What They Came In For: Constipation

When Things Stop Moving

Bill came in because he was tired of feeling stuck. His digestion had gotten slower over the past few years, in the gradual way that these things often do. At first it meant less regularity, a missed day here and there, nothing he thought about much. By the time he scheduled with us, it was not uncommon for him to go three or four days without a bowel movement. When things did move, the movement was slow, dry, and incomplete.

"It's like my body just forgot how to do it," he said.

He was 68, semi-retired, and active by most measures. He walked his dog daily, made coffee for his wife every morning, and kept up with a small handful of long-standing friendships. The constipation was the one thing that had begun to organize his daily experience. He felt heavy after meals, bloated in the evenings, and often turned down food he would have enjoyed because the aftermath was not worth it. He was not in pain exactly. He was never quite at ease either.

His primary care doctor had told him it was normal at his age. Slow motility, probably. Drink more water, eat more fiber, take stool softeners as needed. Bill had done all of it. He drank plenty of water, ate oatmeal most mornings, took a daily magnesium supplement, and had tried psyllium husk, probiotics, and prune juice across various combinations and durations.

"It's not like I'm eating cheeseburgers every day," he told us. "I'm doing the right things. My gut's just not cooperating."

By the time he arrived at Root and Branch, his baseline had not really moved in years. He still had a proper bowel movement only once every three days, sometimes longer. The longer he went, the worse he felt. Foggy. Sluggish. He described a sense of things backing up in more ways than one.

What Slow Transit Looks Like Biomedically

Chronic constipation is one of the most common gastrointestinal complaints in older adults. Prevalence estimates run somewhere between 15 and 30 percent in people over 60, and the numbers climb further with each decade. The standard biomedical framework distinguishes between several functional categories: slow transit constipation, where stool moves through the colon more slowly than it should; outlet dysfunction, where the muscles that coordinate evacuation are not firing in the right sequence; and constipation-predominant IBS, where transit is variable but trends slow. Bill's presentation matched the slow transit pattern.

The typical workup rules out structural causes (obstruction, stricture, tumor) and then defaults to a layered set of recommendations. Increase fluid intake. Increase fiber, usually starting with soluble fiber like psyllium. Add osmotic agents like magnesium or polyethylene glycol. Consider stimulant laxatives if the osmotic agents are not enough. For patients who do not respond, the next step is often a referral for anorectal manometry or a colonic transit study, followed by prescription prokinetics like prucalopride or, in selected cases, biofeedback for the pelvic floor.

This algorithm works for a significant fraction of patients. It also leaves a meaningful fraction stuck. The patients who do not respond tend to be people who have already addressed the obvious modifiable factors and whose physiology is doing something more subtle than the algorithm is designed to catch. Bill was in this group. He had checked every box on the standard list and his bowel still would not move on its own.

Reading the Pattern

When we did Bill's intake, the picture that emerged was less about a single broken mechanism and more about a system that had lost its momentum across several layers at once. His pulse was thin and slightly wiry, which in Chinese medicine suggests both depletion and a layer of tension running underneath. His tongue was pale, dry, and showed a slight scallop along the edges. His abdomen was soft overall but felt mildly firm in the lower left quadrant. He reported feeling cold easily, especially in his hands and feet in the evening, and his sleep had become lighter over the past two years.

The pattern that fit was a combination of fluid depletion and underlying Yáng deficiency, with some Liver qì stagnation layered on top. In classical terms, the Large Intestine had lost both its moisture and its motivating warmth, and the Spleen and Kidney systems that should have been replenishing both were no longer doing so reliably. The wiry quality in the pulse and the firmness in the lower left suggested that what little Yáng was available was getting bound up in tension rather than flowing through to drive peristalsis.

This is a common picture in the patients we see for chronic constipation in this age range. The conventional framing of "slow motility" describes what is happening at the level of muscle contraction. The Chinese medical reading describes the broader physiological context in which the slow motility is occurring. The bowel is not moving because the systems that should be warming it, moistening it, and rhythmically driving it have all become quieter together. Treating any one of them alone tends to produce limited results, which is part of why Bill's previous interventions had each helped a little and none of them had changed the underlying picture.

