45: Can Ancient Medicine Heal Modern Illness? – Transformative Insights from TCM with Maegan Hodge

In Chinese medicine, things get broken up into these really simple categories. So I mentioned one, excess and deficiency. Another is hot and cold. Is the person a hot type body? Are they cold type body? And those categories extend to food and herbs too. So is this an herb that makes a person warmer or feel warm or is this an herb that makes a person feel cold or can lower inflammation and reduce excess temperature? And similar with fluid metabolism, they're always thinking about, does the food or herb warm somebody up, cool them down, and what does it do to the fluids in their body?

Welcome back, everybody. I'm super excited to be here today with Megan Hodge. She's a local acupuncturist, tripletized medicine expert. And so we're going to go into all things Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and some special things she does which are super unique as well. So after I do an introduction, we'll kind of hop into things. Okay, so today we're actually thrilled to have Megan Hodge with us. She's a nationally board certified acupuncturist and the founder of Centered Richmond Acupuncture. She has over a decade of experience in traditional Chinese medicine. She's also dedicated to career, to helping individuals find balance and healing through holistic practices. Her compassionate approach and personalized treatment plans have made her a trusted name in the Richmond community. Megan's academic journey is impressive as her professional accomplishments. She began by earning her BA in psychology from the University of Virginia. She went on then to get her master's degree in acupuncture and Oriental medicine from the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon. She's completed over 3,000 hours of training during that time. And she also did her master's thesis exploring the correlation between ancient and modern understanding of anatomic physiology, which actually might be kind of interesting to talk about in and of itself how people thought about that stuff back in versus today. Today we're going to dive into all things acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine. Just understand a little deeper about it and how it applies to our current state of care as well as in the functional integrative medicine world. It's something I use often with a lot of my patients, particularly with those with dysfunctioning with their neurological system and regulatory system, their HPA axis, which we'll probably talk about a little bit first. Megan, I want to kind of dive into, like, how did you get into this? Because this is obviously not. When you start studying. Decades ago this was not on the radar. Most you remind myself as well, like, yeah, can you walk us through Your personal profession development where you're at today.

Sure. So as you said, my undergrad was at uva. I studied psychology. And for a really long time I thought I wanted to go into counseling or psychiatry. And I could just never. I. I kept look, I'd pull up the application and I could just never really bring myself to apply. And it might sound strange, but I wanted something meatier. I didn't ultimately decided I didn't want to be a physician because I wanted to be able to do something other than prescribe medications. And I wanted to do something that was a little more getting into the weeds with people. And like I was like, I want to fix things for people. Like does that exist? Can you, can you actually heal people? Is that a thing? And I stumbled upon acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine a bit by accident. A friend loaned me a book that was about traditional Chinese medicine, dietary therapy, which sounds so nerdy and truly it was. But I started absorbing this book like it were like the most exciting novel I'd ever read. I was just plowing through this text that's like this big I'll get get home from work and was excited to read it. That was sort of my introduction and decided to go to grad school for this. And at the same time I was seeing an acupuncturist who I was going through digestive problems and I had had these horrible allergies that would pop up a couple times a year and they would get so bad that the whites of my eyes would swell. I was acupuncturist, I'm not even kidding, cured these allergies. They went away. It was almost 20 years ago. They never came back. And so I was between the book and that. I was incredibly impressed and realized I'd found the thing that could, could kind of work on fixing people and was really excited about that.

Yeah. One thing you said about you read some stuff from. Written from maybe 4,400 years ago, referring to nutrition. Now one of the things I think is interesting is that ancient, ancient Ayurvedic as well as traditional Chinese medicine, like they looked at gut health back then as being super critical. Could you just tell me a little bit about how did they look at gut health as the gut as far as the center of our body's like mechanism and what is their perspective on it?

There's many different schools of thought and there's one sort of school that's called the spleen and stomach school. The spleen sort of gets mis. Ascribed to digestion. And Chinese medicine, a better translation could perhaps be pancreas, though technically, that's. That's wrong, but just for our understanding. So. But when we talk about spleen and stomach in Chinese medicine, we're very much talking about digestion and related functions. So depending on what era of Chinese history you get, depending on what was going on with people's health at that time, you'll get different perspectives, but there's written record, a time from a time that is more similar to current times, where people were doing very, very well. People had a lot of resources, a lot of money, and were eating a lot of very rich foods. And the digestive problems that developed in that era were very different than periods where there were pandemics or starvation. So I think what's unique about Chinese medicine is that it values looking at the environment that the person is in and the environment of the body, so to speak. Is this a problem of too much? Is this a problem of too little? You know, what. What's. If it's too much, what's going on? Is there stagnant blood in the area? Are there phlegm and biofilms in the area? What might be impeding proper function? So there's lots of different ways of looking at it, depending on the problem. Is the person malnourished? We see that less often these days. You might see it with young women who go to a lot of yoga classes and are eating salads every day, and maybe you're not getting good, good nourishment because they're accidentally eating too many raw vegetables. It's kind of hard on their digestion, and they're having a lot of loose stool and thinking that's normal. But mostly with the patients that I see in our area of Richmond, Virginia, is we're all from the South. People love Southern food, and Southern food is very enriching of the body and tends to create these problems of excess, which in Western medicine, you see issues like high blood pressure, high cholesterol. So the gut problems from those two types of people I just listed listed are very different. And so basically, you learn to look at the type of person and think about the problem more globally, holistically, if that makes sense.

