It seems like everything you read about your health tells you how bad stress is.  It’s true that stress is bad for your heart, makes you gain weight around the middle, decreases your immunity, messes with your digestion, and causes you to lie awake at night staring at the ceiling.  You get the message; you’ve got to get your stress under control.  Understanding that you need to do something to de-stress is the easy part.  Taking steps to deal with the stressful situations in your life is much harder.  The way I see it, you have two choices.  The first is to deal directly with what’s causing...

We have a guest blogger! Rachelle Holmes of Metropolitan MD in Chicago is posting about the link between depression and obesity. In the clinic, I see quite a few people who are dealing with depression as well as weight issues, belly fat, sugar cravings, low energy and lack of motivation. In Chinese medicine, there is a powerful link between strong emotions and digestive health and obesity. Thanks, Rachelle, for covering this topic! Obesity in today’s youth can’t solely be attributed to overeating and lack of exercise.  It’s important to understand that excessive weight gain can be...

If you worry that your memory is going, you’re not alone.  Do you regularly walk into a room and forget what you went there for?  Have you ever drawn a blank on a close friend’s name?  Do you routinely forget common words?  Join the club.  These little episodes are embarrassing and frustrating, but are you on the fast track to Alzheimer’s?  Probably not. Memory loss can the result of a number of factors, the most common of which is your age.  However, hormonal changes, diet, stress, and simply trying to do too many things at once can also mess with your memory. There are a couple of organ...

One of the questions that I ask every patient that comes through my door is about how much stress they’re experiencing.  Some own up to being stressed and others live their lives relatively stress-free.  Occasionally, I will have a patient who is so tightly wound they’re about to snap, but will deny being stressed at all.  How can this be?  Don’t they know they’re ringing the stress bell?  Apparently not. In the past month or so, I’ve had some insight into those poor overwhelmed souls.  You see, the last four or five weeks have not been kind to me.  It was a time of things breaking. ...

The Chinese have a saying that the emotions are the cause of 100 diseases.  In the case of depression, they’re right on the money.  I have worked with many patients who suffer from depression, and while they differ widely in their histories, they all have one thing in common:  lack of emotional flow. Chinese medicine is all about flow, whether it’s the flow of digestion, blood, energy, or emotions.  When that flow is blocked for one reason or another, symptoms arise.  We practitioners of Chinese medicine consider that lack of flow a kind of stagnation, much like a dam on a moving river. ...