There is a useful biomedical bridge here. The enteric nervous system, the network of roughly 500 million neurons embedded in the wall of the gut, depends on adequate hydration of the mucosal surface, adequate parasympathetic tone, and adequate rhythmic input to keep the migrating motor complex (the wave of contractions that moves contents through the bowel between meals) firing on schedule. In older adults, all three of these inputs tend to decline together. The mucosa runs drier, autonomic tone shifts toward sympathetic dominance under chronic stress, and the rhythmic cuing of the gut becomes less reliable. The Chinese medical description of dryness, depletion, and lost rhythm is describing the same phenomenon from a different vocabulary.

The Treatment Approach

We started Bill on weekly acupuncture and a custom herbal formula, with the explicit goal of restoring rhythm rather than producing a single bowel movement.

The acupuncture sessions used points on the abdomen and lower back that have specific effects on the Dà Cháng 大腸 (Large Intestine) pathway, supported by points that nourish the Spleen and tonify Kidney Yáng. The biomedical correlate is that these points reliably shift autonomic tone toward parasympathetic dominance and increase blood flow to the splanchnic circulation. For a patient whose gut had been running on low parasympathetic input for years, time spent in a parasympathetic state was therapeutic in itself.

The herbal formula was built around moistening the intestines, gently warming the lower burner, and supporting the Spleen and Kidney systems that had become depleted. We deliberately stayed away from the strong purgative herbs that produce a single dramatic bowel movement and leave the underlying picture unchanged. Bill had tried the over-the-counter equivalent of that approach and it had not gotten him anywhere. The formula was designed to do a slower kind of work, and the herbs were adjusted every few weeks as his presentation shifted.

Diet recommendations were minor. Bill was already eating reasonably well. We suggested warming his breakfast oatmeal with a little ginger and walnuts, easing off raw salads in favor of cooked vegetables in the evening, and being more deliberate about a small amount of healthy fat with each meal. The goal was not to overhaul his diet. The goal was to stop subtly cooling and drying a system that was already too cool and too dry.

What Changed

After the first two weeks, Bill was going every two days without thinking about it. The evening bloating had eased noticeably. His appetite was better and he had started enjoying meals again rather than budgeting around them.

After a month, he was having regular, comfortable bowel movements almost daily. No urgency. No straining. No mental real estate spent on whether today was going to be a day.

"I never thought I'd feel this much joy over taking a normal crap," he said.

The change ran deeper than the headline symptom. Chronic constipation affects energy, mood, sleep, and the general sense of being at home in one's own body. Bill described feeling less irritable in the evenings, sleeping more solidly, and noticing that the low-grade fog he had assumed was just aging had lifted. None of these were surprises. The gut and the rest of the body are in continuous conversation, and when the gut is sluggish for years, the rest of the body adapts around the sluggishness in ways that are easy to attribute to other causes.

If You Have Been Told It's Just Age

What Bill came in for was a bowel that would move on its own. What he got was a system that had its rhythm back, which is a different and more durable thing.

If you have been told your slow transit is just a feature of getting older, that framing is not wrong exactly. Motility does change with age. What the framing tends to miss is that age-related changes are not a single switch that flips. They are a slow accumulation of small shifts in hydration, warmth, autonomic tone, and rhythmic cuing, each of which is more responsive to careful intervention than the "just age" framing suggests. The patients who do best with Chinese medicine for chronic constipation are usually the ones who have already done the basics and want to understand what else might be going on underneath. There is usually quite a bit going on underneath, and most of it is workable.

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Foundations of Chinese Medicine: The Spleen

What the Spleen Actually Does

Patients often come into the clinic for one thing and get asked about another. Someone arrives exhausted, and we spend ten minutes on their bowel movements. Someone comes in for heavy periods, and we want to know what they eat for breakfast. Someone is worried about a bruise that took three weeks to fade, and we ask whether they feel worse when they skip meals. The questions can seem oblique, and most patients are gracious about answering them without quite knowing why we are asking.

