Season 1, Episode 28: What are the Benefits of Acupuncture?

with Vanessa Ebertz

In Episode 28, I address the importance of authentic conversations and community representation. I apologize to the Blackfoot Confederacy for previous episodes that lacked proper vetting and announces an upcoming episode dedicated to discussing these mistakes.

Vanessa Ebertz, a doctor of acupuncture, joins the podcast to discuss traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). She explains TCM’s holistic approach, focusing on the balance of qi (energy) and the theories of yin and yang, and the five elements. Vanessa highlights the effectiveness of ear acupuncture for stress and trauma, particularly in group settings, and emphasizes the importance of integrating Western and Eastern medicine for comprehensive healthcare. The conversation underscores the significance of community, proper diet, and lifestyle in maintaining health and well-being.

Welcome and Introduction to Vanessa Ebertz

Jenny:

Hi there. I am offering a message before we get going. This week, The Gravity Well is now posting episode 28, and we’ve taken down episodes 7, 14, and 21 due to inadequate vetting of our guest. I aim to host authentic conversations with community members or concerned groups to discuss, and I apologise to the Blackfoot Confederacy. Our vetting process has been updated to ensure we have appropriate community representation and support on a topic. Before we proceed, it was recommended that we dedicate an episode to discussing our mistake and better understanding the risks of misrepresentation. The conversation is set up for this upcoming Tuesday, October 22nd, though I also had a one-on-one conversation with a member of a different community today. Please reach out to info@thegravitywell.net, if you want to participate or if you have suggestions. I’m extremely grateful to the Blackfoot Confederacy for allowing me to learn from this mistake.

Jenny:

I am looking forward to that. And with that, I’ll kick off tonight’s episode.

Welcome to The Gravity Well Podcast. Here we break down heavy ideas into small buckets that you can handle. Our mission is simple. Help us work through your dilemmas in conversation and process. Together we and our community will face your dilemmas and make the world a better place for all beings. In the spirit of truth, I acknowledge I’m a settler on stolen Blackfoot Treaty seven in Metis districts five and six territories. I take reconciliation by seeking the wisdom of elders and individuals who aim to restore water, air, land, life, or community, a healthy living relationship with the earth and each other is our guide. Welcome back, Vanessa. I am glad that you’re with us. We had the opportunity to meet Vanessa and she graciously offered to redo our conversation to made sure we give a full hour to your work and that we could dive into it more fully, which is wonderful. Thank you so much for giving us your time again, Vanessa. Excellent. Happy to be here. Yeah. And with that, why don’t, if you wouldn’t mind, please do a reintroduction of yourself? Thank you.

Vanessa:

Oh, yes. Well, thank you. Well, my name is Vanessa Ebertz. I’m a doctor of acupuncture. I practise here in Calgary, Alberta, in a one-on-one practice called Blue Frog Wellness. I also practise out of way found mental health centre at the downtown location here in Calgary as well. I aim to cover a few different aspects in tonight’s conversation, but we’re going to talk about both streams that I have going on how they all fit into the traditional Chinese Medicine model and how perhaps that might be a benefit to some of the listeners out there. And answer some questions for some curiosity that might be looming about Chinese Medicine. I’m happy to be here. Thank you again.

Jenny:

Yeah, thank you so much. I will back up by saying how I came to know Vanessa. My husband Chris, is in the city fire department and had the opportunity to do some ear treatment work, some of the ear treatment work that Vanessa does. We’ll get into that a little bit later when we get into the details more. And then I’ve had the opportunity to see you in your traditional practice. It’s been good to have exposure to both. That’ll help this conversation move along. And it’s been life-altering for us so far. Chris’s pain that he’s worked through with you significantly and in conversation as well as understanding how Chinese Medicine can help us understand how to be in balance with the environment and with nature so that we can be healthier and have that important respect for the earth that comes with Chinese Medicine. Understand. Anyway, we’ll get into that, but okay, let’s start with if you wouldn’t mind, Vanessa, give us an overview of traditional Chinese Medicine, please.

