifics, check out our foot soak catalog here.
Place 1-2 herbal pouches (or, as directed by your practitioner) into a heat-proof, non-reactive vessel and add boiling water. Steep for 10 minutes. Pour tea bag and herb liquid into soaking vessel. Add hot water as necessary to cover your ankles.

C) Add liquid herbs to Foot Basin
Pour tea bag and herb liquid into soaking vessel. Add hot water as necessary to cover your ankles. Larger basins may require more water.

D) Confirm The Soak Temperature
Extremely important for those with impaired sensation in their extremities.The temperature should be between 105-112 degrees Fahrenheit (check using a thermometer). If this temperature feels uncomfortable when first starting to soak, it is ok to work up to this temperature gradually.

E) Sit & Soak
Choose a place where you will not be exposed to drafts and disruptions. It is best to avoid television or other electronics while soaking. Use the time to sit quietly, meditate, pray, or engage in pleasant conversation.

F) Maintain Soak Temperature
It is important to maintain the soak temperature in the therapeutic range of 105-112 degrees Fahrenheit for the duration of the soak (30-45 minutes). The easiest way to do this is to use an electric kettle to add small amounts of boiling water to the soaking basin every 5-10 minutes. Please Exercise Extreme Caution: Remove your feet from the bin when adding hot water and be very careful using electric appliances around water. Always confirm the soak temperature is below 112 degrees Fahrenheit before putting your feet back in the soak.

Other Helpful Treatments For Circulation

Acupuncture
Perhaps acupuncture’s greatest asset as a treatment modality is the precision at which, it can encourage the circulation of the body. Bad acupuncture can alleviate pain and promote general circulation. Good acupuncture can harmonize the organs of the body, extract and eliminate deeply held pathogenic influences in the tissues, and clear the mind.

Chinese Herbal Medicine
Chinese herbal medicine has an entire collection of herbs that may be used to increase the circulation of the body in both micro or targeted, and macro or general, sense. While the vast majority of these herbs are plant substances, there are a few medicinals that fall outside of the traditional category of plant. My article, How Bugs Can Heal Chronic Pain & Disease is a discussion about one subset of these medicinals.

Bodywork
Whether you’re talking Osteopathic, Chiropractic, or more traditional massage therapy, a good body worker is worth their weight in gold. Good bodywork can pinpoint the problematic area in the tissues of the body and remove it, restoring flow and encouraging the health of the entire person.

Step Three: Find A Health Expert & Comrade
(Not The Internet)

While the internet is an incredible place for the sharing of ideas, it is a terrible place for editing out bad ones. I’ve seen more patients damaged by following bad internet advice than almost any other source of information or treatment out there. Please be careful when receiving advice from sources that you have no way of dialoging with. Health advice should come with a platform of participation on both ends. It should include clear directions and signs of progress or deterioration. If the advice you’re getting is vague or lacking this basic partnership, do not follow it.

On the plus side, the internet can be a great place to find health comrades or experts to work with directly. There are so many good practitioners that can assist you on your path to health, wisdom, and happiness. You just need to find them.

Which Type of Medicine Is Best For me?
Stay connected for a future article dedicated to describing the strengths and weakness of various modalities of medicine. But in the meantime, rather than focusing on the type of medicine to try, I would recommend focusing instead on finding the right person as a practitioner, for you. This person should be trustworthy, intelligent, and credentialed within the context of their given field. They should be able to communicate well with you so that you can adequately understand your situation and what they think about it. They should also have a referral team of other practitioners whom they trust, that do different kinds of work than they do. In this way, finding the right practitioner can mean finding the right network of practitioners who are available upon need.

The best way to find the right practitioner is often through the referral of others, so don’t forget to ask trusted friends and family members about who could be right for you. If you happen to live in the Portland area or in the Pacific North West in general, me and the members of the Root & Branch team would be happy to recommend a practitioner who might be good for you. Feel free to book a free conversation with one of our experts here or virtually contact us via email or phone, here.

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Your Greatest Asset

One of the best things about being a human is not having to do it alone. In our culture we tend to think of our health as an individual thing, but it’s not! We exist in communities now as we always have. While it is, of course, important to cultivate the integrity of our health as an individual, it’s equally important to cultivate the health of ourselves as a people.

Please do not feel that you need to do this life alone. There are many humans as well as resources to assist you. And with such assistance, your journey of aging can be one of happiness and wisdom. Just give it some time.

Let's be honest... You are lying.

The world of natural health and healing is no stranger to bold claims. Many of us stand at odds with the status quo in healthcare. We are trying to change the way people think about their bodies and their relationships to disease and to accomplish those changes sometimes we get loud. We rely on inflammatory headlines (like this one) to draw people into an article or to a video. Sometimes that reliance on bold text crosses over into hyperbole and then into unsubstantiated claims about this food or that drug; about how Monsanto is trying to kill us all because Round-Up was originally designed to clean pipes (it wasn't); about how the environment is so full of mold and toxic chemicals that we all need to be regularly detoxing to avoid the diseases of modern living (interesting idea but you're gonna need to support that with some data). Here's my favorite one lately and the inspiration for this post:

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"I would never feed me or my kids margarine. It's one molecule away from plastic."

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This handy little comparison has been applied to lots of processed foods to illustrate their deeply harmful nature.

