LS 148 - An Eastern Twist on Western Medicine with Dr. Erin West

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Hello everyone, this is your host Fernando Aris, in partnership with the Hartman Media Company. Today I have the pleasure to welcome to the show Dr. Erin West. Dr. West is a nationally board certified doctor in acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Cellular Biology from California State University and then went on to complete a five year doctorate in Traditional Chinese Medicine, TCM at Pacific Rheim College of Integrative and Complementary Medicine in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Dr. West, welcome to the show. How are you today?

I'm good. Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. West, I wanted to bring you to the show because I'm fascinated with what acupuncture can do to the body and it's a lot more than, you know, no pun intended, is on the surface by just sticking needles into the skin. How does it work? What's behind the science of acupuncture and how do you tie that in with complementary herbs and additional nutrition advice that comes with acupuncture? Give us an overview.

Yes, that's a very good question and I can go very deep with that or I can kind of keep it with some bullet pointed areas. But acupuncture is one of the main modalities in Chinese medicine. But Chinese medicine also encompasses nutritional advice and therapy. We use food as medicine as well as herbal medicine, which is typically we're going for a strong medical response to the herbs, so we're using very complex formulas for that. Acupuncture is so beautiful of a medicine just on its own, and I typically boil it down to maybe three or four main effects of those main effects, we can dive even deeper into what it is actually doing on a biological cellular basis in the body. So we obviously have heard of acupuncture. We know first thing that comes to mind is pain and we know that it relieves pain now that we've been researching it extensively. And how is it affecting our pain receptors and our pain response in the body? So, so we know that we release a bunch of pain relievers and natural painkillers from the body, which is a nice endorphin release, but it also in the long term helps with increasing the nitric oxide levels in the body, which nitric oxide helps to relax blood vessels, open and vasodilate them. And that can actually improve circulation to a degree that can be very pain relieving for most people. And, and the other main bullet point is that it reduces inflammation in the body. We've all heard of inflammation and how it's definitely the precursor to most, and I would say 80 to 90% of chronic illness stems from inflammation somewhere in the body. We're usually trying to seek out how can we reduce inflammation in our gut, in our joints, in our muscles, in our head even. And when we put pins in the body, I call them pins, I don't call them needles. Needles have a pretty bad connotation to them and it can sound quite painful. And acupuncture is not that way. They're very non traumatic pins that we use and most patients actually fall asleep. But when we put pins anywhere in the body, the brain starts to release a bunch of anti inflammatory mediators and these start to go out and seek out different areas of the body. We're obviously trying to direct it where we need it the most, but it's going and seeking out areas of inflammation which is so powerful, stimulating our immune system that way. And the other real cool thing is we've determined that when we put acupuncture pins in the body locally, but also systemically or throughout the body, it helps to elongate and relax muscle fibers. And so you probably know somebody or maybe yourself that has tension in the body. You can feel it. You can feel that your upper traps or your neck or your lower back, even your legs can just feel so tight and tense. And massage can be very helpful. And I sometimes think for most conditions we need to go a little deeper and combine acupuncture where we can really elongate those muscle fibers, take the pressure off of the joints where they attach. And that's a beautiful thing. The other cool thing about acupuncture and how it works in almost all of those facets is that when we put pins in the body and we're lying for about 25, sometimes 20, but 25 to 30 minutes, we stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. I like to touch on this because if we look around, we notice in our modern culture we see a lot of stress. And it could be emotional stress, it could be physical stress. It manifests quite differently for everybody. But regardless, we're under stress. And that could be from chemical overload. It could also be from just lifestyle choices. So what I love is talking about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic is what we know as our fight or flight response. That's us feeling the get up and go. Our heart rate goes up. We're kind of in this stressed spot. And there's so much that goes on in the body when we're in that space. But the parasympathetic think of a parachute. That's how I like to remember parasympathetic. So parachuting down, just like the come down from the fight or flight. Parasympathetic is a nervous system state that we actually want to be in a little more frequently. Why? Because that's when we rest, digest, heal and repair the body. That's when so much work is going on inside. And we tend to seek it out with massage, yoga, meditation, acupuncture, anything to kind of feel that calm that we tend to not feel very often for most people. And when we do acupuncture, it strongly stimulates that to a degree where people say, when I come back into the room, they say, I feel so heavy or I feel like I'm floating. I just feel like I can't feel my arms. They feel like just dead weights.