An Overview of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Vanessa:

Yeah, for sure. The scope of this hour might not cover absolutely every detail of Chinese Medicine. It is a very big topic, however, hopefully, you’ll leave with a little bit more of an understanding of the framework and then how we can go down a few different avenues to get a little more specific as we go. But essentially, if you are thinking about Chinese Medicine at all, we need to think of it as its unique complete system of medicine. We use Chinese Medicine to treat, to prevent and also to diagnose disease. From a Chinese Medicine perspective, some things will be very similar to how we see things in Western Medicine, but many things are quite different. And that just comes with that. It’s been around for 2000 years plus. Back then we didn’t have technology to help us diagnose things. We had observation as our main tool.

And when you have a giant population, you can hone in on what the trends are pretty quickly. There’s been some benefit to how this originated and how it’s come to be as we know it today. Truthfully, it’s only been in the West since the 1970s. Richard Nixon went over to China to reestablish some connections and get some trade happening. Oddly enough, one of his journalists ended up having an appendix attack, had to go into the hospital, and had his appendix removed, but while he was there getting his treatment, he also received acupuncture for pain relief and just overall general healing. And he was just impressed by it. He came back and wrote an article for the New York Times about his treatment. Shortly after that everyone was starting to get like, what is this acupuncture thing? What is traditional Chinese Medicine?

How does it work? It’s not been in America or North America for very long. It’s still in its infancy as we know it here in the West, but dates back quite far. What you have to think about when you think about Chinese Medicine is that our whole system is predicated on this notion of qi or energy. Everything in our body is animated by some type of energy and it’s, you can be broad sense, QI means the energy of your whole body, everything around you, everything inside. But then you can get specific and each organ has a specific qi. Your skin will have Qi, your thoughts will have a QI, and your emotions will have QI. What we’re trying to do is always find out what’s going wrong with somebody when they have any physical ailment or mental-emotional ailment.

There’ll be some blockage obstruction or deficiency of the chief flow. We’re always trying to find out, okay, what’s going on? How do we find out what’s in the way? How do we get that out of the way or change that up so the Qi can flow smoothly? Now that restores all the balance because much like Western Medicine, we see homeostasis as the guiding principle for the human body. If you give a body a proper environment, it will go back into regulation. It doesn’t matter if you’ve had surgery or you’re on some form of medication or whatnot. Truthfully, if you set up the body to be in that element where things can regulate, they will go back to their normal operating system. Chinese Medicine is always trying to find out what is in the way essentially. Now with that being said, the theories that make up the whole bulk of Chinese Medicine are three different distinct theories.

We have the Qi blood-body fluid theory. Your energy, your qi is going to move your blood, and that’s going to create your circulation. If you have some blockage or a heart condition or even diabetes and metabolic syndrome, you’re probably going to have something disrupted in the chi flow and we want to get that going. Again. With that being said, we also have the Yin and Yang theory. If you’ve ever seen the yin and yang symbol, it’s opposites that are mutually flowing from one state to the next within each other. You have the yang, which is your daytime energy, your active energy, male energy, sunshine, hot, and spicy, that’s all yang energy in nature. And Yin will be the exact opposite. You have cooling, restorative, quenching, slowness, stillness, rejuvenation is all yin energy. Yin and yang must always be flowing.

And the symbol that has the yang with the little white.in it means that it’s being attracted over into the yin. They’re continuously flowing, and should never be stagnant. That’s one of the main theories that if you have a yin and yang balance, things are working very well. When yin and yang are not balanced, you can have hormone disruptions, you can have mood disorders, and you can have insomnia. All kinds of different things yin and yang are essentially a form of qi as well. You can think of it that way. And then lastly, we also have the five elements theory. This is going to overlay everything we see in Chinese Medicine, and it comes from the Arian society of folks watching the patterns that we see in nature. You plant your seeds in spring and you let them grow for the summer, and in the fall you’re going to harvest things, and then in the winter, you’re going to store things.

It’s the same thing. And if you’re in alignment with all of those seasonal changes and the climates that go with that and the foods that are in season at the time, you’re going to be very healthy. But if you’re in the middle of heat or summer or even summer heat or autumn, and you’re eating spicy, dry foods like sriracha and everything, you are going to have a yin problem. You’re going to have too much heat in your system burning up the cooling nature of your system. We always want to find balance. That’s really how we restore the chief flow. We restore whatever’s in the way as we look to find out what’s going to bring this back into balance. Like I said, if you’re too hot, we want to make you cooler too cold, we want to warm you up.