"Cool whip is one molecule away from styrofoam or "Cheez Wiz is only two molecules different from garbage bags"

So here's the thing: that might be true. I actually don't know what the chemical composition is of margarine or Cool Whip or Cheez Wiz nor do I know how it compares to plastic. But that really doesn't matter. I know it seems like it might. But it definitely doesn't. Lots of things are just one molecule or one DNA pair away from other things and yet those things are not at all the same. They don't have the same properties or effects on the body or the environment. For example: Humans are just a few DNA links away from Chimps. Or how about Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2)? It is one atom (not even a molecule which is a collection of atoms and much larger than a single atom) away from water (H2O). How bout you fill me up a big glass of Hydrogen Peroxide since it is only one atom away from water, it must be roughly the same right? Or if you don't like thinking about it that way, you'll need to immediately stop drinking water since it is only one atom different from Hydrogen Peroxide and is probably subtly killing your gut bacteria leading to leaky gut syndrome right? The whole comparison is patently ridiculous. 

Ok but you never fell for those kinds of memes or chain emails. You're not an anti-vaxxer or a heavy metal chelator or a chronic detoxer. You like to be healthy, eat good food, be responsible as often as possible. Awesome! That is great news! But there are some things we need to talk about. Because margarine IS a terrible product. So are Cheez Wiz and Cool Whip. And we need to talk about why they are bad products in all the ways that they are bad -- the resources used to manufacture them, the actual ingredients they contain and the verifiable effect those ingredients have on health, the environmental cost to producing the food and its packaging, and let's not forget about the taste! Those products taste terrible, especially once you free your Patty Hearst tastebuds from the stockholm sydrome they're processing from years of eating crap food. But one of the reasons that margarine and all the rest are terrible foods is not because they are one molecule away from plastic (if that is even accurate). And making statements like that one ping hard on rational radars as indicators for people who are so far gone from reasonable discussion that they can be discounted. Perpetuating false narratives about problematic foods or chemicals or processes only leads us into folly where the people who could actually regulate those industries and make changes to benefit us all, see the people screaming hysterical alarm as poorly informed lemmings who listen to the opinions of the Medical Medium and Gwenyth Paltrow as gospel and internalize their fringe points of view to help foment their distrust.

Classically, in order for a person to tell a lie, the person speaking must know that what they are saying is false. There is a presumption in the word lie that there is some intent to deceive -- to misrepresent what the speaker knows is true for some particular gain, often a gain considered nefarious or at least self-interested. So when I tell you that it's time to stop lying, maybe I'm reaching too far. Maybe you didn't know that what you were saying was false, but so much of what I see repeated on the internet is so obviously false or can be determined false with about three minutes of Googling, that it's hard to not hold people accountable for the crap they are perpetuating. 

What am I talking about?

I work in an “alternative” medicine field. I practice Chinese Medicine in America where our medical system is at best dysfunctional and at worst actively working to prevent people from getting the care they need to live healthy and fulfilling lives. In this miasma of complex health pathologies, many people are looking for answers to their woes. They are looking to understand why they can’t stop coughing or why they always feel tired; why they can’t seem to sleep or why their libido is way lower than they would like. For so many of these conditions, biomedicine has little in the way of an answer. If all the blood tests come back negative and the symptoms don’t fit a known disease, well… just wait ‘til it gets worse then come back to see us. Maybe we’ll know what’s wrong then.

Trouble is, people want to know WHY, and they are going to look for answers wherever they can find them, and today that means going to Google and asking the question. You might find a forum for people with your symptoms or a WebMD article that hopefully doesn’t suggest you likely have cancer. You might commiserate with the online communities you have discovered and learn about different treatment options that “mainstream medicine” isn’t talking about. You might even learn about how some environmental toxin (mold, heavy metals, pesticides) or a food component (gluten, casein, fructose) is likely the cause of your myriad symptoms — how Big Pharma and Big Ag are conspiring with Corporate America to keep you sick because there is good money in your illness. You might start to feel beaten down, taken advantage of, and then a lot people start to get mad. They become zealots for a new “healthy” living movement. They listen to gurus and life coaches and many of them arrive at an “alternative” clinic wanting to know how Acupuncture can help them overcome the Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO) symptoms that are manifesting as fibromyalgia, hypothyroidism, and depression. They read about a woman in Boulder who was able to completely get rid of her autoimmune condition by eating only sprouted greens and bananas and using Chinese Medicine therapies. They want to know what herbs they can take to help purge the heavy metals from the fillings in their teeth and what sort of cleanses they can do to get rid of the unnamed toxins coursing through their bodies every day. And because people in medicine are usually in that business because they want to help people, we answer their questions and guide them along our own experiences and impart our own biases and points of view. It’s completely natural this whole process. And its completely misguided.

Don’t get me wrong. Heavy metals and pesticides are dangerous and harmful. Mold can set up shop in your sinuses and lungs and cause all sorts of problems. Unmanaged hormones and neurotransmitters can wreak havoc on people’s sense of health and well-being. The problem comes in when we start to assume that we are not actually part of the world around us. That we are individuals, fighting against other individuals, fate, and the poor choices of people in the past instead of realizing that we are a continuum. Not people in a continuum but the continuum itself. We are just as responsible for processing chemical contaminants, as we see them, as the rocks and the oceans, and the clouds. We are dynamic members of a complex web of living creatures and biomes, but we are constructing our realities. We give breath and life to our diseases. We give in to the idea, created millenia ago, that our bodies are corrupt and will ultimately betray us either through their irrepressible desires or through their inevitable mechanical failure.

Instead, we have to begin the practice of seeing ourselves as part of the global whole, not truly separate from other living things on the planet, certainly not separate from other humans, and definitely not independent of the people that have come before us. Our health is a complex constellation of factors that is more than a little influenced by our internal narratives, and commiseration can be empowering to know that you are not alone in your struggle but can quickly become a toxic echo chamber where a path out is beset on all sides by people selling snake oil. No matter what your suffering looks like, there is a way to feel better. It relies on you more than on celery juice enemas or high-quality supplements that cost a lot of money. It requires that you lean into your history and on the wisdom of humans collected over the 30,000 years we have been wandering the planet. Harmony with the world around you, not viewing disagreement as conflict and conspiracy, feeling the changes in the seasons and shifting your lifestyle accordingly, giving yourself the empowered permission to make big changes in your life that might at first glance seem impossible — these are just some of the practices that lead us away from the outrage that margarine is only one molecule away from plastic (factual reality still unknown) and into an informed intellectual position where we can truly assess the claims of healers and salespeople without the weight of conspiracy and exploitation at the front of our minds.