The reason is that Chinese medicine treats the digestive system as the upstream source of almost everything else the body does. The tradition has a specific organ system, the Spleen, whose job is to take food and fluid and turn them into the substances the body uses to power, build, and repair itself. When that conversion is going well, the downstream systems have what they need and tend to work. When it is going poorly, the downstream problems show up first, which means people often arrive at the clinic for fatigue or menstrual irregularity or anxiety or poor healing, not recognizing that their digestion is the variable that ties them together.

This is one of the genuinely distinctive moves in Chinese medical thinking, and it reorganizes how a lot of common complaints get approached. It is also one of the harder ideas to translate, because the Spleen in this sense is a different organ than the biomedical spleen. Understanding what the tradition actually means by it is most of the work.

The Spleen as Functional System

A short note on the word first. The English "spleen" is a translation of the Chinese character 脾 (pí), and the translation is old enough to be fixed even though it is misleading. The biomedical spleen is a small organ in the left upper abdomen involved in blood filtration and immune function. The Chinese Spleen is a functional system that encompasses digestion, nutrient absorption, fluid metabolism, and the production of qì and Blood from food. The two share a name and very little else. When Chinese medicine writing capitalizes Spleen, it is signaling that the functional system is meant rather than the anatomical organ.

This kind of naming is common in Chinese medical thinking. The organs are defined by what they do rather than by what they are structurally, which means the Heart in Chinese medicine includes functions biomedicine locates in the brain, the Kidney includes functions biomedicine locates in the adrenal glands and reproductive system, and the Spleen includes functions biomedicine distributes across the stomach, small intestine, pancreas, and parts of the liver. The tradition is not confused about anatomy. It is organized around a different question, which is what the body is doing rather than where the doing is happening.

For the Spleen, what it is doing is the transformation of food and fluid into the substances the body actually uses. Classical texts name these substances qì and Blood, and most of this post is about what those terms mean in practice and why the Spleen's role in producing them matters so much clinically.

Qì and Blood as Bodily Resources

Qì 氣 is the most translated and most mistranslated term in Chinese medicine. "Energy" is the usual English rendering and it flattens the term into something vaguer than the tradition intends. In the context of digestion and the Spleen, qì is better understood as the body's capacity to do work. It is what powers muscular movement, keeps organs in their proper position, holds blood inside vessels, drives immune responses, and sustains the countless small cellular operations that add up to being alive. Biomedicine would describe most of this as a combination of ATP, hormonal signaling, neural activity, and tissue integrity. The Chinese framework groups these functions under a single term because the tradition is interested in whether the body has enough of what it needs to do its work, and qì is the name for that sufficiency.

Blood in Chinese medicine overlaps with biomedical blood but extends further. It includes the physical substance that biomedicine measures in a CBC, and it also includes the nourishing and moistening function that blood performs for every tissue it reaches. Blood nourishes muscle, moistens the eyes, supports the mind and memory, carries warmth through the body, and provides the substrate for menstrual flow. When Chinese medicine says someone is Blood deficient, the claim is not necessarily that their hemoglobin is low, though it sometimes is. The claim is that the nourishing and moistening work that Blood is supposed to do is not getting done adequately, and the signs of that deficit show up in the tissues that depend on it.

Both of these substances are produced, in Chinese medical theory, by the Spleen acting on food and fluid. The Stomach receives and begins to break down what you eat, and the Spleen extracts from that partially processed food the refined substance that becomes qì and Blood. The unrefined remainder continues down through the digestive tract for elimination. This is the tradition's account of what digestion is for: not simply to move food through the body, but to convert it into the resources the body uses to run everything else.

The implication is direct. If the Spleen is doing its job well, the body has what it needs. If the Spleen is weak, the supply is thin, and the downstream systems that depend on qì and Blood show the shortage first.

What Spleen Weakness Looks Like Downstream

The clinical pictures that follow are among the most common in outpatient Chinese medicine, and they share a structural feature. None of them is primarily a digestive complaint, and in each of them, improving digestion is often how the complaint resolves.

Fatigue is the most direct. When the Spleen is producing less qì than the body needs, the body has less capacity to do work, and the experience of that shortage is tiredness. The specific quality of Spleen-related fatigue is worth knowing, because it is different from other kinds of tiredness. Patients describe it as heavier after meals rather than relieved by them, worse in the afternoon, accompanied by a sense of mental dullness or brain fog, and often paired with a desire to lie down rather than sleep. It is the fatigue of not having enough to work with, not the fatigue of having worked hard. Standard workups typically come back unremarkable, and patients are often told their labs are fine and their fatigue is stress. The Chinese medical account is that the fuel supply is thin, and the fix is to improve what the digestion is producing.