That’s the whole principle of how it all works. Now with that being said, everything can be broken down, whether you have diabetes, indigestion, insomnia, infertility, back pain, anything migraines, anything can be broken down or distilled into a pattern of disharmony. Again, this is the what’s in the way part. The pattern of disharmony will essentially be predicated on eight principles, yin and yang, hot and cold, interior, and exterior. And then we’re just basically going to be distilling things all the way through. If you have strep throat, you’ve probably got an exterior invasion, something from the outside pathogen getting to your throat, it’s going to be hot, you’re probably sweating, you probably maybe have a nosebleed, dryness, you just can’t cool down. What we’ll want to do is always kick that back out. We want to use things that are going to be cooling.

If you eat more spicy food when you have strep throat, it’s going to make it worse. But if you have things that are a little more cooling, quenching, cucumbers, watermelon, that stuff, it will help to soothe your throat and get things healing faster. That’s the overarching view of how Chinese Medicine works, but you do have to remember that it is a holistic view. We’re taking into account the whole person, not just what is the thing that you’re sick with, what is the pathogen, what is the virus or the bacteria or whatever we want to see. What is it and how is it affecting you in your constitution? Currently, at the moment, we can always balance both of those things. When people come to see me usually they’ll say, Hey, I have this shoulder pain. I will always find out what’s going on underneath that. Do you have a blood deficiency? Maybe there’s some stagnation in the shoulder. You had an injury there, and the blood flow is not moving very well. And once we revert to that pattern, they feel better. Back to that homeostasis, things fall back into place.

Jenny:

Yeah. I’m just going to reflect on a couple of things for you. Vanessa, what I heard from you is we want harmony. That was what came to mind for me because you were talking about how QI can be different in each of your organs. I think that the system is in harmony together and there are signals that you would get from them if they’re not. But then also that flow is required too. Not to think of it not as a constant state, but to understand that it’s always dynamic and potentially changing. I listened to the video that you pointed me to before we met tonight, and I do my homework, I promise. If it’s given. The thing that stuck out for me in there was you were saying the flow. If somebody is saying, I need to be treated for this, you’re going to be looking for, well, where’s it coming from and where’s it going?

Discussing the Five Elements of Qi

Jenny:

And then also if it changes, you need to suddenly change and adapt to that new state, right? Yeah. And what’s interesting to me is that it’s this overarching view helps us see the patterns rather than potentially treating the symptom. And it’s fascinating because a lot of doctors in Western, at least here in Calgary have, I’ve left practices that have said, I’m only looking at one thing, you book another appointment. Because to me, no, I know they’re related. I can’t look at these things in isolation and think that that’s effective. Thank you for getting into some of the five elements. One of the things I was hoping you could explore a bit again about when somebody’s born and how the elements come into play in terms of when you’re born in a year. Is that right? And then also in time, is that true?

Vanessa:

You bring up a couple of different things. First, let me just go back and also advise that with that pattern of disharmony, we find that will dictate how we’re going to treat it. Whether we use acupuncture, which would be the main modality I would say, of traditional Chinese Medicine alongside Chinese herbs to balance that pattern out. But then lifestyle, dietary recommendations, qigong, tai chi, meditation, things that will help out, we’ll all be in accordance with that pattern of disharmony. And it is funny you mentioned too, just about the one item, an isolated item, a Western doctor might say that’s all they have time for. I do want to get a note in my clinic that says, we will address all of your ailments in this one visit. Because you’re right, they are completely related, and it might seem unrelated to most people, but your constipation, your night sweats and your acne are probably all one pattern of too much or damp heat.

And we start clearing that out for someone and home and behold, all those things get better. They say, “Wow, I feel better.” I say because it’s all one thing. You’re right on that. We’ll hopefully be able to shed more light on what those patterns look like in a future episode. What you’re asking about is a little bit more related to the five elements framework. And there are again, two different ways to go about that. Again, Chinese culture has this overlaid on many different things, but definitely on your constitution type, just how you are when you’re born. And that is all predicated on the five elements, which are fire, earth, metal, water, and wood. All of those five elements will relate to a different organ. They’ll all relate to one of the sense organs. They’ll relate to an emotion, they’ll relate to a colour, and they’ll even relate to a sound.

