Yang Qi: The Key to Not Getting Sick

You know, many people that have chronic illnesses have a cyclical quality to those conditions or to those symptoms. Like, for example, sinusitis and sinus infections. Swollen glands, tonsillitis, strep throat, and other conditions like that have a very common cyclical quality, including ear infections you see in children as well. But I thought this would be a very good point to illustrate a basic concept in Chinese medicine. Hey guys, Dr. Alex Hein, Chinese medicine doctor and author of the health book, Master of the Day. Now, before we jump in, there are two very important links right below this video. The first is for a free guide for daily rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine. And the second link is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally or virtually via telemedicine, the link to my private practice and contact info is right below this video. You know, there's this very interesting undercurrent of people in natural medicine, or I guess you could say lay practitioners, who believe that the body always heals. There's this idea that the body always heals and it just fixes itself. But my clinical experience kind of suggests otherwise, that there are quite a few substantial reasons and barriers to healing that we see clinically. I mean, if the body always healed, then everyone who ate healthy and took care of themselves would heal and feel better, right? But that's often not the case. And why that is, is as important of a question as why the person got sick in the first place. So why don't some people heal? And why don't some conditions heal? That's a very important question and not always so easy to answer. Now, these conditions, for example, sinus conditions, sinusitis, they're often treated pretty barbarically in conventional care. What you often see is repeated antibiotic usage and then they keep coming back still. And then these pseudo-surgical procedures, like where the balloon is inflated and the sinuses get, you know, there's a little bit of minor fracturing there. But none of these really address why it's happening in the first place. And I wouldn't say that we would need to address the root cause unless I thought that fixing the root cause would also solve other issues. And these people almost always have other things going on because it is a physiological issue, but it is treated as something structural. So let's talk about this idea of yang qi and constitutional healing because this is something we have chatted about quite a few times in my videos because it is absolutely essential to healing. And I do not see a lot of medical practitioners discuss it. Even a lot of alternative practitioners, you know, there's the tendency to just practice green medicine as it's called. They're using just supplements instead of a pharmaceutical effectively in the same exact way of clinical thinking. Chinese medicine is very very different. So yang qi is not so easy to explain, but one layer of it is we could just say yang qi is your healing force, your immune system, your general vitality, whatever word you want to use. And it is also the body's ability to heal itself. Now the problem is that for so many people the yang qi is what is weak in the first place. And so a chronic low-grade sinus infection for months is only a branch manifestation. That is only a symptom of the yang qi being weak. Now often what we see is that there are certain constitutions, people with certain genetic makeups, it often runs in families, sometimes it's post illness, sometimes it's post antibiotic usage, sometimes it's post medical interventions. But for whatever reason you're looking at a person with a weak yang qi constitution. The yang is weak. And so what happens is with sinusitis, for example, this is only one kind of sinusitis, mind you, more of the deficient side, is that you see these people manifest these low-grade sinusitis conditions. They undulate. It dances up and down and it never fully resolves. So when it gets bad again, it's this low-grade thing potentially for weeks or months and then they're good for a while and then it comes back. And what you're looking at is that the person's body is not manifesting a strong enough yang response to fully kick out this infection. And so it festers at this low-grade area and the sinuses just really stay occluded and they stay clogged and then eventually infection can breed from there. But this idea of it is the weak yang that often predisposes a certain percentage of sinusitis patients to that. But weak yang also predisposes you to potentially insomnia and mood problems and gut problems for a lot of people, especially with sinus conditions, almost always have something going on in the gut as well. So understanding that the sinus infection that is recurrent is only a symptom of this weak yang pattern. And weak yang predisposes you to a whole host of other things, not just the sinus condition. And again, in my experience, these conditions are depressingly almost always treated with repeated antibiotic usage. And you know what is one of the strongest, most consistent ways to damage yang in Chinese medicine? Antibiotics. And they're wildly overprescribed for chronic diseases. And you can even read research papers suggesting that the number of times a person has taken antibiotics is correlated with certain kinds of cancer. I've seen colon and breast cancer correlated with anxiety and depression rates going up. But the most base level is from our diagnostic intake side, the pulse diagnosis, the symptom picture, abdominal diagnosis, what we see is that it damages the yang. It impedes the body's ability to permanently heal in the future. I'm not saying that to scare you. I'm just sharing this video to illustrate another side that I don't hear even in other natural medicine modalities. I've only seen this explained in Chinese medicine. And this is obviously the medicine that has humbled me the most and helped me as a patient the most. So that is just one way to look at a certain percentage of the population with chronic sinusitis and why it keeps happening and it never fully goes away. All right, you guys, that's all I have for today for you. Again, remember right below this video, if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally or online via telemedicine, check out the link. Contact info for my private practice is right below. And I have two related videos for you right there.