Makes sense. Yeah. And one of the reasons I like working with you and sharing patients with you is because when our patients come back, they actually, I can talk to them. Like, a lot of times, I'll talk with other practitioners. They'll talk about my chi being stagnant, and I'm kind of like, what is. What does that Mean, but it's kind of, we talk in very similar language. But I think one thing that's really interesting is that the gut health, the microbiome, was considered woo woo craziness in academic medicine 20 years ago. And it's just now, in the last one to two years, literally taking fire. And now it's become the public consciousness that the gut microbiome or your gut health, we tend to focus on the microbiome, but again, it's just holistic from the mouth to the anus kind of thing. Associated with 75% of all neurotransmitters are made in your gut. Nutrient factors made in your gut. And yet in traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine, they understood, maybe not obviously not the way we understand it, but they understood that gut health was super critical. Death begins in the bowels. Yes, we, we say that's Hippocrates, but actually predated Hippocrates.

Yes.

You know, so can you tell us a little bit about some of the, their perspective as far as like foods? Because there's the idea of warming foods and cooling foods. Like how help us understand in modern terms what they were observing 10,000 years ago.

So yeah, it's maybe important to back up and explain to your listeners that in Chinese medicine things get broken up into these really simple categories. So I mentioned one, excess and deficiency. Another is hot and cold. Is the person a hot type body? Are they cold type body? And those, those categories extend to food and herbs too. So is this an herb that makes a person warmer or feel warm? Or is this an herb that makes a person feel cold or can lower inflammation and reduce excess temperature? So food, let's see. And similar with fluid metabolism, they're always thinking about does the food or herb warm somebody up, cool them down, and what does it do to the fluids in their body? And by extension, how does it make the body circulate, whether we're talking about blood or lymph. And when you hear the term qi in Chinese medicine, sometimes that gets translated as energy. Some I have a translation that I like is the character of qi in Chinese medicine, and excuse me, in Chinese language is basically steam coming off of a bowl over a pot of rice. So one translation could take the implication of gases and you can think about the movement of gasotransmitters in the body. And for people that don't know, gases play just a very crucial role similar to neurotransmitters in terms of cell signaling in the body. So we're thinking about how does the food move things around in the body? How does it impact fluid metabolism in the body and how does that warmer or cool the person? So like, something I've been thinking about lately is people with sinus issues. Some people have these cold type sinus issues. Some people have more hot type sinus issues. Hot type would be where there's more visible inflammation or the sinuses feel swollen. Sometimes the person's face will feel actually hot. And so if you give a person herbs or foods that can exacerbate some of that inflammation, they'll get a lot worse. A person that has a more cold type will be have like clear discharge as opposed to yellow with the hot type. And so the things that you give are very different with those two cases. If you have somebody who has less visible inflammation and they're more just kind of like drippy, clear fluids. Does that answer your question?

It does, yeah. But that actually makes me think about something. With a lot of my mold patients, one of the common things you run into is they have colonization of their sinuses. They love this thing called morons. And they can also have yeast, other things that stick in their sinuses that release toxins that can affect the brain. Patients that are working on their sinuses for one to two years on biofilms, you know, how would you some. Obviously you're in Richmond and we're a big molding environment. So you see this as well. When you see someone who's had chronic sinus issues that you know, has mold as a part of their illness, someone I've actually sent your way, how do you think about these? I think about biofilms, I think about biotoxins. How from a traditional Chinese medicine, do you look at these patients and what are some of the things you do for these people?

That's a great question. First, my biggest concern in yours is to make sure that the exposure has been removed from their environment. Because if they're constantly getting re exposed, treating them is going to be very difficult. But first you have to establish, from my perspective, the overall health of the patient. How well are they? What are the resources of their body? How much can you challenge them without getting really bad side effects, essentially Herxheimer reactions or similar. And if a patient has otherwise been pretty healthy, they have good reserves, you can push things a little bit more. And with chronic infections like that, there's sort of a certain protocol that I follow where from the Chinese medicine perspective, often what I'm doing first is working to remove dampened phlegm, which corresponds with the western medicine category of biofilm. So I'm trying to give them herbs and help them employ strategies that are anti biofilm basically so that their own immune system and circulation can get into these pockets where circulation has been limited and so they can start draining and fighting these things off themselves. It's probably not really that different from what you're doing.

Well, it's really interesting I think and this is just more for people who are listening. Like in ilads, which is the International Alignment Associated Disease Society which I'm a part of, there's like two branches of that and one branch actually uses a lot of herbals as biofilm busters. Like uses them actually with direct antimicrobial but as well as anti inflammatory properties. But one of the things I've found out and some of the patients we've shared have been my really super crazy sensitive patients that I can't antibodies to because they have these crazy hertz reactions I can't do binders with. Some of them actually been so sensitive that even like their environment emf. And you've done some really interesting things with calming the nervous system down using electrical stimulation, acupuncture, which I was super fascinated with. I actually been reading about a little bit about that recently. Can you talk about how like when this nervous system gets like super crazy and literally I'm like some of my patients are so sensitive they actually react to the cellulose and supplements which is actually, it's actually in the literature. People are hypermobile and when you're like that inflamed, I'm kind of like you're kind of stuck and sometimes. Let's try something else. Yeah, yeah. Explain in your world how some of the acupuncture, electrical stimulation, even some of the detox stuff with herbs, really gentle things for these people that on my end antibiotics are too much, supplements are too much, even binders are too much.