Well, I can attest to that. I've been treated by you a few times and it just completely knocks you out. It's just unbelievable how that I imagine that it's something that you can't do on a chronic basis. You can't keep having this overstimulation of the parasympathetic system every day, I imagine, right. It has to be balanced. You don't want to have too much of this analogy used with a parachute coming down. Rest and digest and heal. You have to do some sort of cycling. Does that make sense?

Well, yes, and I think we get quite a bit of the sympathetic already. But you're right, there's benefit to sympathetic. Even if we just think emotionally when we are under stress, evolutionarily speaking, that has saved us because now we seek different answers. We Search for a different solution and it drives and motivates us. So I do think we need to be in sympathetic at times to get things done. It's like you've probably heard or you have somebody that, you know, you want to kind of light a fire under their butt, you know, get them going. So it's almost like, yes, you need that balance. It seems in our modern culture we're tending towards sympathetic more often. And then if we're in that zone, even when going to sleep, we can see things like restlessness with sleep and even increased cortisol because now we're in a stress spread position when nighttime is supposed to be a decrease in cortisol levels. So it's a lovely thing to tap in. Even if we can tap in for 10 minutes a day with some 10 minute meditation, I think that's really, can be very beneficial. Plus it's, it's actually been highly researched as well.

I, I see exactly what you're saying. I think as a society mostly in cities, we are so far away removed from nature, which has the ability to balance energy in your system and it has that ability to increase your parasympathetic system and relax you more. But if you're just constantly meetings and indoors and just dealing with issues and lots of things in the head not really connected with nature, you tend to create too much cortisol and just be in that, as you mentioned, your fight or flight mode too often. You know, we have so much technology and so much has been done in the area of medicine and yet there's so many issues with stress. So acupuncture helps with that. And you mentioned inflammation. How exactly does acupuncture reduce inflammation? What's the process behind that? I'm curious.

Yes. So it's almost a little bit kind of how it relieves pain by releasing the nitric oxide or at least enhancing the generation of nitric oxide in the body, opening up blood vessels, increasing blood circulation. Because sometimes inflammation, it actually causes a lot of stagnation, it causes a lot of pressure on the body. And so when we just open up, blood vessels, get things moving. But then what we found when we researched what happens, what chemicals are released, what happens in the brain, when we put pins in the body, we found that it actually stimulates the release of neuropeptides and other anti inflammatory mediators. And that's powerful to. Because so much of things that we do in our life, or what we eat, for example, nightshade vegetables, as simple as that and as complex as sugar and Gluten can actually block our natural anti inflammatory processes, which we have several of. So we're kind of needing to mitigate the inflammation because we don't have our natural sources helping with that because it's been blocked naturally. And so that's a bit of how the inflammation can be reduced. So stimulating white blood cells and anti inflammatory inflammatory mediators and then opening up and moving the blood circulation, which I can't say enough about that. Let me give you an example of pain and the heart. So if somebody's having a heart attack, it could be that there's a blood clot right in the vessel. The minute that you either open up that vessel and relieve that constraint or, or go in for surgery and get it removed, it is immensely different. The pain, it's instantly gone. So just that lack of blood flow to an area causes that pain and then that inflammatory response.

That is fascinating that the pins going in and the process of improving circulation and just relaxing the muscles and everything that you mentioned is so powerful by just being manipulated by pins. I know. And it's just fascinating that you can control so much with so little, I guess is what I'm trying to get at. But I do want to know, and from your perspective, how this works with your specialty, which is infertility and pregnancy related conditions and so on, what is the mechanism there? How can acupuncture and just Chinese medicine in general really help people with these issues?

