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Natural Allergy Relief
It’s getting to be that time of year where a remarkable number of people in the Willamette Valley suffer with seasonal allergies. Fortunately, there are a number of natural steps you one can take to mitigate or even eliminate allergy symptoms without suffering the drowsiness and other side effects that often come with taking pharmaceuticals.
In Chinese Medicine, we distinguish between two main types of allergies: those where heat or cold predominates. Wind, joining forces with either heat or cold, invades the body from the outside, causing an acute attack of those symptoms we all know and don’t love: sneezing, nasal congestion or runny nose, itchy eyes, tiredness, sometimes even coughing or asthma. Symptoms of wind-cold type of allergies include very drippy runny nose with clear mucus and fatigue, while the wind-heat type is characterized by itchy eyes, itchy throat and thick yellow or green mucus. Both conditions are made worse by the presence of phlegm. Phlegm is which is basically accumulated turbid water that the body is trying to throw at what it perceives as a dangerous pathogen: the evil, invading pollen.
So what can you do besides hide indoors?
Eat strategically: Making sure that you’re digesting well and therefore not creating more residual crud to hang out in your system as dampness or phlegm is very important. Keep damp-producing foods like dairy products, citrus, bananas, alcohol,and refined flour products to a minimum (Though yogurt and kefir with active probiotic cultures can help the immune system, you may be better off with fermented foods like miso and kimchi — or taking probiotic supplements– which are less mucogenic than dairy.)The taste of bitter helps to transform phelgm, so including lots of leafy greens, nettles, turmeric in your diet can be helpful. If you have wind-heat type allergies, cooking with spices such as rosemary, oregano, and mint can be helpful, as can drinking chrysanthemum tea. For wind-cold type allergies, cook with onions.
Herbs: Ready-made Chinese herb formulas like Pe Min Kan Wan, Bi Yan Pian, or Xanthium Pills are all aimed at treating the wind-heat or wind-cold to decrease symptoms of allergies, and many people find to be effective symptom relievers. (Of course, the FDA has not evaluated this claim. . . .) The Ayurvedic formula triphala can also be helpful to take daily throughout allergy season. All of these are available at my office.
Use a neti pot to rinse your sinuses to get the pollen out of your respiratory tract. Combine warm water and enough salt so that the water tastes like a teardrop, and rinse your nasal passages twice daily.
Get some acupuncture. A study published in the Australian Journal of Medicine suggests that acupuncture provides safe, effective treatment for persistant seasonal allergies, even 12 weeks after the course of treatment. Of course, many of you already know that!
Tune up your system for next year. In detoxifying your system and cleaning up your diet, you may find yourself less allergic in the years to come.
The Imbalance Continuum: Rethinking Health and Disease
“Treat beforehand,” and “the only constant is change” are two central axiomatic concepts in Chinese Medicine. When we resist change, we get sick. Imagine a continuum that stretches from “health” to “imbalance” to “symptoms.” On one end of the spectrum, we have Health, a state of dynamic balance, of yin and yang in equilibrium. But because nothing in nature (or in us) is ever static, this is not a state we can just achieve and reside in mindlessly. We must constantly adapt to change in order to stay healthy. If we don’t adapt to the new moment, we move away from health towards the Imbalance Zone on the continuum.One sure way to slide away from health is to ignore the body’s messages. It is all too common in our culture to avoid even the bodymind’s most obvious requests for change. If the body says “stop” but we push on anyway because there are Things To Do; if we suppress or ignore anger or fear or sadness because we’d rather not experience them; if our shoulders are reaching for our ears while we type but we don’t notice or stop to stretch and massage them; if we persist in eating food which our body does not digest well or is out sync with the season, we take steps away from Health, towards Imbalance. Here is the incredible opportunity to treat beforehand. Here is where Chinese Medicine practitioners are trained to recognize and respond to imbalances in the pulse, the tongue, and the points that are tender to the touch, to help prevent you from manifesting disease. But as you heighten your level of internal awareness, you develop your ability to be your own healer and prevent imbalances from moving even further down the continuum towards the Symptom Zone. Symptoms, as we all know, manifest at varying levels of severity, intensity, and frequency as we move further away from Health on the continuum.
We all possess the capacity for tuning into ourselves at levels of awareness that are far deeper than our fast, material society typically encourages. While reading this email, you are probably not aware of your little toe, or your lower abdomen, or your breath, but if you put your attention there, your awareness would deepen. With practice, your sensitivity to the subtle energies increases, making you more intuitive or more “psychic” (since you are not your body alone but a field of energy shared by those around you). In paying attention to what is going on in the own bodymind at increasingly subtle levels, we increase our ability to keep ourselves healthy, and to awaken spiritually. We have so much untapped potential within us. Developing greater perception and internal awareness requires attention and practice: qi gong, meditation, and yoga are tried and true methods. I wish you all the best in your practice. May you never need a healer other than yourself.
Tips for Fending off a Cold or Flu:
AcuPoint Locater
Click here to find the points you need to treat yourself with acupuressure or essential oils for a variety of common conditions.
Find an acupuncturist out-of-state
Help your out-of-state friends and family members find a well-trained acupuncturist in their city. In some states (including Oregon) doctors are allowed to perform acupuncture with little or no training, as opposed to the 4-year Masters degree programs required to sit for the NCCAOM exam. Find a Nationally Certified practitioner at nccaom.org to help your loved ones find a well-qualified practitioner near them.
Digest Well
As many of you know, good digestion is central in the production of energy in the body. No matter how nutritious a particular food is, it will not nourish you if you cannot digest it. If you suffer from symptoms of poor digestion: abdominal pain, bloating, acid reflux, heartburn, diarrhea, constipation, abdominal fullness, tiredness, low immunity,nasal congestion, lethargy, etc., paying attention to diet is vitally important in restoring health. According to both Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda (the traditional medicine of India), a diet consisting mainly of warm, cooked, freshly prepared food is the way to restoring healthy digestive system and maintaining overall health. Specifically, kitchari is an especially digestible food, simple food that I often recommend to patients with poor digestion or at the change of the seasons. Check out the Ayurvedic Institute’s resources page for a kitchari recipe and tips about food combining for optimal digestion.
Just as important as what to eat is what not to eat. It probably goes without saying that limiting your intake of sugar, caffeine, alcohol, pesticides, anything artificial, hormone-laden animal products, and trans fats. As for further do’s and don’ts, I agree heartily with Micahel Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, who distills his thorough investigation of diet into seven words: “Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.” The word “food” here is used in contrast to complicated, processed food-like products. Elaborating on what food is, he offers a second rule of thumb: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” Chinese Medicine is based on living in harmony with nature. Putting only things that nature intended into our bodies seems like sound advice.