Yeah. So for patients like that, sometimes if there's a specific type of gut impairment, often I can prescribe what I would consider to be food grade herbs that most people tolerate well that are kind of based on things a lot of us have in our diet to help the gut dysfunction. Often that helps. But what you're talking about. Oh yeah, long COVID patients really put this into my mind and the more that I am aware of this concept, the more that I see it with more patients with chronic infections, I think there's almost some element, often some element of dysautonomia with patients and acupuncture can be really incredibly beneficial in terms of helping rebalance the two sides of the sympathetic nervous system, the parasympathetic and sympathetic. And why that is remains yet to be discovered. But we see it when we give patients acupuncture. And there's studies now where the acupuncture is lighting up certain parts of the brain pretty predictably. And so we know that the acupuncture is interfacing with the nervous system. We're kind of working on understanding how. But so I'll employ strategies. I'll use acupuncture and I'll use often something called frequency specific microcurrent. And I have certain programs that I'll run for people that seems to provide that type of balance and relief. And I just will talk patients through basic things like how to breathe and ways to support your nervous system health and stuff. That sounds really simple. So simple that it might not work. But types of things are often incredibly beneficial for patients.

Yeah. Particularly when they're stuck. It's like you don't want to push them too much. Yeah, you mentioned. I want to come back to decide anomaly thing real quick because that's something I see all the time.

Yeah.

The frequency specific mic prints, I actually wasn't familiar with you doing those. Can you talk a little bit about those? Because that's something that I've actually been really intrigued with. It's the idea of using really, really low biologic level energies, frequencies to actually almost push your metabolism a little bit forward. Is that what you're doing with the acupuncture electrical stimulation? Is it a type of frequency specific.

Or is that two types? I have basically what's our tens units. There's a specific Japanese brand called Ito Acupuncturist Love, where it just has little alligator clips you attach to the needles. And I will do that in two cases for pain. It's incredible obviously. And I'll do that even at these kind of low subsensory levels to essentially expand the benefits of specific acupuncture points. So like I had a prostatitis guy yesterday and there's a couple of acupuncture points that even western medicine doctors are using now, apparently on the ankle that hooks into the nerve pathway that goes all the way to the prostate. And so you can clip things on like that when you want to juice up the visitor, basically. What was your question again?

It was, it was like with the frequency specific microcurrents, what are some like ways in which you're using that because you were actually going down that pathway. Oh, yes, because it's. Again, it's. It's a frequency basically at a biological level. Like, I use PMF and some really higher. Like, yeah, crazy high. Not. But you're. This is more like at the level of your bias frequency. So it's a very gentle energy that actually is pushing the physiology forward a little bit. And it's been around for over half.

A century, actually quite a long time. From the FDA perspective, you can only say that you are using it to treat pain. I will say anecdotally, I've noticed that it seems to help balance the nervous system for people, and it seems to help just encourage movement in general in the body. I've had some constipation cases that have responded really well to it, and it just seems to work well for people that are sensitive. And I'm using it to essentially complement what I'm already doing with the. With the acupuncture treatment. I've used it with some fertility cases. Interestingly, the thought being if it's good for pain, it's probably working to increase circulation. So we know from Western medicine that to get pregnant, you need good blood flow to the ovaries and the uterus. So we've employed it. There are some, too.

Yeah. Now, one thing I see a lot is dysautonomia. I feel like this is something that is totally, totally, totally unrepentant, unrecognized with people with chronic fatigue and fiber and long Covid and just general health issues, even kids. It's straight. There's actually a Clientine prescription that's FDA approved to treat ADHD in kids. And it's kind of like that's treating the sympathetic overdrive in these kids. It's kind of intriguing. I was actually really quite surprised. And this. I'm not sure how this communication happened with you a while ago, but the fact that it's on your radar, I wasn't quite sure that that was something that's on the radar. Yeah. Could you, like, walk us through how you think about that? Because the way I think about it is much more like hardwiring nervous system stuff. Obviously, the way you're looking at it and you're treating patients with success from a totally different perspective. So could you kind of talk about how you view with that? Because it's something I see, like, depending on what you read, maybe 15 or 20% of the population has some degree of dysautonomia, which is a crazy statistic even to just ponder.

Yeah. I will say, traditionally in terms of what I'm aware of, there's, there's not like a one to one category in traditional Chinese medicine that really corresponds with dysautonomia. What you see with a lot of diseases is you can, within a disease there will be many different common diagnoses from a Chinese medicine perspective. So in Chinese medicine perspective, it's all, it's all pattern diagnosis. So okay, this person has this disease, but how is their body presenting otherwise? So I'm always working to fit it into that framework. And there's not. Yeah, there's not, there's not one specific thing where I see from a Chinese medicine perspective that's like always happening with dysautonomia. But my, it's a little weird that I ended up as an acupuncturist because my younger, in my younger version of myself, I was very hardcore science. And I was like, I remember when I was graduating from uva, I heard that one of my friends was thinking of going to acupuncture school and I literally went, what a weirdo. Who does that? Who does this stuff? That's nonsense. So I'm often, I'm kind of like often applying my science background stuff and my obvious interest in the Western medicine side of things and saying like, okay, like I know this is going on here, so what can I use from Chinese medicine to sort of broach this newer diagnostic category essentially? And, and we know like everybody knows that acupuncture is good for stress and balancing the nervous system. So it's just, it's kind of easy.