The time is now. Stop sharing BS articles that aren’t based in reality. Stop feeding your outrage machine. Embrace your life as it is and ease into change when it feels right. Cultivate your appetites for food and distraction. Give yourself permission to be powerful and in control but also know that leaning into the swirling river around you is often the best way to find satisfaction. You got this.

Bulk Herbs and the Power of Decoction

A Post for Practitioners

(but you can read it even if you’re not one)

When people think back to the origin of our medicine, images of people searching the forests and fields for special plants and minerals that could cure pathological conditions is certainly part of the imagery. Those ingredients, broadly referred to as herbs even though many of them are animal parts or minerals, became the cornerstone of the internal medicine components of what would evolve into Chinese Medicine today. Indeed, the use of powerful herbs is not unique to East Asia and not even unique to pre-modern people. Some assessments put over 80% of modern pharmaceuticals have their origins in compounds derived from plants and animals. Searching for balance or counterbalance in the natural world is perhaps one of the most unifying characteristics of human beings across all cultures and all times.

As a contemporary practitioner of Chinese Medicine, I lean heavily on the knowledge of our predecessors. I use their recorded insights as they refined their craft and documented their findings in the literal millennia of case studies and then commentary on those case studies that form the bulk of the classical basis for modern practice. I look to formulations of different herbs that have been tried and found effective in clinical practice nearly every time that I want to help a patient with their different problems and wellness limitations. And when I finally put together the treatment plan for those conditions, I almost always reach to whole plant medicine. In the same way that I want to eat whole foods as close to their form in nature as possible, so too do I want to build remedies that are as close to the natural world as possible. Our bodies are evolved to process and utilize that which it understands, and it struggles to make use of that which is unknown or unrecognizable.

Yet we all know that patient compliance is often a challenge when prescribing herbal medicine. Cooking herbs into medicinal tea can be time-consuming for people and confusing for patients to navigate on their own. Even patients with the time and intention find themselves forgetting to prepare herbs or using methods that don’t yield the most potent solution. So in our pharmacy we decided to cut out the compliance middleman and do the work ourselves. Using filtered and mineralized water, Root & Branch will cook your patient’s herbs for them to make sure they get the most potent brew to help resolve their ailments.

We use electric pressure cookers to decoct herbs in our shop. We have experimented extensively with cook times, temperatures, and water levels to create a process that produces potent extractions. We are able to maintain the volatile components of short boil herbs by condensing them back into the decoction or by using a more traditional “add at the end” method. If you use our decoction services, please specify “add at the end” when building your formula if that is your preference. All of our decoctions leave the shop in sanitized, reusable, tempered-glass jars that keep those decoctions food safe in the refrigerator for as many as 10 days.  But please adhere to the “Best-Buy” date in your patient’s herb packet.

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Talking to Patients about Cooking their Herbs at Home

Some of your patients might want to still cook their herbs at home. I have a few folks who really love the idea of brewing their own remedies, and they enjoy having an intimate connection to the process of their healing. For those people, we designed an easy infographic that lays out how to cook herbs on the stovetop using the traditional, double-boil method. But for a lot of patients, cooking herbs in a pot, especially cooking herbs everyday in a pot, can get cumbersome for even the most motivated of them. So we decided to share our pressure cooker methods too. We’ve reproduced them here as a way to help you talk to them about cooking herbs in a pressure cooker or maybe even trying it yourself:

Formula to Consider:

Dang Shen - root (tonic)
Cang Zhu - root (aromatic)
Fu Ling - rootesque (draining)
Gan Cao - root
Sheng Jiang - rhizome (acrid)
Da Zao - fruit (sweet)
Chen Pi - peel (aromatic)
Jiang Zhi Ban Xia - rhizome
Cao Guo - fruit (aromatic)

1. Determine which of your herbs are going in for the pressure cook stage and which might need to be short boiled

   As a general rule, herbs that are roots, fruits, sticks, or minerals go into the pot for the pressure stage. In particular, herbs that are tonic in nature, especially those that are sweet or slightly cloying definitely go into the pot for the pressure stage. For herbs that are more aromatic in nature, they are likely to be short-boiled at the end of the process. Such herbs might include Bo He (mint), Gui Zhi/Rou Gui (cinnamon), Sha Ren (grains of paradise fruit), or Jing Jie (schizonepeta), especially if you are using them for their ability to cut through turbidity or to expel the exterior.

   We have even taken this process of selection to a more specific level than I would expect from patients. Let’s use the formula to the right to highlight how we would create a decoction for our own patients:

   Herbs for Pressure Stage: Dang Shen, Fu ling, Gan Cao, Sheng Jiang, Da Zao, Ban Xia

   All the herbs listed for pressure stage are herbs that are heavy, dense, tonic, sweet, or are needed to harmonize the actions of the other herbs. These types of herbs can withstand the increased temperature of cooking under pressure and, in our experience, are more deeply extracted when cooked at a higher temperature.