Menstrual patterns are another territory where Spleen weakness shows up clearly, in two opposite-looking presentations. Light, pale, shortening periods often reflect Blood deficiency, which the Spleen has a direct role in producing. Heavy, prolonged, or breakthrough bleeding often reflects what the tradition calls the Spleen failing to hold Blood in its vessels. Both of these patterns are Spleen patterns, even though they look nothing alike symptomatically, and both of them respond to strengthening Spleen function. Patients who have been told their heavy periods are just how their body is, or that their scanty periods are just stress, often find that several months of digestive support changes the picture meaningfully.

Easy bruising and slow wound healing belong to a similar family. The Spleen's role in holding Blood includes holding it inside small vessels under normal mechanical stress, and when that function is weakened, minor bumps produce bruises that the same bumps would not have produced a year earlier. Healing is also a construction project, and construction projects require materials. When qì and Blood supply is thin, wounds take longer to close, scars take longer to mature, and recovery from illness takes longer in general.

Anxiety that tracks with hunger is the clinical picture most patients find unexpected. When people notice that their anxiety is worse when they have not eaten, better after a meal, and prone to flare in the late morning or late afternoon, the pattern often involves Spleen weakness affecting the production of qì and Blood that support the Heart and the mind. The biomedical parallel is blood sugar regulation and the downstream effects on cortisol and mood, and the two frameworks are describing related aspects of the same underlying reality. Patients in this pattern often do better on regular meals with adequate protein and complex carbohydrate than on any amount of anxiety-directed intervention, because the anxiety is a symptom of a supply problem rather than a primary psychological condition.

Cognitive fog, poor concentration, and the specific complaint of "not feeling sharp" round out the common presentations. The Chinese medical account is that the mind depends on adequate qì and Blood reaching the Heart and the head, and that supply depends on the Spleen. When the digestion is not producing enough, the cognitive work that depends on that production suffers, and patients describe feeling dull, slow to find words, or foggy in ways that do not track with sleep or stress.

Why This Reframes the Clinical Approach

The common thread across these pictures is that the presenting complaint is not the problem. Fatigue, irregular periods, easy bruising, hunger-related anxiety, and cognitive fog can all be driven by digestive insufficiency that the patient has not connected to their symptoms. Chinese medicine looks for this connection routinely, which is why the intake asks about things that seem unrelated to what brought someone in. The practitioner is checking whether the downstream symptom might have an upstream driver.

When the driver is identified, the treatment often targets the digestion rather than the symptom. Herbs that support Spleen function, dietary adjustments that match the Spleen's preferences for warm, cooked, regular meals, acupuncture points that strengthen digestion, and lifestyle changes that reduce the load on the digestive system are the common tools. Patients sometimes find it disorienting that the treatment for their heavy periods is a change to how they eat breakfast, or that the treatment for their fatigue is an herbal formula aimed at their digestion. The logic becomes clearer when the framework is visible. If the Spleen's output is what the downstream systems are running on, improving that output is how the downstream systems get fixed.

This is also why Chinese medicine tends to improve a set of apparently unrelated symptoms at once. A patient who comes in for fatigue and also has heavy periods, slow healing, and afternoon anxiety often finds that all of them shift together over a few months of treatment, because the shared upstream cause is getting addressed. Patients sometimes remark on this with some surprise. They came in for one thing and got five things, and the five things were all the same thing.

The broader point is that the digestive system in Chinese medical thinking is not peripheral to the rest of the body's function. It is the source from which the rest of the body's function is built. Understanding this reframes why the tradition pays so much attention to what and how people eat, why so many Chinese herbal formulas include digestive support as a base, and why patients with complaints that have nothing apparently to do with digestion often benefit most from having their digestion treated first. The Spleen is doing more work than its quiet name suggests, and recognizing that is most of what makes the rest of the tradition make sense.