Well, it's really interesting how like some of the modern science in my world is going more to realize that brain based inflammation by itself. Yeah. Can become, can be a cause of Crock disease. And there's actually cytokine levels. You can use people that have elevated certain sterile leukins like interleukin 1, 6. Actually you see it more common in depression. And so we're kind of actually realizing, I think maybe to the public consciousness long Covid kind of brought this everybody else's consciousness. But in the functional medicine world, and we've known about this for decades. Yeah, like neural inflammation is a big issue with I feel, gut issues of the gut, brain access, cardiovascular issues, wound issues. Like so kind of segmenting to like we have an epidemic of anxiety, depression, mood disorders. Like what are some of the things that you typically see and how do you kind of address those patients? Because in the conventional world it's basically you have an SSRI or dopamine Deficiency. And we augment that in the functional medicine, where we do a lot of gut work and nutritional work, but obviously you're doing it from a different perspective, modulating the nervous system.

Is this a question about dysautonomia specifically, or are you just wondering what. What are the. Some of the common conditions that I see in my practice?

Oh, it's. This is more in relation related to mood disorders like depression, anxiety. Yeah, because we see those. Because the way we put the symptoms together and give you a diagnosis of depression. Yeah, but what's not depression? What if it's brain inflammation? What if it's gut issues? What. And so, like, it's almost like traditional Chinese medicine is more equipped to view that. Depression with sleep disturbances, Depression with, like you said, pattern recognition.

Yes, absolutely. So in a sense, it's kind of a simple. It might sound like an overly simple answer, but usually with people with mood disorders, I see one of two things that are happening, and there's exceptions to this, but I would say this is 80 to 90% of people that happen to be coming to me, and the biggest one is gut dysfunction. So like you said earlier, something like 75% of the body's serotonin or whatever is made in the gut. A huge amount. I forget the exact amount. And most of the people that come to me have gut dysfunction. And 80% of the time, when we fix their gut dysfunction, their mood gets better and any symptoms they might have had of neurological inflammation seem to calm down. And then I'm trying to give them advice about how to eat better to sort of support the results that they've gotten with me. The second thing that I see is not to use a Chinese medicine term that nobody will understand, but I'll explain. It is what we call liver Qi stagnation, which basically just means that things aren't circulating very well in the body. And for most people, that means they're not moving enough. So most problems in modern life develop from these two things. Gut dysfunction because of our kind of terrible diets or stagnation issues because we're not moving enough. And it sounds overly simple, but there's Chinese medicine strategies that you can use for all the variations of those two cases, and that clears up about or improves, I would significantly say about 80 to 90% of cases that I see.

Yeah, I think one thing you keep on saying, I feel like in a lot of times over, complicate things, because really, the foundations of functional medicine, diet, exercise, sleep, you know, meaningful relationships. It seems like an oversimplification but there's so many. If 80% of crock diseases in our country can directly be attributed to eating processed foods. But all of a sudden the, the most, the biggest elephant's therm, so to speak. Are these really kind of more basic things. I actually asked a question about how I got written down. How does acupuncture work? And this is my understanding of part of how it works. Maybe you can kind of help me elucidate a little bit. And this is more again, because I'm thinking more my brain thinks differently than your does. But it was really intriguing to me to find out that actually the acupuncture puncture points in the body actually correlate with your body's electromagnetic fields exiting and entering, which is fascinating. Just like the earth has a electromagnetic flux, so does that come in body. And the points that actually the acupuncture points actually correlate I believe with low resistance parts on the skin. I believe this I think is low versus high. Correct?

In my opinion, yeah, I believe so. Lowers. Yes, that makes sense.

I think it was just fascinating that they figured out 4,500 years ago that the, the body had an electromagnetic field field, which now we're actually appreciating the heart does as well, and how the acupuncture is actually helping us with accessing that part of the nervous system through these low resistance spots and actually altering those fields, which ultimately we have research in the 60s from the VA with using electrical stimulation to regrow tails on frogs, for example. We have all this really cool stuff, but yeah, and we skip the idea of using the biogenics to help heal. Oh, is that kind of. Is that roughly like your understanding or how, how do you see like the body's flux energy as it relates to or body's energy that's being accessed or manipulated or affected by acupuncture itself?

That's a good question, and there's not one simple answer. And the reason that that is the case is that these pathways that were mapped out with a fair degree of accuracy thousands of years ago are many things all at once. And that's one of my favorite things about Chinese language is each character, each symbol, each. Each word that you say can have multiple meanings at a time. And that is very intentional. There's many layers of meaning. That's. I think that's a way in which Chinese culture is honestly very superior to Western culture because there's this inherent understanding about how things can be many things at once. And in the west, we like to things can only Be one thing at a time. We have this, like, dualism that we struggle with. But anyway, so these pathways, when you look at the, at the old terms for them, they're. They're vessels. The pathways are vessels. And so that means they contain something. What do they contain? They tend to contain major pathways through the body of major arteries, major nerves, lymph pathways. And because those things are moving through that area, there's a concentration of electromagnetic energy by extension, just as we're electromagnetic beings. It's everywhere. So when we're stuff is moving through where the highways are the most active is where. Where we're seeing that kind of stuff. And, and I, I think that if you're somebody in the modern times who meditates a lot, you can sort of dive into aspects of our senses that we don't explore very much. And that I've been doing this very long time, and I can feel a lot of things with my hands that 20 years ago seemed impossible to me. So I. How that all developed is a little bit of a mysterious magic. But, yeah, I'm rambling a little bit. Did that answer your question?