   Herbs for Open-Lid Cooking: Cang Zhu, Chen Pi

   The herbs listed for Open Lid Cooking are herbs that would normally be cooked with the first group if you were doing stove top cooking but in the case of using a pressure cooking device, we have found that there more gentle aromatics are damaged by the added head and while some of their more volatile elements will condense back into the cooking chamber, side-by-side comparisons in our pharmacy show a more potent flavor profile when these herbs are not subjected to the additional heat of a pressure cook. These types of herbs should be set aside from the rest and soaked in just enough hot water to cover them while the first group of herbs is being cooked (see more details about how to do that below). Once the pressure has reduced and safety pin has released, open the pot and add this “open-lid cooking” group of herbs (and the liquid they have been soaking in) to the decoction. Set your cooker to saute, or whatever equivalent setting will get the liquid boiling again, and cook for 10-12 minutes.

   Herbs for True Short-Boil: Cao Guo

   This last group of herbs represents what most experienced herb cooks will recognize as a “short-boil” herb. That is, an herb whose extremely aromatic nature (i.e. high concentration of volatile flavor compounds)is lost with extensive application of heat. In order to preserve the potency of these herbs in a decoction they should be added once all other cooking is done and simmered for no more than 5 minutes. For some of the most aromatic ingredients, I will grind them into a coarse powder and add them to the hot, finished decoction and let the ground herbs steep like tea, with the HEAT TURNED OFF. Once they infuse for 5-8 mintes with no additional heat, I will strain the whole mixture and hot pack into sterile jars.

2. Figure our how much water you need to cook your herbs

   We use a basic calculation as a starting point for all of our decoctions and then make modifications based on the specific formula ingredients:

   Water required = final volume of finished decoction + 20%

   So to put that into context, we cook most of our formulas 7 days at a time, and we send out those 7 days worth of herbs in 7, pint-sized, glass canning jars. So for 7 days of herbs, we send out a total of 14 cups of finished decoction or 3.5 quarts. That means that for our water requirement calculation, we use the final volume of finished decoction (14 cups) + 20% (3 cups) for a total water requirement of 17 cups (a little more than a gallon).

   However, some herbs that might be in a formula could be more voluminous (i.e. Zhu Ru, Shui Niu Jiao, Tong Cao) or more dense and heavy (i.e. mu li, e zhu, dai zhi hi). This change in volume will require an increase or a reduction of water so that you can get a solid extraction but still managing the total liquid so you don’t have gallons to drink. This is where the art of herb cooking comes in and we recommend that as you start down the road of cooking your own herbs (stovetop or pressure cooker), you have a small notebook where you can keep info about the ingredients in a formula, how much water you put into the cooking pot, and how much yield you got in the end. That way you will have data points to use in informing your instincts around right amounts of water or not.

3. Cook the herbs

   Once you know the order of our herb cooking and how much water you are going to use, it’s time to get cooking. Add your pressure cook group to the pot. Put your open-lid group in a bowl near to your cooking station. Do the same with the short-boil group. Pour just enough water over each group of herbs to get them barely submerged (Be conservative here. We want them to start hydrating while the pressure group cooks, but we want most of the water in the cooking pot). Pour the remaining water into your pressure cooker with the pressure cook group of herbs, put on the lid, and set the cook time to 20 minutes of low-pressure cooking.

   Allow the pot to go through its complete cook cycle, and DO NOT vent the steam. Allowing the pot to cool naturally will force any volatile components in the chamber back into the solution and once the safety pin drops you can open the lid to add your soaked open-top group to the pot. Once you have the first two groups in the cook pot, change the setting to saute (or other equivalent setting on non-Instant Pot brand machines that will allow the contents to come to a boil) and cook at a very low boil for 15-20 minutes.

   Once you have finished cooking the second group, turn the heat off and add the short-boil group to your pot. Allow the short boil to steep for 5-8 minutes.

4. Strain and drink

   Strain out all the herbs you’ve used and compost them. Divide your finished decoction into the appropriate number of doses per your prescription, and store them in the fridge.

Important Points about Decoction Service at R&B

 1.) Because of food safety concerns with shipping, decoction Service is only available for patients who are able to come to the pharmacy in person to pick up their cooked herbs.

2.) R&B cooks  1 day’s herbs (usually also one bag) into one (1), 16oz jar of finished decoction. Dosing therefore is usually 1/2 jar (8oz) per dose, 2 times per day. Exact volume will vary depending on the herbs in a formula and the number of days being cooked. IF YOU NEED EXACT VOLUMES FOR YOUR PATIENTS, you may want your patients to cook their herbs at home.

3.) In order to guarantee that decoctions are fresh and safe to consume, R&B CANNOT decoct more than 7 days worth of herbs at a time (i.e. no more than seven jars of decoction at a time).

4.) From the time payment is received for herbs, it usually takes 2.5 hours for the herbs to be cooked, cooled, and packaged. Please advise your patients accordingly. They will receive a text notification that there herbs are ready for pick-up.

5.) Decoction service costs $5.00 which pays for a portion of the jars and carriers, as well as the labor to wash, sanitize, and restock the equipment

Chinese Medicine is NOT Energy Medicine

Travis Kern MAcOM, L.Ac.

Feel the resonant, cosmic, potent, masculo/feminine, Gaia/Kwan Yin presence

Ok, ok, ok! Put down the crystals friend. I'm not insulting your sense of energy and the flow of cosmic forces through the human experience. Well, I'm not directly insulting those sensibilities, but I am questioning how we understand the language of Chinese Medicine and by extension a whole host of "New Age" concepts like energy healing, auras, chakras, vibrational medicine, and many many others. And by the way, the New Age is hardly New any more. It fact, it has it's own vocabulary, jargon, and style that gives it a distinctly dated feel. 

So here's the rub: Saying that Chinese Medicine or Reiki or Yoga or Aura Atunements are energy medicine makes a significant assumption about the nature of reality -- an assumption that is based on a distinctly Western understanding of what it means to be real and extant and is heavily influenced by the moral dimensions of Christian thought, especially the sort of Christian thought that was brought to the American colonies by our ancestors. So there are really two dimensions of assumptions that I want to explore. The first has do with what is real and the second has to do with Satan waiting for your in the wilderness. Let's begin.