That's a great question. And I remember when I was in my undergrad and internship, I thought, thought every time somebody had infertility or came to the clinic with having a problem conceiving whether it was male or female, that it always boiled down to a biomedical reason that there was something really nefarious going on or some major complication. But it turns out that there are a lot of times that there isn't really a problem. And I can't remember what the percentage is, but I think it's less than 20% that when we go to a fertility clinic that we actually find out a reason for our infertility that's pretty low. That means that a lot of the reasons why people are infertile are actually not even diagnosable. There's really doesn't seem to be a problem, you know, keep trying or go for artificial reproductive technology.

And by the way, I hear that these issues are growing. There's more and more cases. Do you see the same thing? Do you see, you know, an upward trend?

Absolutely. The fertility specialists that I'm close with in the Area, definitely we have this conversation and it's good business for them. It's also unfortunate because I think there's, it's multifactorial and I think that if you and I have talked about this before, how much nutrition is our medicine and it also can be our, to our detriment too. So food, food, food and what we're being exposed to with our food too. So but anyways, infertility, one of the biggest things that we do and we know happens in the body again now that we've been able to research it, is sometimes it's just they need to reduce stress. So coming in and getting their nicely stimulated parasympathetic nervous system, having somebody to talk to and feel heard and the process of just being still for 30 minutes is a beautiful thing for people. But also we know that we've done a lot of studies with Doppler readings on the uterus and the ovaries. And we're trying to see what type of changes do we see with blood perfusion or circulation to the ovaries and the uterus. And we with acupuncture, not even local, we're not even necessarily putting pins locally above the uterus or the ovaries. We can see a significant difference in improvement of blood circulation to those reproductive organs, which is so beneficial again, blood circulation and again getting those anti inflammatory mediators where they need to go. And also acupuncture is very beneficial for regulating hormones. So the endocrine system, we can work with thyroid and adrenals, but we can definitely work with sex hormones, which usually both of those actually affect sex hormone function. So the other aspect is when we think about men, usually with men, we can stimulate increase in sperm parameters like morphology, motility, mobility, all the things that are necessary to have functional sperm. But we often will add in Chinese herbal medicine, I will, I find that that is even more effective to combine acupuncture and Chinese herbs for the men. So that's the fertility in a nutshell.

That's interesting. That is a common combination, right? You adding the herbs with the acupuncture, does one enhance the other? Is that the reason behind it? Why do you do that?

So that's a really good question. Some people come to me, they have a lot of pain and they want treatment with pain, but their digestive system is just not functional. And of course they're not going to be able to absorb internal medicine herbs if their gut is not working properly. And you and I discussed this even with you, where you know, that was a You're coming in for a pain, and I'm asking, how's your digestion? That doesn't seem right for most people.

Yeah, most people listening. You know, that is what really impressed me. You know, having you work with me is you go deeper. You know, you don't just ask, okay, tell me about your symptom. I says, no. Okay, what's your nutrition like? You know, what sort of exercise do you do? How stressful are you? You have to go deeper, right, Dr. West? I mean, you have to.

Let's face it, modern medicine has the symptom management upper hand. You know, that's pretty much what it does, aside from er, emergency medicine, cancer, things like that. I mean, it just soars. But symptom management, you have a symptom, you could go and get a pill and it can eradicate it. But is it treating the root? That's a question always to ask your provider. So with herbs, what I think is if the gut isn't working well, we gotta repair the gut, then maybe we can do internal herbs for their condition. But if their gut is working fine, what I like to think of is acupuncture clears the pathways. Acupuncture gets the circulation moving, opens up the vessels, relaxes the muscles. Now we add in herbs and it can effectively get to the areas. Very few times do I ever work with patients without combining acupuncture with their herbal medicine. So very few are just herbal medicine patients because, let's face it, we want to also make sure we get those nutrients and those medicinal properties to the areas of the body, so the acupuncture delivers that part.