We can get a picture of what type of element people might be by what they look like, what they sound like, and maybe some of the emotions that they seem to be in more often than not. But that is your constitutional type when you’re born and they say you’re born with a certain amount of jing, which is your essence, and that comes from your mother and father. And then you can’t get more jing as you get older, but you can nourish it or at least stop it from draining out of your system by resting and not overworking in these things. But with that being said, there’s also another, I guess a side spin to Chinese culture, which is Chinese astrology. Traditional Chinese Medicine touches on that, but not necessarily in a depth way. But yeah, it’s exactly that. The story goes that way back.

There was an emperor who wanted to host a party and nobody showed up at his party. He was pretty depressed. And finally, some people started arriving, but it wasn’t people, it was the animals. There’s 12 of them. He decided you’re each going to get your own designated year. Dragon, you’re going to get this year and snake, you’re going to get the next year and ox you’re going to get that year. He named all 12 animals as you’re the keeper of this year. And the qualities or the characteristics of these animals apply to the people born in that year. You have the 12-year cycle. You might be a horse, a dragon, a snake, a pig, a dog, or any of those things. And every five years you’re also going to be one of the elements.

For me, I’m an earth horse, which makes sense. I work, work, work, and I’m very grounded and I like to be very connected to the earth and all those things, not caught up in all the other fancy things in life. I’m more like, Hey, let’s just be real here. You’ll find that and you’ll find there will be fire roosters and whatever. That will lend itself to a little bit more of the personality type. But it’s funny enough that people do have a lot of the physical attributes, those animals just how far apart your eyes are set and your cheekbones and all your structures. One key component of facial diagnosis specifically for Chinese Medicine recognizes those elements. We’re going to look at your jaw and we’re going to find out what’s the state of your jing. What’s the state of your essence or your constitution?

How much fortitude were you born with? And I think I mentioned you can build that. Some people are put into politics or they have to be the face of something or they have to deliver news to mass audiences or whatnot, and they have to be courageous, I’m strong, I got your back feeling. And you’ll see them over time. Their jaw will get bigger though, literally because they’re clenching and they’re using their jaw, they’re putting more tension there. The bone mass will get more dense and you’ll see some people’s face shapes will change over time based on what’s required of them as they go through life and totally. And traumas. In the one video I sent Lillian Bridges was the lady who is the, I guess you could say, the godmother of facial diagnosis.

She comes from a long line of people who did this, sadly she’s passed away now, but she was always really good at quickly pointing out key features on people and saying, here’s when this arrived. If you look back to 1982, you’ll see whoever’s image change and it’ll be because something significant happened. She cites the one lady who she saw in her office, and the next time she saw her, she had a dimpled-up chin, and the dimpled-up chin showed a state of fear. There was fear and shock and it hit the kidney area, which is your water element. She asked her what happened, and she had a massive car accident, a major trauma. We also can note that Donald Trump has a very dimpled chin. You can see this in celebrities and hockey players who have furrowed brows.

Your wood element and the wood element is what is going to be required when you need to have grit when you need to be like a tree, you need to be flexible, but you need to be strong, you need to be reliable, and you need to be adaptable, but sturdy, right? You’ll see a lot of athletes just have bushy eyebrows, and that’s one sign that they’ve acquired a lot of that wood element, which will only help them in their career doing that. We can see the different areas of your face will be different organs that it’s related to and different characteristics, and they all come with some personality traits. Yeah, it is super fascinating. Facial diagnosis could be, again, another whole topic for us.

The Three Avenues of Chinese Medicine

Jenny:

Yeah, okay. Let’s try, you were saying that there are three avenues, and then maybe we can start exploring your avenue like we talked about before.

Vanessa:

Yeah, yeah. No, that whole overarching theme of traditional Chinese Medicine, like I said, is it’d be like going to see a GP, right? We’re a family doctor, we know the general gist of many different things. But then you can always, and this is what has always attracted me to Chinese Medicine, is that you will never stop learning. I can read all the books out there, and I will still not even put a dent into the knowledge that is out there. And thankfully more are being transcribed from Chinese to languages that we can all understand French and English and whatnot. You have that big view and then you can always narrow down. You can go into fertility treatments, you can go into musculoskeletal stuff, you can go into mental-emotional stuff. They always say that as you go through your career, people who come to see you will tell you what your career path is, and where you’re going to go with it. That was basically how I ended up where I am now. And I would say I largely treat stress and trauma. I mean, most people have stress in today’s world just the way that it is, but it confounds a lot of the ailments that we see, Crohn’s disease and IBS, and sleep issues and infertility. That is many things. Even hormonal things can largely be exacerbated by stress that people aren’t managing very well. Skin issues.