Primary Assumption in the term Energy Medicine: You can understand what is real and you are distinctly part of "real"

This assumption asserts that reality is a collection of solid objects that are animated by another force called "energy" or "spirit" or "vibration," and it is this other force, separate from the solid objects that it animates, that creates the activity of life. It doesn't matter which word you use to describe this separate force because they are all touching on the same idea, and they all conjure a similar image to mind -- that of the meat-filled, skin bag human excited and propelled by an ethereal, mysterious force that might be translucent like Casper, glow from the fingertips like an Xman, or pulse around the body like a rainbow disco show only visible to those with the gift.

This image presumes that human beings are composed of two opposing, dualistic natures, one of substance with little character which is plagued by base instincts and another of heavenly light and cosmic potency that is glorious and mighty to behold (if you have that ability of course). Hold on champ! We've got a problem - dualism is a fundamentally limiting perspective. Instead of understanding and knowing the infinite complexity of existence, we're stuck with only two forces to make sense of our experience. 

"But that sounds just like Yin and Yang," you say! "Aren't you a Chinese Medicine practitioner? A student of Dao? How can you dismiss this idea?"

The thing is, you're almost right. It is almost Yin Yang Theory. Except that Yin and Yang are just parts of a complex system that is not based on two things. It's based on one thing: Dao. Which emanates to two things: Yin and Yang. Which begat the three things: Heaven, Human, Earth. Which birthed the four seasons and the five elements and then the ten thousand things (i.e. everything else). Yin and Yang are part of a larger constellation that is not about substance but about movement -- about change. In fact, Yin and Yang are concepts that reflect the way that things change, not what they are but how they move from one state of being to another. It is a constant question of interplay and dynamic transformation. To be one thing is to stagnate and ultimately to descend into permanent suffering.  

Assuming that you can manipulate the energy of something demands that the energy of whatever you are manipulating is a component part of a mechanized whole, that it is like gas in a car or circuits in a computer. Standard biomedicine doctors are trying to fix the parts of the substance (the things they can observe and measure), and contemporary energy workers want to work with the ethereal (the things they can sense and feel). Each group is really doing the same thing -- being a mechanic who is repairing the part of the structure or spirit that is broken. But what if you are not actually made of substance or spirit? What if you're not really made at all in the way that most of us think of it. You're not a peanut butter sandwich and you're not a multi-phasic dimensional ghost. Stop assuming you can repair anything and/or stop assuming you have magic powers. I wanted to be McGyver and I wanted to be Hermione too but that ship has sailed. You can help bodies remember how to be whole and functional, but it's not because you shot invisible light and good vibes out of your forehead and fingertips, or because you replaced 1000 knees in surgery. 

Now let me be clear....
You can't help bodies return to physiology and dynamic health with  magic, nor can you do it with biological science. This is not a rational science apologia. The acupuncture needles aren't stimulating cytokine/immunoglobulin/heat protein cascades through your lymph/immune/cardiac/myofascial systems either. Well they might be doing those things if we could actually measure them (which we can't seem to... but one day amiright?), but that's not why it works. At least, that's not why it works within the framework of the system that created that tool. Chinese Medicine is not dependent on lab tests and petri dishes, nor is it dependent on belief or electric energetic forces. It is reliant on the observation of dynamic movements in nature, the earnest effort to understand those movements, and to apply the concepts that those changes represent to the human condition. Because as it turns out, we aren't actually separate from anything around us.  We don't have dominion over all the other things on the planet. The idea that we are superior or wholly unique from everything else is part of that morality stuff I mentioned earlier. Gosh we have so much to talk about.

And I guess this explanation still isn't very clear. 

How about a comparative example?

Setting: Ancient times - when people were superstitious and dumb

There are definitely bad things that live here. Maybe even a ROUS...

So here you are walking along through the woods when suddenly you realize you have strayed into the forbidden swamps of the ancestors. Here is a no-pass land, long slapped with a metaphorical verboden sign because it is well known that the spirits that live in this place cause illness and death to those that enter. Though if you are strong and young and still possessed of the good stock given to you by your own ancestors, it is possible to survive a walk through these bogs, but nonetheless, a travel pass is not recommended. Yet here you are. Suddenly bitten by a swarm of gnats and assaulted by foul-smelling air, you bolt from your position across the swamps and back home where within a day you start to feel ill.

Chills and fever take hold of you and the local healer declares that you have been possessed of a foul force from the swamps. It has broken through your charms and defenses and that you will need the smoke of healing herbs and the poultices made of tree barks to cure you.  It's hard to know which spirits are the ones that are attacking you and without that info, the healing approach is in broad strokes. But you are young and from good people so hopefully the protection offered to you from your own family spirits will be strong enough to survive. You'll make it. A little worse for wear but you make it.  

---

Setting: Contemporary Times - when people know what's real and aren't bound by ridiculous assumptions

It's just a casual walk in the woods. Good for you, right?

So you're hiking in Mt. Hood National forest when you realize that it's colder out here on the trail than you had imagined and you don't have a nice North Face fleece to cover up with. It's cool you think, punning to yourself quietly, and you carry on with your hike. You've been assaulted by a few No-See-Ums while walking along but you brought your handy bug spray so you're pretty comfortable. By the time you get back to your car though you've got a little sniffle and you hope it doesn't get worse.

The next morning you are sick. Sneezing, hacking, your through feels full of razor blades and you know you need to see the doctor. They tell you that you have a bacterial infection in your throat and lungs. These pathogens probably entered through your mouth and nose and set up shop while your immune system was depressed by the cold. These bugs are causing your symptoms, but they're not sure which one's they are. So take these antibiotics to see if it'll get rid of them and if not, you're young and strong with good genes. You'll be ok. A little uncomfortable but Ok.