Okay, yeah, it did. I think the big thing is that we're actually in on my end of the things, learning how our body's electromagnetic energy affects our body's healing. We have centers. Heart is a center, basically. Your parasympathetic nervous system, which is above and below your sympathetic nervous system, is a center. Your pineal gland is actually a center. And I'm more familiar with Ayurvedic medicine. How the doshas, how they kind of view those energy centers which just happen to correspond with these ganglia or basically which are places. We have lots of nerves conglomerating in your body, which you can actually pick up with. There's actually electromagnetic imaging that can actually pick these centers up. Does traditional Chinese medicine have a similar view of energy centers? Or is it not something I'm not as familiar with?

If you asked people in the west who've been trained in Chinese medicine, all the textbooks that came from, like the 1950s China were translated that way, like qi is energy. But many intelligent people that I was at research and connections with scholars in China disagree with that translation. And it's seen more physically there than. Than some. Sometimes in the west, we like to think about qi or energy. But the truth in terms of physics is that all things are. All those things are true. These Chinese medicine is very oriented on these physical truths. There's some discussions of spirit in Chinese medicine. You can go on to write whole books about that that connects with mood and the person's mental health basically. But somebody, I forget which one of my professors said this, but there's matter and there's energy and not even talking in like a woo woo sense at all. Both of those things exist. And when there's a. When there's a severe physical problem, you'll get the best results when you're treating it from a physical perspective. If you have a sort of more minor physical result, it will be responsive to fluctuations in energy and vice versa. If some things this is less common. But if there's an energy problem which could be interpreted in terms of literal electromagnetic energy or just things that are difficult to see like mood, you can impact those things with physical treatment. But the more severe they are, the less physical treatment is going to impact those things. So that sort of delves into the realm of spiritual matters, which is absolutely outside of the scope of this conversation. But I like thinking about things that way.

So maybe to like. So if someone has appendicitis like a physical problem need to get fixed versus if someone's got like ibs, which is just a more like non western medicine. We're not quite sure what to do with IBS functional world, we have a lot of things with it. But is that kind of like that?

I would say more like appendicitis versus like an emotion like mild anxiety. You know, like mild anxiety will be often very responsive to more energetic treatments that are maybe interacting with the electromagnetic magnetic field or energy movement in the body versus appendicitis. You don't want to mess around with trying to give somebody a frequency specific microcurrent like go to the er.

Agreed. Agreed.

Yeah.

Even though some newer research is actually showing this is interesting, like treating pedocytes with antibiotics, oral antibiotics. If the patient's stable, you actually have better outcomes than sort of going written all of them, which is. Yeah, it's kind of intriguing. So you did. You mentioned detox a couple of times. Not in the functional medicine where we talk about detox a bunch. There's the. The kidney does detoxification using minerals and different kinds of things. The GI tract with bile. Actually the facts are dumping off toxins and chemicals in your small bowel as well. And a lot of my patients who are actually really quite sick, their detox pathways are blocked and we'll try a binder to speed up part of that liver gut and they, they hurts. You know, sometimes we'll do model things like kidney detox which is usually electrolytes and alkalization of urine, things like that. Could you touch a little bit? Because that's some of my patients actually that people align patients who've been really sensitive to things. You've done some like mild herbal things, which makes sense. It's helping deliver detox. I've had some pretty good results. Could you talk a little bit more about the way nutritional tiniest mess. And how do you all do detox? Because we usually think lungs, kidney, skin, spleen is like your body's biggest lymph nodes. That's kind of in between lymphatics and kind of gut. How do y' all like look at detox pathways and address them?

I would say there's not, again, there's not really a one to one correlation with that train of thought. So it's a little hard for me to separate my Western knowledge from my Chinese medicine knowledge there and answer that question in a good way because again, that concept kind of doesn't exist. But I will say what we now know are issues of congestion from these detox pathways not working efficiently do also show up in what's considered the liver organ system in Chinese medicine and the kidney organ system in Chinese medicine and the stomach organ system and Chinese medicine. Things that are related to digestion, liver, kidneys. Oh, and lungs too. So yeah, not a one to one correlation. But the problems show up in the same systems basically in Chinese medicine too, even though it wasn't maybe thought of exactly in that same way.

Yeah. Do you ever ask. This is just something I thought. You ever ask patients about their stool consistency or you ever get.

People love that.

Well, my understanding of like traditional Tibetan medicine, they actually make a big deal about urine.

Yes.

Receives breath, smells, wet smell, which are mainly detoxification, like the byproducts of your. Your own body's detoxification. Tell us a little bit about how y'.

All.

How you look at poop. I know how I look at poop symptoms.