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What They Came In For: IBS

When Your Gut Stops Making Sense: Finding Rhythm Again After IBS

When Josh L. first came in, he was a little embarrassed to talk about what was going on. He had already been to his primary care doctor, a GI specialist, and a nutritionist. He had Googled more than he wanted to admit. He had tried cutting out gluten, dairy, coffee, and sugar. He had tried probiotics, peppermint capsules, and digestive enzymes. Nothing really helped.

Still, the idea of describing his digestion out loud to another stranger felt like a lot. "I just don't want to be that guy," he said. "You know, the one who won't shut up about his stomach. But I’m here for help, so here we go."

His symptoms had been going on for over two years by then, long enough to start shaping how he lived. Some days were fine. Other days, he would eat something perfectly normal, grilled chicken, a salad, a bowl of rice, and suddenly find himself doubled over with cramping and urgency an hour later. Sometimes he was constipated for days. Other times, everything ran straight through. He could not predict it. Could not track it. He just always had to be near a bathroom, just in case.

The GI doctor told him it was IBS and ruled out anything more serious. Which was reassuring, but also, in its own way, deflating.

"It kind of felt like getting diagnosed with a shrug," Josh told us. "Like, well, it's not cancer, so we can try some stuff and maybe it’ll help."

By the time he came to Root and Branch, he was tired. Tired of second-guessing every meal, of pretending that everything was fine when it wasn't. He didn't necessarily expect Chinese medicine to fix it. He figured it couldn't hurt to try something different.

What IBS Actually Looks Like From the Inside

Irritable Bowel Syndrome is one of the most common digestive diagnoses in the United States. Current estimates suggest it affects somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of adults, though many people who have it never end up with a formal diagnosis. It is what clinicians call a functional disorder, meaning the plumbing looks fine on imaging and biopsy, but the function is off. The gut is doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, and no one can quite point to why.

For patients, that framing can feel maddening. You know something is wrong. Your life is arranged around bathroom proximity. You have stopped eating at restaurants, stopped taking road trips, stopped trusting your own body to behave in public. And then a specialist tells you the tissue looks healthy, the bloodwork is unremarkable, and there is no structural problem to repair.

The standard recommendations that follow usually include fiber adjustments, a low-FODMAP elimination diet, stress management, and sometimes medications like antispasmodics or low-dose antidepressants to modulate gut-brain signaling. These approaches help a meaningful number of people. They also leave a meaningful number of people stuck. Josh was in the stuck group.

Listening for the Pattern

We started, as we always do, by listening. We asked about his symptoms, yes, and also about his story. About how long things had felt off. About how stress landed in his body. About the nights his gut kept him awake, and the strange way everything tightened during even minor decisions. In Chinese medicine, IBS is not a single condition with a single fix. It is a pattern, and patterns are about relationships between systems rather than isolated symptoms.

We looked at his tongue, felt his pulse, examined his abdomen, and asked questions that might have seemed unrelated. About his energy levels across the day. About how well he slept. About whether he could actually relax after meals or whether he ate standing up, half-distracted, between obligations. His answers formed a recognizable shape. The digestive system was stuck in a state of overreaction. Underneath that reactivity was a quieter picture of weakness and cold. His gut had lost its rhythm and was swinging too far in both directions, clenching when it should have been releasing, and releasing when it should have been holding steady.

In classical terms, this is a version of a disharmony between the Liver system and the Spleen system. The shorthand is useful mainly because it names what a lot of IBS patients experience but rarely have framed for them. One part of the body is generating pressure and tension. Another part, the part responsible for steady digestion and transit, is too depleted to hold its ground. The two systems start working against each other, and the bowel is caught in the middle.

Why Stress Changes Your Stool

Most IBS patients already know, intuitively, that stress affects their digestion. What they often have not been told is why, in mechanistic terms, that relationship is so strong.

The gut has its own nervous system, the enteric nervous system, which contains roughly 500 million neurons. It runs largely independently, but it is in constant two-way conversation with the brain through the vagus nerve. When the body perceives threat, even low-grade chronic threat like deadline pressure or financial worry, the autonomic nervous system shifts into sympathetic dominance. Blood flow redirects away from the digestive organs, bowel motility changes, and visceral sensitivity increases, meaning the same amount of gas or stool that would have been unremarkable now registers as pain.