---

Comparison: They are the same thing.

Both of these scenarios describe a similarly observable process. They both are looking at a sick person and trying to understand how that person went from being healthy to being sick. Each of them relying on a set of knowledge and a system of analysis to determine the answer to the question. Now I don't mean that one is real and one is a metaphor for something real. I mean that these stories are just using particular vocabulary to describe the same thing. Healthy becomes sick. Microbes and spirits? The same thing. Whoa snap! I know. I sound like a crazy person to both camps but seriously just sit with it a minute. Have you ever seen a microbe yourself? Have you ever seen an ancestor spirit yourself? Have you been to Havanah before? Yeah like in Cuba? But all or some of these things are real? How do you know? What is it to be real? Whew ok, lets take a step back from the post-modern, relativistic anarchy and just breathe.

In

and out

Just breathe a second, and feel the air. 

I am not trying to collapse the world down on itself to say that all the things are just one thing, in fact that they are not even "things" as such, and that how you view the world, no matter which frame of reference you are using is not more or less real than any other. That, in fact, there is no sense of real because nothing is fixed, and everything that we truly understand or try to understand is a moving target. Wait, actually that is what I am doing. 

The parameters of our language create boundaries around our experience by the nature of description. Can we understand things without words for them? Can we see that energy and body are not separate nor are they joined? They are the same thing moving in different spheres and observed in different frameworks. By observing a phenomenon we are intrinsically changing it (concept credit to a white guy from a while back who probably didn't actually think of it but got credit for it anyway).

Chinese Medicine isn't Energy Medicine because that is a limited and erroneous description. People don't get better because my acupuncture needles manipulated their energy flow or because your invisibly glowing hands moved their cancer out of the way or because your good vibes made The Secret come to life. It's because when we work in a sphere that is speciously described as an energy space, we are softening the edges of our own "realness" and experiencing ever so briefly the interconnected fabric of Dao. Our pattern of health and wellness is laid over the pattern of disease and disorder when those boundaries are loosened, and they interact. I don't do anything accept make the space; open my mind to the very difficult idea that what we are all experiencing is only an infinitely small fraction of what is moving in, around, and through us. The actual healing that happens is the flow and movement of existence on a macro scale. You can cut out a tumor or lay in downward-facing-dog or chant or take pills or smoke drugs to solve your ails, but none of those things is the treatment really. They are tools to accessing the pattern of things. Not a magical pattern to be stored in some grimoire or a rational pattern to be tracked by electron microscopes -- just the pattern that even gives us the framework to read grimoires and see microscopes. 

A little jazz hands or maybe spirit fingers or maybe it's just waving. But the demons are waving at YOU!!

So about Satan and the forest:

If the world is dominated by two forces: body and spirit, up and down, hot and cold -- then one of the core anchors of a dualistic world view is that Good and Evil also stand in opposition to each other. God and Satan. Even if you're a polytheist or a nature worshiper, what is the fundamental relationship at play in your pantheon? My guess is probably Good and Evil. Or if you're a super modern person maybe it's Good and Apathy. Even still, this idea of good and evil is reflected in our love of spirit and energy and our derision of animal and substantive. Our society looks at our physical selves as machines in the process of decline and popular nutrition and baseless science is constantly trying to purge your body of all the toxins it has absorbed or created, all in an effort to restore your pristine, "natural" self. Your clean soul, free from the dark influences of indulgence and a lack of self-control. Take your vitamins even if you don't feel like they do anything for you because it's important to build up health brownie points for the time in the future when your skinbag starts to fray.

Satan has long been depicted as waiting in the dark forests of the Americas. Living and working through people of color and natives, warping their minds and filling them with notions of unmarried sex, demonic chanting, and the reverence for the very natural world that has been infused with disease. That same fear has been at the heart of Western empirical thought even as the very people who started the Enlightenment worked to release themselves from the shackles of what they saw as an oppressive religion. And yet, the idea of your body as flawed and impure has persisted, even among people spending time at Free Love Ashrams.

But wait, you're a free-thinking atheist (sometimes agnostic) who has spend years working and studying the Eastern Ways and you know that the world is in fact filled with poisons and horrors that must be purged.

Sure. Ok. But if you are taking a collection of plants and supplements that have words attached to them like: natural purgative, anti-inflammatory, emetic, demulscent, restorative, curative, immuno-supportive; and you are consuming these products with the aim to "purge toxins," to "cleanse the liver," or to "expel  heavy metals," then you should know ahead of time which toxins and metals you are targeting and then you should have some way of measuring whether or not those things are actually happening. You are living and working in the world of biomedical, reductionist science (even if the treatment is called natural and chemical free) because you and your practitioner are thinking about your body in this substantive way -- that you are biological machine who needs its oil changed because ENVIRONMENTAL TOXINS/MOLD/FUNGUS/GLUTEN/NIGHTSHADES. But fear that these toxin monsters are lying in wait with henchman from Big Pharma and Monsanto who are all waiting to destroy you is just the Devil in a new form. It is the Puritans exacting control from 500 years in the past. Western culture has not shaken the influence of Abraham, and American culture in particular has made a new religion of fitness and health among some of the least healthy and high-strung people on the planet.  

And look, I feel that tension myself every day. We are all of us in the US entwined with our past and our history. We have not left it. We have not evolved beyond it. It is our ancestry -- in Chinese Medicine terms, it is our cultural Jing. And we can't start being vegetarians until our great great great auntie has had her fill of steak. 

So how how about those action items?