So every acupuncturist or Chinese medicine practitioner that you talk to is going to give you different answers because they're going to have different things that they resonate with. But the. You want to know how regularly somebody's going. Of course, you want to know the consistency, loose or firm. I like to ask if they have to bear down to have a bowel movement. And I also want to know if. If they're having any discomfort, especially in their abdominal region, if it feels better before or after the bowel movement or worse. If you feel worse after bowel movement. That tells me that something very different is going on than if you're feeling worse before you go and the discomfort is relieved by the bowel movement. And I want to know like, is the smell especially bad? I want to know if it is hot feeling when it comes out. All these things give me different indications about, about what might be going on. And if it is, the stool is loose. Is there undigested food in it versus not. Those are just a few things that I can think of off the top of my head, but.

And how do you feel?

A lot.

Yeah. And so how do you, how do you look? Because like, I know how I think about undigested fool or the hot feeling. How, how? So if someone has undigested stool, loose bowels, and it has that kind of hot feeling coming out, what does that typically mean as far as their bodies functioning?

Hot would be. So you would think of it as a more heat type based problem. So from a western medicine perspective, more inflammation if there's a hot feeling. Undigested food specifically is usually that there is a weakness in the digestive tract. So the digestive tract is kind of too weak to be doing its job. So the person might not be producing enough stomach acid or pancreatic enzymes or something along those lines. Or the tone of the digestive tract is really poor. So things are just running through.

Gotcha. Okay.

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Interesting weakness because like typically I think about low stomach acid hypochlorhydria, which is, I guess is a weakness, or the things are moving through too quickly because there is inflammation or bacteria, which again, you're not going to be digesting it. That's kind of.

It can be both, but more traditionally from Chinese medicine, you think undigested food is a weakness. And there can be both things. There can be an irritation causing a weakness. So you have to assess for that same thing.

Yeah. So one thing we talked about initially when our conversation, like I was like, what are the things you'd like to talk about? And I read, when I read articles, I read stuff from around the world. Unfortunately, I don't, I guess. Do you speak Chinese or read Chinese or.

I took a lot of classes in grad school and that was a very long time ago. And now I can probably read about.

Three words because all the stuff I'm reading is just translated into English. But there is a huge amount of literature on Chinese medicine. Could you talk a little bit to the evidence base interest in Chinese medicine? Because in the west we tend to think there's this one kind of evidence and we're actually kind of written. I think we're at an inflection point like in our culture and society right now, because I feel like the idea of different kinds of evidence is kind of coming to our public consciousness. But here's some people's evidence based. They mean randomized double lined controlled trials, which is actually like less than 1% of all clinical research in the West. So when people say that they're throwing out like 99% of all clinical research, those different kinds. But could you talk a little bit about the evidence behind.

Yeah, I'd love to. So what I was saying to you before we started recording is that I hear this less as time goes by, but I start. I went to grad school in 2006 and I started my practice in 2011. I would hear this more than the now, but people will just say, understandably and again, because I was one of these people, oh, that's not evidence based. I don't believe in that. There's not science behind it. And that's very wrong. Now on two counts. The first count being that there is 2000 years of written record of Chinese medicine and there's a huge number of books and a massive amount of text that amounts to 2000 years of recorded observational data. And we believe that the system of medicine goes back at least another 2,000 years. Perhaps further, they found some artifacts that maybe dated back to about 6,000, 4,000, 6,000 PCA might be messing that up, but a really long time. So thousands of years of observational data is a massive amount of observational data. And yes, it's in a different language and yes, it's in culture, cultural concepts that Western people aren't going to inherently understand very easily. But I think it's old. Now that I'm older, I can say that it's foolish to dismiss that amount of observational data. It's massive. But also additionally, there is an increasing, pretty sizable amount of what one might consider more from a Western medicine perspective, more traditionally evidence based information about all the different systems that acupuncture interacts with. We have seen acupuncture light up predictably certain areas in the brain. We have seen it under microscopes interact with the connective tissue and influence control centers in the connective tissue. I think that's the fibroblasts, if I'm not mistakenly remembering that term. Three inches away from the needle in the connective tissue, three inches away, these control centers and connective tissues start firing and tensing and relaxing. We've seen it interact with specific nerve fibers that are important on pain pathways. We've seen it influence colitis in the GI tract. There's a cool. There's an amazing episode on Radiolab called. Do you know that radio show Radiolab? I think you would love it if you've never heard it. This liver pathologist about 10 years ago discovered this new structure in the body. He called it the interstitium, similar to lymph flow. It's like this honey like honeycomb like structure that moves between all the cells in the body and contains 25% of the body's fluid. And this Chinese researcher found this research. He did some experiments on rabbits. He gave them colitis, very sad. But then gave them acupuncture. They got better, some of them were cured. And he went looking in the interstitium to see if there was anything new and different that was happening after the rabbits had gotten acupuncture. And he found these cells called telocytes that were crazy, crazy activated after the acupuncture when the. That seemed to correspond with when the rabbits were improving from their colitis. And these telecytes are these really weird shaped cells that have these super long tendrils that people are still trying to understand but seem to have some role in immune system function and cell signaling essentially. So the whole picture is still forming, but it's clear to me from both perspectives that there's a massive amount of data. So if you're still saying I don't believe in it, there's no science behind it, respectfully, you're just wrong.

