3 Common Reasons for Menstrual Problems - According to Traditional Chinese Medicine

If there's anything traditional Chinese medicine should be famous for, it's for women's health. It is very very inspiring how many case studies I have seen of women having unique and specific gynecological problems that should not have been able to be fixed according to their doctor or specialist that I've been able to treat with internal medicine and Chinese formulas. But why do they occur in the first place? In this video we're going to discuss three of the most common causes of women's health issues within my field. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hine, author of the health book Master of the Day and doctor of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine. So before we jump into this video, there are two very important links right below the video. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, you can reach out to my private practice and contact us that way. The second is I've put together a free guide which is four daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. So those links are right below this video. Now there are three interesting causes of menstrual issues that are most common within my field and everyone is intimately familiar with them, but maybe these stories and these examples will help illustrate how common this is. So when I see the top three most common, I would say they are what we call qi stagnation, deficiency taxation, and the third would be what we call cold, deficiency cold. And let me explain and give examples for each of these. Now I once had a female patient that came in, this woman that came in, and she was going through an extremely rough patch in her relationship. She said they were fighting all the time, she was stressed out at her job, she wasn't eating well, but in general was feeling the highest stress she had ever felt in several months. Now to compound it even further, she said she came in and was worried that she was pregnant and she didn't want to be because mysteriously she hadn't had a menstrual cycle in several months, which was very uncommon for her. Now eventually over a few months that menstrual cycle restored itself and her menses was fine and she wasn't pregnant, but she had uncovered and unpacked a very common cause of menstrual irregularities in women, which is stress. So Chinese medicine calls this qi stagnation, and the best way that I can explain qi stagnation is it's almost like that feeling of having to cry but you're in a scenario where you cannot cry, meaning you have to push it down. You're at work or you're in a professional scenario or you're being criticized publicly and it wouldn't look good to cry, where someone is saying something to you or there's something bubbling up and you feel that overwhelming pressure in your chest and throat where you want to cry or yell but you have to swallow it down. That pressure creates a kind of stagnation and that emotional stagnation can lead to qi stagnation. So for many women they know under high stress they may miss a cycle and that is one of the common causes of menstrual irregularities, specifically when we talk about this cycle. Now it can often sometimes be a reason for dysmenorrhea or painful cycles, but in general I tend to see women have variable cycles with this pattern. Reason number two is what we call deficiency taxation. Another way we could call this is maybe overexhaustion. I once had a patient who is a very very high level division ranked athlete and a runner and she was running so many miles and putting in so much mileage that eventually she told me I hadn't had a menstrual cycle in several years. Now this woman was totally ripped, had a six-pack like any athlete and her body fat was so low that her body was now into survival mode effectively where it said hey you know what body fat is so low we're not going to have a menstrual cycle anymore. Now in many ways this is a kind of stress placed upon the body right because the ability to have children and get pregnant is a sign of good health and if a woman is not in some ways it's just an extension of poor health. There are underlying barriers to conception but with athletes and women that are very very very hard trainers their body fat may drop low enough that they're no longer able to have their cycle. So for some of the women that I see primarily the ones that are very athletic they tend to lose their body fat, they tend to have very low body fat and as a result tend to lose their cycle. But in many ways I view this as a stressor placed upon the body. So deficiency taxation is when a person is pushing or working or stressing the body so hard that it produces what we consider a state of deficiency, deficient resources that then leads to a whole bunch of other problems. Now how do you know you're in this picture if you're not ripped with an eight pack as a woman and you're an elite athlete? One of the ways is that we tend to see what we call blood deficiency and blood deficiency tends to show up in the skin, the hair, the nails, specifically dry skin, sometimes pallor or pale facial complexion, a scanty or very light menses or menses that stops altogether or the bleeding is very light or the number of days is no longer five days or three days it's even less. All of these can be signs of blood deficiency which means the body is pushing itself into a taxed state from our point of view in our profession. Reason number three is what Chinese medicine calls deficiency cold. If you as a woman have ever put a heating pad on your low abdomen you might know why ancient people considered this abdominal pain being due to cold because the vasodilation that happens from placing a warm heating pad on your low abdomen to relieve pain is what ancient doctors and ancient people observed but what's interesting is that from an internal medicine point of view we are literally using herbs that are warm and spicy to increase that microcirculation in what Chinese medicine calls the lower burner. The lower burner can be the reproductive genitourinary organs, right? So we use herbs, they can be herbs like guager, cinnamon tig, twig, wujiu, evodia, baishao which is peony that will actually what we call move the blood, tonify the blood, regulate blood stagnation or blood stasis and these herbs help increase the circulation and therefore the functioning of these organs. So cold can occur due to many different reasons. For a lot of people lack of blood circulation can lead to symptoms related to stagnation, right? Like the river that has stopped flowing because you're not moving anymore. Poor diets can sometimes lead to this whether they are just bad diets overall or I've seen women that have been raw vegans for a very very very long time that begin to manifest with basically clinical hypothyroid symptoms and associated menstrual related phenomena. All of these can lead to cold. It can be lack of activity, literally eating a very what we call cold diet. Raw vegetables are energetically the coldest diet basically you can have outside of I don't know ice cubes in your water or drinking watermelon juice or celery juice all day I see. But cold we treat with literally pungent warming herbs. So exercise is good for this and formulas are very very good for this probably the king and the queen of treating this. But these three scenarios cheese stagnation due to stress, deficiency stagnation due to really I mostly see in very athletic women and then cold which can be sometimes just genetic tendency, sometimes this runs in families, sometimes it's dietary, sometimes it's inactivity. But these three scenarios are the most common clinically that I see and nothing is better in my experience in the world than Chinese formulas for regulating this. So I thought that's interesting something you don't hear every day but women know these anecdotes well. Again that's what I have for you today guys. Check out those other related links right below the video and again if you guys want help with this come see me in my practice in Los Angeles I'll be happy to help. Alright guys check out those videos, check out the links below, I'll see you soon.