The only way out of the mind bend is to work to internalize every day that how we have been trained to know and understand the world is not objective. Science with an capital S is not without a point of view -- not without assumptions in the same way that our tribal or religious ancestors made assumptions about reality. The fact that you saw a video on Facebook of a virus attacking cells and injecting its DNA into those cells to reproduce is not itself evidence of an incontrovertible truth about existence. The real truth is that almost no one has seen with their own eyes what that video showed you. It was made in a computer, an example of what we believe is happening based on our observations of lots of other factors. When your doctor tests your blood for infections, they don't look at your blood in a microscope and see all those badboy microbes puttin' a beat down on your cells. It's more complicated than that and much less exact. Certainty is an armor against the scary truth that profound humans have been spouting on about for millennia: The world is largely unknowable in any concrete way and sitting with the certainty that things are the way they seem to be, is the root of inquisitions. The only certainty is that there is no certainty (concept credit to Neo or did Confuscious say? Look for a meme. I'm sure it'll be a wrong attribution).

Chinese Medicine is NOT energy medicine because there is no energy and there is no medicine. And of course both energy and medicine do also exist. Sort of. The answer is Yes and it is No. Because the answer is not what is important. It's the space between the answers and the transition from one answer to the next which gives us the only real insight into what is.

The Power & Poise of Chinese Herbal Medicine

Travis Cunningham L.Ac.

    Where I live in Portland, Oregon, many people share an interest in natural medicine. There are two Chinese medicine schools in town, a Chiropractic school, a Massage school, the oldest Naturopathic school in the country, and a medical school which specializes in Integrative Medicine. With such an abundance of natural medicine to choose from, why would someone pick a medicine that does not draw its roots from local soil? Wouldn’t it be better to choose medicine that is grown, stored and processed here? Why should people give Chinese herbal medicine a shot?

    All of these questions are valid. And as a Chinese medicine practitioner, I have been asked them many times. The answer lies within the uniqueness of assessment, diagnosis, and treatment that Chinese herbal medicine can offer. This begins with the medicine’s focus on relationship.

Understanding the Relationship

The focus of a Chinese medical assessment is not based on the physics of what is happening in your body. This assessment is actually more concerned with understanding the relationship between your component parts (e.g. your organs, tissues, or bones). Our understanding is expressed using a kind of symbolic language. These symbols are taken from activities and movements that ancient people observed within nature and then observed that those natural processes had an apparent likeness to activities within the human body.

Knowing the History

The Chinese Medicine understanding of combining herbal remedies is backed up by thousands of years of writing and experimentation. The older writings that exist on the various topics of herbal medicine also have hundreds of years of commentary and discussion by physicians of past and present. In a very real sense,  Chinese herbal medicine has close to two thousand years of peer review. This fact alone may suffice to make it worthy of consideration for modern people.

Defining the Symbol

Natural experiences like heat, cold, dampness, dryness, and wind, are described as they appear in a person’s body presentation. Shaking, for example, with its sudden appearance and disappearance, tremor and vibration are caused by wind. The ancients observed the air suddenly moving and gusting, shaking the leaves of the trees and blowing debris along the ground, and they carried this experience to their understanding of human physiology.

Symbols such as Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water, were also chosen to emphasize patterns of functional movement within the body. The Lungs and the Large Intestine both descend and consolidate, as is the movement of Metal in nature. The Lungs breathe in air (descent), and consolidate the essence of air into nourishment for the body. The Large Intestine descends the stool and consolidates moisture for optimal elimination. Every major organ is looked at by a similar likeness with a corresponding movement in nature.

The ancient Chinese found that when these movement patterns were happening harmoniously and in just the right amount, a person was happy and healthy. While, a disharmony or mismanagement of these movement patterns led to disease. When these nature-based symbols are used together in an evaluation, a Chinese medicine practitioner can form a type of diagnosis called a pattern. A pattern reflects the relationship of harmony and disharmony within a person’s body.

Finding the Pattern

All Chinese medical treatment, whether acupuncture, moxibustion, cupping, gua sha, or herbal medicine is done to address a person’s pattern. This is different than targeting the person’s disease (as is done in biomedicine). If we seek the destruction of an illness we require a force to eliminate it. If, however, we seek to restore a pattern of functional movement, all that we require is a guide. This guide can be less forceful, but it must be precise. The cultivation of precision is the skillset of the Chinese medical practitioner. This skillset is practiced through a careful differentiation of the pattern. 

Lets look at an example:
Two people catch a cold. Person A, has chills and fever, a slightly irritated sore throat, a headache on the sides of their head, and itchiness in the ears. Person B, has chills and fever, an intensely swollen and painful throat, and is sweating profusely.

Analysis:
Biomedically, these people may have the same virus attacking their systems. But in Chinese medicine, what is important is the pattern that such an illness presents within the individual. And in the example above, the pattern is different.

In person B, the intensely swollen, painful throat and profuse sweating indicate a heat pattern. In person A, the sore throat is less severe. The itchiness in the ears and location of the headache indicate that the illness has reached a different pathway (the Gallbladder or Shao Yang layer). The Chinese medical treatment will be different for each case, as it will tailor to the individual’s pattern.

As you can see, the pattern not only tells us about the disease, but also the relationship between the disease and the person’s constitution. This relationship is given a symbolic name with the terms discussed above (Example pattern: wind-heat invading the exterior). Treatment is given to principally address this relationship, and help assist the person restore their health (Example treatment principles: clear heat, vent wind, secure the exterior).

Choosing the Formula

To execute the above principles in the form of a treatment, a formula is chosen. A formula is a set of procedures that follow the direction of a treatment principle. In acupuncture, a formula is a list or set of acupuncture points, and the needling techniques of each point. In Chinese herbal medicine, a formula is a set of herbs given at a particular dosage and frequency of administration.