Yeah, we talk about Data. I have to remind people that when the pandemic started, we were saying there's no data for vitamin D and the immune system. And it was kind of like I had start check checking levels of that back in 2002, based on my understanding of literature. I was in my training at that point in time. And so 20 years later, it was controversial. Now we know. Yeah, if Your level's over 50, your chance of passing away from COVID was less than 0.001%. So it was actually almost determinative in some populations of how well they do. And so this thing I tell people, if you wait for the science to catch up, so to speak, you know, to 50 years. Give 50 years and 7,000 research articles before the surgeon. Julian Einstein said smoking causes cancer. Right. Well, it's really interesting. Well, it's interesting because I actually remember reading in China, it was like in the 1600s, they recognized the negative impact of tobacco exposure that had been introduced to the west, to military, to soldiers. So they actually start banning now. It's part of the whole east west thing with the English and stuff. But they realized and realized this is bad because they delineate addictive behaviors. They delineated how it affected their health. And they were like, this is bad. We don't. And again, I knew a culture where you need a strong standing military. Anything affect your military is bad. But it was interesting how they figured they saw that a correlation half a millennium ago, and then we were struggling with it in the 70s here. So I feel like, you know, one of the things of functional medicine I had of a western mindset. But it's like you a great example. Here we go. Like, I remember reading about G. This is more auretic medicine being used with neurological conditions like Parkinson's. And I'm like, that's weird like that. But then you can start getting the gut microbiome and butyrate and you realize actually there's actually a prescription drug that actually has butyrate in it. And tudka, that's being phenyl butyrate, that's being actually FDA approved to treat the symptoms of als. And we'd actually realize how important butyrate is. And nature's highest density thing that has butyrate is actually ghee. So somehow someone 4,500 years ago saw some correlation and it just. That's. That's what really intrigues me. Like the ancient wisdom that we're now just getting assigned. Like, I can understand now why ghee can be used, but when I First heard it, I'm like, that's Huey nonsense. There's so many things like that. I feel like that now more open to, like, okay, like, someone did this for 2,000 years. Maybe there's something behind it. And then getting what I would consider like, evidence, quote unquote, like published stuff behind or even bench research, which in my. Which in the traditional medicine will be Nord. Bench research, which is like what textbooks are made of. Right. So it's kind of. I think the evidence we need to like, have a bigger understanding of. It's not just randomized trials that are usually paid for by pharma. It's not just. Or NIH Grant. It's epidemiologic diet and historical data as well. People have been collecting Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine, Tibetan medicine, information for like, I didn't realize it was going back to six. I didn't realize it went back to 6,000 BC. That's. That's even longer than 4,500 years, right?

Yeah, a very long time. And that one's theoretical. They found some tools that were maybe for surgery, maybe for acupuncture. But the oldest acupuncture texts are basically describing surgery. So I don't think the delineation was that clear back then. It was just probably all medicine.

Yeah, well, it's also. You have to have. Yeah. It takes a culture to be around for a while before people experiment with stuff, before you actually get something written down. So there's a history before that written as the prehistory, so to speak.

Yeah. Being on oh Journey has certainly been humbling for me because I have constantly been faced with my own biases and ignorance and kind of what I've come to after all these years is that people are like, well, why try something? It's very old if you don't know if it works or not. But you and I both see a lot of patients who are in very bad shape and very desperate, and Western medicine has nothing for them. Long COVID patients are a great example. What's cool about Chinese medicine is that that type of pathogen is very well known from a Chinese medicine perspective. And within a month of that hitting the ground in China, the TCM providers had formulas, herbal formulas that were working well for patients because there's a written record of viruses presented in a very typical way. So if the treatment or the cure is going to be low harm and low risk, there's no what if you are somebody who has no. No other answers, why not try it? Nothing else is working for you.

And actually. Well, that's. That actually triggers on my brain because also during. Earlier. Earlier on in the pandemic, they start using your sodiol over and trying to treat while Covid, which is. It's a bile extract. I use a lot of tuka in my patients with other issues. It actually helps your body detoxify better, strangely enough. Like, is bile, like ox bile or bile derivatives? Is that something that's used at all, like in your. In. Can you tell us a little about. Because I am actually super fascinated with bile because of its impact on the peroxis zone, which is basically a detoxifying thing in your cells and actually improves mitochondrial function. It helps your body burn off dysfunctional lipids. Where if you're familiar with all the seed oil stuff going on right now, like seed oils are these horrible toxic things. You can actually use tudka or utka and udca to burn those things off. From your perspective, from a TCM perspective, kind of curious how they view bot because again, my perspective is totally going to need a different perspective than this one that has 4,500 years of knowledge behind. What's your perspective on bottle?

So I'll tell you that the textbook use for that is that it clears heat so inflammation, dissolves phlegm. So can dissolve mucus, can dissolve biofilms, can help break down just kind of thick, goopy fluids, calms wind, which can correlate with convulsions. That one, the modern correlation there is a little less clear. But traditionally it's used for infantile convulsions, seizures, facial pleuralis, tetanus stroke, spasms and cramps. And you can obviously use it for any type of digestive issue. It's not a super commonly used herb. It's in some formulas, but mostly you give it with patients that have these thick, goopy stuck fluids or biofilms.