In people with IBS, this stress-response wiring tends to be set on a hair trigger. The gut overreacts to normal stimuli. A medium-sized meal feels like an overwhelming load. A mild emotional stressor produces a cascade of cramping. Over time, the pattern reinforces itself. The gut becomes more reactive. The person becomes more vigilant about the gut. Vigilance increases sympathetic tone. Sympathetic tone worsens the gut.

This is the loop Josh was caught in when he arrived. His digestion was not failing because he was eating the wrong foods or because he was unlucky to be wildly allergic to things he liked to eat. It was failing because his whole system had been living in a state of alarm for so long that the gut had forgotten how to do its job calmly.

What the Herbs Were Actually Doing

That is where the herbal medicine came in.

We formulated a custom blend for him, something to gently warm the center of his digestion, regulate the bowel, and calm the overactivity without suppressing it. The formula included herbs that support digestive function, herbs that soften tension in the smooth muscle of the gut, and herbs that address the underlying cold and depletion we had identified during the intake. The goal was to meet his body where it was and help guide it back toward its own regulation.

Well-formulated Chinese herbal medicine works differently from the single-compound pharmaceutical model most patients are used to. A formula is built as a system. One or two herbs address the main pattern. Others support the primary herbs, moderate their effects, or direct the action toward specific systems. The overall formula has properties that no individual herb in it would have alone. For a condition like IBS, where multiple systems are out of sync with each other, this kind of layered approach matches the problem.

There is also a growing body of research looking at how Chinese herbal formulas affect the gut specifically. Some formulas have been shown to modulate the gut microbiome, reduce inflammatory markers in the intestinal wall, and influence serotonin signaling in the enteric nervous system. The mechanisms are still being mapped, but the clinical results have been consistent enough that several formulas are now recognized in integrative gastroenterology as viable options for functional bowel disorders. In many ways, modern clinicians are catching up to what classical doctors have known for hundreds or sometimes thousands of years.

Josh's formula became the foundation of his care. It changed as he changed, adjusted every few weeks to respond to how his symptoms shifted. It was the steady thread that helped his gut relearn consistency.

The Role of Acupuncture

We paired the herbs with acupuncture, though in Josh's case the herbs were doing most of the heavy lifting. Acupuncture has a well-documented effect on autonomic nervous system balance. Treatment sessions tend to shift patients out of sympathetic dominance and into parasympathetic tone, which is the state in which digestion actually happens. For someone whose gut has been operating on high alert for years, time spent in that shifted state is therapeutic in itself.

Several clinical trials have examined acupuncture for IBS specifically, with generally positive results on symptom scores, quality of life measures, and reductions in abdominal pain. The effect sizes are modest in most studies, but the safety profile is excellent and the benefits accumulate over a series of treatments.

For Josh, acupuncture was the component that helped him unwind the emotional undercurrent driving his symptoms. He would often come in wound tight and leave loose-limbed and quiet. Over time, that quieter state started to become more available to him outside the treatment room.

What Changed, and How Fast

Within the first week, his urgency calmed. Within two weeks, his bowel movements had begun to normalize. Meals felt less like a risk. The background panic around food started to dissolve.

"I didn't realize how loud my gut had become until it got quiet," he told us one day. "I feel like my whole system is less reactive now. Like I finally have a little space between what I eat and what happens next."

Clinical improvement in IBS looks like a less reactive gut. The person develops a more neutral relationship with their own digestion, and food stops being a threat assessment and starts being food again. The specific symptoms matter for the overall timeline of improvement and where we decide to measure outcomes (things like bowel frequency, urgency, and pain), but the underlying shift is about the nervous system and the digestive system learning how to trust each other again.

Patients will even describe this shift in the clinic when they talk about feeling more in relationship with their bodies, and less adversarial with eating and digesting. We hear less about how “my stomach hates me” and more about how they have agency and choice again.

Josh's symptoms did not disappear overnight. Over the course of a few months, they stopped dominating his life. Over the next 3 months, he started trusting his digestion again. And by the end of a year thinking about his health and his digestion through a Chinese medicine lens, he was living day to day without even considering whether this thing he was about to eat was a trigger food. IBS had become a thing he once dealt with and not a defining fact of his experience.