Chinese herbal medicine studies not only the effects of an individual herb, but pays particular attention to how that effect changes when herb A is combined with herb B. Herbs in combination can emphasize certain functional principles, or unlock new actions entirely.

The hot herb Fu Zi (Aconite) can be used to treat invasive cold patterns like neuropathy of the limb, by warming and dispersing the cold influence. But Fu Zi can only become a tonic for the heart, when it is combined with other sweet herbs like Gan Jiang (Dried Ginger) and Zhi Gan Cao (Prepared Licorice Root). In this case, Gan Jiang and Zhi Gan Cao also act to nullify the toxicity and harshness of Fu Zi, making the decoction or tea, safe to drink. While if you were to take Fu Zi by itself, the remedy might actually be dangerous.

Treating the Person

The strength of using Chinese medicine ultimately stems from the medicine's focus on treating the person. The perspective that Chinese medicine comes from is a view that believes in health as a natural phenomena. Health doesn't need to be forced, it can simply be encouraged. And with the right encouragement, a natural state of health and happiness can resume. Ease is, after all, easier than disease. 

How Tea Healed Me

Travis Cunningham L.Ac.

When people ask me, “Travis, why are you so into tea?” My answer inevitably points to my experience that tea is Medicine.

“You mean like, it’s good for your digestion?” they ask.

“Well, yes… but that's not quite the extent of it,” I say. It is at this point that words usually fall away from me. How could I possibly communicate just what tea has meant to me? What simple and precise words would paint a picture worthy of my own intimate experience? The truth is, that tea has changed my life. A story might be as close as we come to delivering our experience to another person. And so, If I know that person well enough, I usually tell them the following one:

The second time I drank tea with my teacher was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life.

As I climbed up the steps to the mystical tea room, I was a mix of turbulent emotion. My heart had just been broken by a woman with whom I was in love. The sting of those final moments of her memory haunted me. She was everywhere I went and would be nowhere, ever again.

As I passed through the doorway, my teacher greeted me with a smile. “It's good to see you again my friend,” said he.

“It's good to see you as well,” said I. My smile was an act of protection while I shook his hand in greeting.

“How are you?” He asked.

“I'm doing alright,” I replied, showing nothing to the tea master. “How are you?”

He looked at me for a moment and then smiled. “Not too well, actually,” he said, almost humorously. “It's been one hell of week.”

“Yeah,” I said, now smiling back. “It has.”

He leaned forward slightly as if speaking to a child. “But I think,” he said, “things are going to get better very soon.”

At that moment, the second and third guest walked through the door and the night began.

As the first, second, and then third tea were served, I relaxed into the glowing atmosphere of support. I was upheld by the people at the table, the tea plants, and the master himself. He was flawless. Telepathy was an understatement. Every time I had something to say, he knew. He would stop his “orchestra” of service, and ask for my thoughts.

The teas pulsed within me. Currents of magnetic and electric force seemed to rearrange my twisted heart. They took me into a place that was foreign to my recent experience -- a place of quiet and a place of peace.

Was this the tea? Or, was it the master? Was it the room, or its people? It was impossible to say. All I knew was that it felt good to be me again.

As my awareness came back to the room, the master pulled out a container from one of his back shelves. “This is something that I never serve,” he said. “But for whatever reason, it's calling out tonight.”

As he placed the precious tea into a bamboo cup, my eyes lit up at their site.

“These are flowers,” he explained, “from very old trees. We're going to drink this tea and see what they have to tell us.”

The flowers were pink and golden. They were the tiniest of things, and they seemed incredibly delicate. I had never seen such flowers in my life, nor have I seen them since.

As he poured the water into the flower-filled pot, my mood shifted. I became aware of my recent experiences and the darkness that characterized them. I could feel my emotions clearly, but somehow was not a part of them. They were objective; detached from me, but still present. They were like the smoke from an incense stick.

The master poured the tea into my cup. It smelled sweet and floral, like plums and orchids. I sipped it and savored the flavor - so sweet! So kind!

My eyes closed and I went inward. And then, I saw...a field!

My vision was as clear as the room I was in moments ago. It was a field filled with plants, valleys and hills. Most prominently, it was raining. It rained and it rained. All of my dread became clouds, and my sadness, the raindrops. There was no sunlight, and no flowers. How could there be?

“When will it stop?” I asked. “Will it ever stop?” But it went on and on.

It was then that I saw something. I saw the flower of one little plant. Except, the flower wasn't there yet. It was as if I were looking at the spirit of the flower to be.

The spirit of the flower was in the stem of the plant. And the closer I looked, the more I saw. The rain fell to the ground and into it's cracks. It found the roots of the plant and quenched their thirst. As the rainwater was absorbed, the spirit of the flower rose.

Suddenly, I became excited. The rain wasn't blocking the sunlight, it was helping that light turn into flowers! With every drop, the spirit of the flower rose. And though the flower came into sight only when the sun shone, it was nurtured in every moment by the rain. The flower was as much rain as it was sun!

It hit me then, that my dreaded and painful experiences were just like the rain. They were helping me make flowers.

I opened my eyes and tears fell down my cheeks. I smiled and wiped my face, concealing my private journey.

The tea master closed with a final tea. It was grounded and full. Soon after, we all said “thank you,” and went our separate ways. Though I did not share my experience with anyone that night, I am forever grateful to those that were there. Several of them would eventually become my close friends.

For me, tea is a medicine of the spirit. It is a friend which has stood by me long enough for me to give myself a second chance. I think any friend that can do this is one worth keeping around.

I work with tea because it has become a part of me. Every time I pour it, I am saying thank you - for all that tea has given me. It has given me relationships, teachers, friends, fun, and the ability to look at myself.