What's fascinating to me also is the knowledge that Chinese medicine brings. And I recall when I talked to you and I complained about some being tired after, you know, doing a fast, and you asked me a few questions and did a little research. And what you told me, which I had no idea about, was that fasting during the winter places a bigger toll on your system, especially the kidneys. And I never made that connection. And, you know, it's something that the Chinese know for a long time. And that's what comes into, I think, your practice as an understanding of what are these somewhat unusual connections that people don't necessarily think about, but once you dive into and you peel the onion, it says, oh, yeah, you know, it does make sense. And I felt better when I did this during the summer, and in the winter, I actually feel a little different or drinking cold water versus warm water. Can you go over a little bit of these kind of common sense Chinese medicine ideas that most people don't think about or don't know.

Absolutely. So every season is really, there's certain organs that have been connected with being maybe a little bit stronger response or weaker action even. And so that's where we discussed what your physical presentation was. Okay. It linked to what season we were in. And then adding that fast, I think just added some taxing to your system, which you are typically born with one area of weakness. You probably know a child that has had skin problems ever since they were born, or, you know, has had digestive problems ever since they were born. That's kind of their Achilles heel. That's what we see as constitutionally their area of weakness. And so when you are taking somebody who has an inset area of weakness, which we all do, and it's good to know what that is. And that's something that Chinese medicine providers can teach you and show you, then, you know, during those seasons where those organs are more abundant, when maybe things are more cold versus more hot, then you need to be a little bit more aware of doing and nurturing different aspects of your health. And you had asked another question too, about the cold water. So, by the way, my fertility top five tips, one of which is do not have any iced drinks. The reason is we went on this big fad, you know, having these zero foods like celery, carrots, raw celery carrots, because it's going to burn more energy than it does, you know, as far as how many calories it gives you. But the problem with that is it's relying on consuming so much of our digestive energy, and then it leaves the rest of our body not able to do all of its processes as effectively because you're kind of exhausting it with the digestive functions.

It's because there's like a shock, the cold, you know, the ice cubes hitting your stomach, and it just. Is that what's going on there?

Yes. And it's same with raw foods. You know, the cellulose we can't break down, but it just requires so much energy to try and break down this raw cold food. Same thing with the ice drinks. You drink it, think about the feeling in your stomach. Most people can identify this. Some people absolutely love ice, and they just love that feeling. But when you think of it, the stomach's almost like, you know, and it crumples up and it gets really constricted because of the cold. And then it's got to bring a ton of blood flow to the stomach. So now it's warming it, warming it, warming it. To try and digest what you just took in. That amount of energy, we don't want to waste on that digestive function. We want to encourage so much more in the body and not just waste it. When we do that, it kind of drains you more, you know?

Yeah, no, it's common sense things. You go back to evolution. When we were cavemen in Paleolithic area era, you didn't have refrigerators. So it was very difficult, you know, in cold water was not something that was available, especially ice, you know, and I'm not sure if the Eskimos would appreciate just. Just chopping down ice. I think they would boil it or they would at least warm it before they would drink it. It just makes sense.

Well, and even from a convalescing aspect, when you're convalescing from an illness, what are we doing? We're giving them basically like baby food. We're giving them warm, blended, even easy to digest, simple ingredients, warm foods. We're not giving them cold, raw foods. So if we think of it, we're doing that. Why? Because we want to conserve their energy to heal from their injury.

Yeah, no, it makes sense. Aaron, I know you worked as an emergency vet technician, and how does that work relate to what you do today? How did it help you, maybe in your intuition with patients? What is the relation between animals and people? And can you go over that a bit?

Oh, that's such a great question. I can't even tell you. I feel really blessed to have had that experience. It was about 12 years in the emergency veterinary field. And what I love about it is it really showed me when something is an emergency. I think the best thing I could take away is when something is a crisis, an emergency, or when is it something that, okay, we can make some adjustments here and there and we can actually rehabilitate without it being extensive, you know, surgery or medical intervention. So I absolutely loved working with animals. I do miss that part, and I think it really refined my intuition about the body because they can't talk. So sometimes people come in and they don't tell me the whole story, but I've got to rely on. Especially with Chinese medicine, we're trained to smell, look, feel, you know, just give the whole picture of what's going on with somebody, not just thinking about their symptoms or hearing their symptoms. So with working with animals, they would come in and we would have no idea what's going on. The owners would say this, these symptoms, and it comes and goes and we have to be investigators. And I feel that refined my skills as an investigator into the body without having them even tell us what's wrong. And I'm also really blessed because there's a lot of pharmacology that and surgical procedures that are very similar to what we do in modern medicine with humans. So I'm very afloat on that. It really helped me in grad school. I kind of soared through the pathophysiology and in that part of our studying and our training and physical examinations and stuff like that. So I think it's only been something that's actually benefited me. Even though I'm not working in emergency medicine now and I'm now working with humans, it's still. I do see the crossover in a lot of areas.