If You Are Still Looking

What Josh came in for was relief. What he got was something more useful in the long run: clarity about what his body was actually doing, digestive resilience that held up across different kinds of days, and a sense of being understood by the clinical approach he had chosen.

If you are struggling with digestive issues that have an unknown cause, you are not alone, and you are not imagining it. The statistics on IBS are substantial. The gap between what the standard workup reveals and what patients actually experience is one of the most common frustrations in outpatient medicine. That gap is where Chinese medicine often does its best work, because it is set up to describe what is happening in functional and relational terms rather than structural ones.

If you have been told there is nothing else to try, we would gently offer that there might be. We don't just treat IBS as a diagnostic label. We treat the pattern underneath, and we treat the person carrying it. Your body is always telling a story. We are here to help it tell a different one.

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Citations

Pei et al. 2020 — Mayo Clinic Proceedings multicenter RCT Pei L, Geng H, Guo J, et al. "Effect of Acupuncture in Patients With Irritable Bowel Syndrome: A Randomized Controlled Trial." Mayo Clinic Proceedings. 2020;95(8):1671-1683. https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(20)30151-8/fulltext

Manheimer et al. 2012 — Cochrane systematic review Manheimer E, Cheng K, Wieland LS, et al. "Acupuncture for treatment of irritable bowel syndrome." Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2012;(5):CD005111. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD005111.pub3/full

MacPherson et al. 2012 — UK pragmatic RCT MacPherson H, Tilbrook H, Bland JM, et al. "Acupuncture for irritable bowel syndrome: primary care based pragmatic randomised controlled trial." BMC Gastroenterology. 2012;12:150.

What They Came In For: Frequent Colds

Sarah M. came in because she caught colds constantly. Every six weeks or so, sometimes more often, she'd come down with something. She'd tried vitamin C, zinc, elderberry, and more sleep, but the pattern continued. She wanted to know why her immune system seemed so much weaker than everyone else's.

This is one of the most common concerns people bring to our clinic. It's also one of the most misunderstood, because the problem usually isn't the immune system itself.

Modern immunology frames immunity in terms of defense: how well does your body identify and destroy pathogens? From this perspective, frequent illness suggests a failure of surveillance or response, and the solutions follow logically. Stimulate the immune system, give it more resources, train it to fight harder.

Chinese medicine asks a different question: does your body have the resources to maintain its boundaries in the first place?

In classical terms, we talk about wèi qì 卫气, often translated as "defensive qi." Wèi qì isn't a standing army waiting to fight invaders. It functions more like the integrity of a container. When wèi qì is robust, the boundary between inside and outside holds, and wind and cold and damp don't penetrate easily. When wèi qì is weak, the boundary becomes porous.

Wèi qì is produced by the body's deeper metabolic processes, rooted in what we call the spleen and lung systems. These aren't the anatomical organs but functional networks responsible for extracting energy from food and distributing it through the body. When those systems are depleted, wèi qì suffers and colds come easily.

This was the pattern we saw with Sarah. She ran cold, especially in her hands and feet. Her digestion was sluggish, with bloating after meals and low appetite in the morning. She carried a tiredness that sleep didn't fix. Her pulse was thin and soft, and her tongue was pale and slightly puffy with a thin white coat. All of this pointed to qì deficiency, particularly in the spleen and lung networks.

Treatment focused on building her up. We used acupuncture to support the spleen and lung systems, choosing points that strengthen qì production and consolidate the body's surface. We prescribed an herbal formula based on Yù Píng Fēng Sǎn 玉屏风散, Jade Windscreen Powder, from the Dānxī Xīnfǎ 丹溪心法 (c. 1347), which addresses this pattern of weak protective qì and susceptibility to wind invasion.

We also talked about how she was living. She skipped breakfast and ran on coffee until noon. She exercised hard several times a week despite being exhausted, because she felt she should. In classical terms, she was spending more than she was earning.