Because it can also be helpful with gut biofilms as well, particular cast tub. Gus, that's kind of interesting. So that's a great example of something that I'm super excited. Been researching a lot in the last couple years. But you just said a few basic, simple things. I'm like, oh yeah, seizures, neurological issue. Oh yeah, biofilms. So I feel like it's marrying these two concepts together to help people who it will be decades before. I have quote unquote research trials to address. And yeah, and it's really interesting how I didn't realize within a month they were already treating it in China. That's kind of intriguing to me. I heard about in Indian hospitals, people when they're coming in, they were giving them turmeric teas and ginger tea, which lowers cytokines, have a massive inflammation and that's all tumor especially actually lowers inflammatory bacteria in the gut tract. So that the fact that they were already doing that and was in hospitals while we were still twiddling our fingers over here is kind of intriguing to me.

We handcuff ourselves a lot here. Oh, we don't want to do anything too crazy like give them turmeric tea.

With what's funny because like a medical dose of green tea for the EGCG to get some of its stem cell impact is like 46 cups a day. So if you're not in a culture that that's part of drinking it, then you're not going to get four to six cups a day of green tea to get that quote, unquote medicinal impact.

Yeah, fair enough. There's a resource you might like and anybody listening might like. I use it. Pretty much every colleague that I know uses it. For quick reference, it's americandragon.com it was created by this acupuncturist who would consult with television shows. He, he's, he passed away at the beginning of the pandemic. But he's, he's quite famous in our realm. And you can look up the different herbs and I just sort of read you the textbook uses of, of that herb and it came from that website.

Oh, that's cool.

Great resource.

Yeah, cool. Awesome. So, Megan, any passing thoughts for my audience as well? Like what are you doing? If people wanted to know more about you, how would they learn about you as well?

Sure. So I'm@centeredrichmond.com I have a social media account myself. I post some health education videos a few times a week. You can find those links on my website. I mostly see patients who have digestive problems, allergies, hormone issues, chronic pain and chronic infections. Those are probably my most commonly treated conditions at my clinic here. And I would say I specialize in more medical conditions, which I think is a little bit unique in the acupuncture community here. That's always been my interest and focus. And I would say just keep an open mind for your patients or anybody listening to this about your healing journey. Don't write off therapies that maybe aren't traditionally accepted, especially if you're not getting the help that you want from traditional Western medicine. There's lots of other options out there for you. You can see a functional medicine provider. There's an amazing one in Richmond. There's a couple that I can think of. You can go to an acupuncturist. You could. Those are my favorite. I won't list other professions, but I just find that if people keep trying, they'll often find somebody that, that can help them. And obviously there's exceptions to that. But just don't give up. You deserve to feel good, you deserve to feel heard, and you deserve to work with a provider who takes you seriously and is working from like a deep place in their heart to like get you better.

I think one thing that drives me first and foremost, do no harm. And that's why I think people don't realize that tunnel Advil cause a lot of deaths, cause a lot of kidney issues. And that's one of the things when you look at other modalities, what are the potential? I always look at. What's the first downside People don't realize the fifth most common cause of death in our country, this number has actually gone up, is the atrogenesis, which is things doctors do. It's medication complications and surgical complications. And so I always went before I started giving someone a recommendation, like, okay, what's the first, the downside? And that's where I think some of these holistic alternative, whatever you want to call them, modalities that have been, you're not, if something's really dangerous, you're not going to do it for 2500 years to somebody. Right. You tend to, you tend to learn the nuances. One side question you actually triggered, do you do, do you work with Alpha Gal at all?

Oh, yeah, I do actually work with Alpha Gal patients. I find that they're responding very well.

Yeah, it's really interesting. You probably know this, alert you more. There's actually a study published on acupuncture for Alpha Gal couple years ago and I was like, blown away. I'm like, oh my gosh. This is actually an actual published trial which like 20, 30 patients. But that's something that again, acupuncture to help with Alpha Gal, like that's pretty amazing.

I think. Yeah, I read that study and used it in my approach and that was just an acupuncture only based approach. And I will, with pretty much all those patients, combine it with traditional Chinese herbalism to just support their health in general. And I find that those two things together are working really, really well for patients. I have a patient who lives on a farm outside of town and she was having, she got it and she was having horrible reactions. She had beef by accident one night, had basically anaphylaxis. And I treated her for like a month, maybe six weeks. She had another accidental exposure and nothing happened. And that, that's not, that's not every case that I see. But pretty much everybody has had a significant reduction in symptoms and has been able to get out of that anaphylactic reaction state.

And alpha gal, for those who don't know what that is, that's a tick bite induced mammalian sugar, actually allergy. I see a lot of people with exercise deduced hives, anaphylaxis. Obviously the worst cases, you eat it. But a lot of people have these weird. They'll eat it and then exercise or do something or get stressed and have these amphylactoid reactions. They don't realize it's related to a tick bite induced.

It's a weird one. It presents so many different ways with patients.

It does. It's so bizarre. And I, I'm kind of. I've actually talked with Dr. Heyman, who's one of the big mold experts, because I've seen a lot of my mold patients, actually a lot of my patients who live in a moldy environment. So there's no quote unquote association in our world as to date with mold exposure and that. But I'm just kind of, I've noticed that curious association myself and I'm looking for a link, so.

Well, it makes sense to me that anybody that has any level of immunocompromization, immunocompromised that didn't come out right would be more susceptible to these types of infections. So there may be a more specific one, but I, to me it makes total sense. I agree that that would be a thing.

Cool. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me. It's really nice talking with you.

Take care. Talk to you soon.