And I do see, you know, I'm definitely a testimonial to that, that I can see that in you, that you can go deeper and you have just, just an extra sense and intuition that you mentioned from the work you did with animals and maybe just. Just innate to really understand the root cause or get to the root cause. A lot of times, as you said, the patient comes in and the head is full of stories and they want to spin it one way or another, but the truth is lying underneath. Now, I know we're coming out to the end of the interview. I did want to ask you one question, and I'm not sure that we ever talked about this. I know you. You were from Canada originally, correct?

Yes, I was born there, moved to California when I was 2.

So maybe it's not too relevant, but do you see a big difference between how, you know, maybe alternative medicine is done in Canada versus in the US or is it about the same, you know, in your area, is it viewed more positively or less positively? Is there a different direction that the two countries are going on? Is there anything that you can comment about the differences?

I think that the larger cities like Ontario and Vancouver in strikingly kind of east and west, those areas are very predominantly having alternative medicine. But I don't see it as anything more than California and New York, where it's very much a part of even the health insurance, even more than in Arizona. And so I think that they're very similar, just like in some states in the US Maybe kind of in middle America, they might not have it as predominantly in their healthcare toolbox, the same thing in Canada. So I don't know if I can make that. I know that when I was in Vancouver, for those, I was on Vancouver island for the five year doctorate program. I did notice that it tended to be something that primary care doctors talked about to their patients. They would even say things like, you have high blood pressure, take some garlic. Now I'm not a fan of just, you know, choosing one thing for one, you know, big condition, but at least they reached outside of the box of it. You could see more of that flavor of, you know, have you tried more relaxation techniques? So referring for massage and acupuncture, I think that was a little bit more than what I see in, in the U.S. excellent.

Well, Dr. West, any last few words of advice for the listeners and any URLs or any links that you'd like people to know about you and know more about your work?

Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much. So I own Amend Acupuncture and Chinese medicine in Gilbert, Arizona. The website emendhealth.com spelled e m e n d health.com and what I will say just in general is if you have a nagging problem, if there is something symptomatic in your body and you are uncomfortable or something strikes you as not right, and you've gone through the medical system for the diagnostic techniques, which are lovely, you know, getting some labs, maybe images, stuff like that, and you still can't get your, the answer that you need or the relief that you need. I do think it would be a great idea that you reach out to either somebody who has a master's or a doctorate level in Chinese medicine. You'll typically see their credentials as LAC or licensed acupuncturist. That's in the US specific. And there are so many more ways to address the body and the health than just looking at symptoms. And I think it's in our best interest to reach outside of the box to, to help heal ourselves. And I would love to discuss nutrition for a full hour with you, Fernando.

We could do that for sure.

We would have a great time doing that.

You have such a strong background and I do want to thank you for helping me with, as you just mentioned, people in my case have some back pain and some disc bulging issues that can be helped with, with acupuncture and herbs and Chinese medicine. And I've seen significant improvement by trying what you suggested and by going through those routes as opposed to going to a more strong, I guess is the right word way to address these issues by going through surgery which is, you know, really cutting up the body is trauma to the body. It's a completely different way of addressing a problem. And I definitely wanted to try it and it is working. So I'm a testimony to what you're just saying.

Wonderful. Oh, thank you, Fernando. It's been a pleasure working with you.

All right, well, Dr. Aaron west from emendhealth.com it has been a pleasure to have you on the show, and you have a great day.

Okay, thank you. You as well. I appreciate you having me on.

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