Chinese medicine takes the arithmetic of energy seriously. You have a certain amount of qì available each day, and you spend it on movement, digestion, thought, emotional processing, immune function, and repair. If you consistently spend more than you take in, your reserves erode. Sarah didn't need to overhaul her life, but she did need to stop draining herself unnecessarily. Eating breakfast, scaling back intense exercise, and resting when tired would make a real difference.

Over the following months, the colds became less frequent. When she did catch something, it resolved faster. Her energy improved and her digestion settled.

This is what constitutional treatment looks like. We weren't boosting her immune system in the way that phrase usually implies. We were helping her body rebuild the underlying vitality that makes healthy immune function possible. Sarah still comes in occasionally for a tune-up when life gets demanding, but she's out of that cycle of constant illness. Her body holds its ground now.

What They Came In For: Long Covid

“I just want to feel like myself again.”

That’s what Thomas K. said when we asked him what brought him in. Then he paused.

“And the truth is, I’m not even sure I remember what that feels like.”

He’d had COVID ten months earlier. It was his second time getting it—the first had been over a year prior, and he’d recovered easily. A few days of fatigue, some sniffles, and then life went back to normal. He was vaccinated. He’d done everything “right.” So when he got it again, and it started as a mild case, he wasn’t too worried.

But this time, the recovery never came.

The fever passed. The test turned negative. But the fatigue stayed. Not the kind you push through with coffee or a good night’s sleep—the kind that settles into your bones. He started needing to lie down in the afternoon. Sometimes his chest felt tight—not dangerous, just off. His brain felt foggy, like he was trying to think through static. He forgot words. Simple tasks took longer. His mood got flatter. His sleep got worse.

He kept waiting to bounce back. But the weeks turned into months, and nothing changed.

He’d had all the tests. Labs normal. Lungs clear. “You're just stressed,” one provider said. Another called it post-viral syndrome and offered antidepressants. He wasn’t against medication. He just didn’t feel like anyone was really listening to what was happening in his body.

That’s when he found his way to Root and Branch.

What he wanted was simple: clarity, energy, and the ability to trust his body again.

We started with the big picture. When did the fatigue hit hardest? How did he feel after meals? How had his digestion been since the illness? What about temperature regulation? Sweating? Focus? Anxiety? We looked at his tongue, felt his pulse. Beneath the surface, his system told a familiar story: a body still caught between recovery and defense. Weakness at the core. Stagnation in the chest. A nervous system on edge.

We explained how long COVID presents, through the lens of Chinese medicine, as a pattern of post-viral depletion and dysregulation. Energy isn’t just “low”—it’s blocked. The body isn’t just tired—it’s stuck in a pattern it can’t exit.

So we built a treatment plan to help guide it out.

At the center of that plan was a custom herbal formula—one tailored to nourish the body’s energy without overstimulating it, to open the chest, support lung and spleen function, and gently recalibrate the nervous system. Not a stimulant. Not a sedative. Just medicine that knew how to listen to what the body actually needed.

He took it twice a day, every day. And we adjusted it often—because as his body changed, the formula needed to change too.

We paired it with acupuncture designed to support his recovery on multiple levels: points to regulate his sleep, clear the lingering heaviness in the chest, restore cognitive clarity, and rebuild his sense of groundedness. After each session, he’d say the same thing: “I didn’t know I could feel this calm anymore.”

After three weeks, his fatigue began to shift. Not all at once—but there were longer stretches of clarity. Mornings that started easier. Fewer naps. More consistency. His brain fog started to lift. He could read again, focus on a conversation without drifting.

After six weeks, he said, “I feel like I’m finally climbing out of something.”

We continued to treat the fluctuations—days where his energy dipped again, or sleep became fragile—but overall, the direction was steady. Upward. Back toward himself.

What Thomas came in for was his energy.

What he found was recovery—and something more: a renewed relationship with his body, one built not on pushing through, but on paying attention.

At Root and Branch, we’ve worked with many long COVID patients, each with a slightly different picture. Some come in with chest tightness. Others with digestive distress, insomnia, hair loss, anxiety, or relentless fatigue. No two cases are identical—but the approach is always the same: track the pattern. Treat the root. Support the whole person.

If you’re living with long COVID symptoms that just won’t let go, know this: there is still healing available. It might not be fast. But it can be real.

And we’re here for the long arc of it.

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.