A Japanese Doctor’s #1 Piece of Healing Advice

In my quest to figure out what was going on with my lifelong digestive problems and now seeing patients of my own, something really jumped out to me about solving the complexity that can come with treating not only chronic illness over years or decades, but also treating complex illness where there are many, many symptoms, many problems, and many patterns where sometimes if you are the patient, you can't tell the forest from the trees and you don't know what's causing certain symptoms, and honestly, you're not even really sure what makes the symptoms better or worse. In this video, I want to introduce the words of a very famous physician in Chinese medicine and how it can really help you heal yourself. Hey, I'm Alex Hine, author of the health book, Master of the Day. I've included a really interesting case study below. The first link is for this guy, Li Qingyun's Four Keys to Living a Long, Healthy Life. Supposedly, he lived to be 256 years old, which I do not believe, but he was a very long-lived guy, and his four Taoist principles can help anyone live a longer, healthier life. You can check it out at the first link below. There was this great Japanese physician named Yoshimatsu Todo, and Yoshimatsu Todo was an expert in abdominal palpation of a certain lineage of formulas called Sheng Han Lin formulas, but he specialized in being a very skeptical scientific guy when it came to systematically figuring out what caused disease and how to treat it with herbal formulas. Now, Yoshimatsu Todo had this one theory that I think is very, very interesting. He believed that for most patients, there was one main toxin, and if you figured out what that was, you could treat that pattern, I guess pathological pattern would be a better term, and if you treated that, most of the symptoms would go away. Now, clinically, I find this to be really, really true, at least in my own health recovery process. The main problem I had since childhood was digestive problems, was constipation, even if I ate incredibly well, exercised every day, meditated, I was happy, sometimes two, three, four, five days. And then later, in my later 20s, when I started to have this bout of really serious stress as an entrepreneur, then as a doctoral student, I learned that I was having other problems, starting to have indigestion, starting to get headaches for the first time in my whole life, really bad insomnia that went on for, I don't know, for years, and I went through this whole wild goose chase, chasing one rabbit that way, one rabbit that way, one goose that way, couldn't see the forest for the trees, completely disoriented and confused, many different doctors and physicians I saw, all treating something different. And it wasn't until I revisited Yoshimasa Toto's idea, what is the one big thing? What is the one main toxin or pattern in Chinese medicine, which is really what it would be? For me, the main pattern wasn't the insomnia, wasn't the psycho-emotional stuff, wasn't these other things, it was my digestion, and a very specific problem. And once I began to treat that very specific problem, that was the root, all these other branch patterns started going away over time. Now clinically, this tends to show up as patients and we have one main clinical pattern. Even though there may be a lot of different things happening, we tend to each have one or two, but primarily one main constitutional pattern that follows us throughout our life. Maybe we're the person where when we're under stress, we get diarrhea. Maybe you're the person where under stress, we start getting anxiety or depression symptoms, or we can sleep 15 hours a day, or something changes with our menstrual cycle. There's usually one core thread, and that thread ancient doctors called constitution. And I share that because if you are going through some kind of self-healing process, one of the best things you can ever do is focus on your main constitutional pattern. What is the main thing? The through line. Focus on the factors that heal that, and many of the other diverse factors will go away as well. So what it really means is maybe you're taking 100 supplements, or realistically 30 or 40. Maybe that means to figure out what are the three that are having the biggest impact. Or maybe this has broader applications to your life, where you've realized that you know what, 90% of my stress, what is the main pattern? It's my financial life. So guess what? I'm going to spend the next three years, I'm just going to work hard on my financial life. Maybe the stress is coming from relationships and love, so you decide, I'm going to dedicate twice as much time towards making sure I have abundant friends, I'm in a great relationship, and I put a lot of effort towards the person I'm dating, so that it stays great. There's usually one main pattern for a lot of people, and if you focus on that one main pattern, the breakdown, the problem, the pathological state, if you can focus on that, usually the results in the other quadrants of your life will often heal themselves. A lot like how someone who gets fit, develops discipline, suddenly they start demonstrating those practices, those character traits in other parts of their life. So I hope that helps. This is kind of in our self-healing series, so to speak, if you're working on healing something yourself. I hope this can help you. It's something that's really, really useful clinically. Now again, before you go, I've included that free case study down there below, Li Ching-Yun's Four Keys to a Long and Healthy Life, his Taoist Longevity Principles. Check it out down there, the first link in the description, and then before you go, check out the related videos right here on this topic.