Jenny:

I remember getting a rash from stress at work once.

Vanessa:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hives, migraines, many different things. I always thought if you could address the stress, if you could help people unwind, some of the stagnation they have, it’s typically a liver cheese stagnation thing, we want to get the liver energy moving again. Then they’ll relax their tightness and their tension just deflates any pain will be less because now they have flow. When you’re all tight and tense, how do you think your flow happens, your blood vessels to your brain? No wonder you have migraines and stiff neck and dizziness and stuff. It’s like, well, you’re cutting that flow off. We need to loosen up, and acupuncture can help with that. With that being said, one specific area of acupuncture is ear acupuncture, and we use that a lot for addictions health and mental wellness just in general because of a lot of the points on the ear, first off the ear is a microsystem of your whole body.

Ear Acupuncture in North America

Vanessa:

We could just treat anything for anyone just with our ears. And some practitioners do that. They’re very good at it. Lee Wong is probably the leader in that. She’s in Florida, but she’ll just take one look at your ear and it’s amazing what she can tell you. She’ll tell you about broken bones you had when you were 10, ovarian cysts that you have now, and astigmatism and heart disease and all these things just by looking at the ear. She’s done so much work with it. There’s nothing we couldn’t treat with the ear, but it’s really good for nervous system regulation and mental wellness because of the connection to the brain. It’s close. But also we’ve mapped out specific points on the ear that when we needle them, stimulate those areas of the brain. We know that if you needle the hippocampus area, the hippocampus will light up in the brain.

And the MRI functional MRI scan, that’s been done since the nineties at the Helms Institute and various studies with the US military now promote that. But again, how ear acupuncture came to North America in the late 1970s. There’s a hospital in the Bronx, Lincoln Memorial Hospital, that was treating heroin addiction. And they didn’t have a lot of funding. Funding was always an issue for them. Someone came back and said, “Oh, yeah, I was in a hospital in China and I had this ear stuff, and funny enough, I don’t crave the smokes like I did before I had the surgery” or whatever. They quickly caught on and thought maybe there was an addiction thing that was happening with the ear acupuncturist. They wanted to know more, and they standardized five points that are key for helping someone go through any withdrawal, any cravings and habits that they had around addictions.

And it worked very well. They implemented it. First, they started with ear acupuncture that had electrostimulation to it, but they ran out of money to buy the batteries for the stimulators. Then they’re like, well, let’s just see what happens if we just put the five needles in and see how people go. And they stuck with the program longer. They had very low rates of relapse, and just in general, people’s health and wellness got better. They said, “We got to keep that up.” Michael Smith, who again, has also passed away, sadly, he pioneered this whole thing. Now we know that the protocol or the National Acupuncture Detox Association protocol, is used mostly in addiction circles, but some counsellors are trained in this protocol. They do it for depression, anxiety, bipolar disease, insomnia and all those kinds of things with success.

And the great news about it is you can’t harm someone with their ear, right? There’s no lungs to puncture, there’s no nerves to damage or nothing bad that can really, very low risk. Yeah, that’s basically where I’ve moved my practice down into ear acupuncture specifically for trauma because it just does such a great job of shifting that for people where they feel better and they’re sleeping better and their digestion’s better and all those things. And then whatever else they’re doing on top of that will only be enhanced. That’s basically how we can niche down. But for me, that’s the path that I ended up with.

The Ear Acupuncture Group Program

Jenny:

Yeah, that’s amazing. And so, yeah, I want to just offer from what we’ve experienced. As I said, my husband did this ear acupuncture 12-week program with Vanessa and others, and yeah, it was remarkable. Chris, back in 2012, late 2012, tore his pec doing a training exercise and didn’t get treated properly for a while, it led to a bunch of issues for him, just constant pain in his neck and arm, shoulder and arm ferment. For the first time since he thought he was going to live with that pain for the rest of his life, and it’s gone. It’s pretty remarkable. Much has changed with his diet and with what he needs in terms of, it’s interesting you talk about how it would take away any desire to have an addiction thing. Not to say that that’s an issue, but Chris has not wanted to have alcohol and other things as much because of I think the treatment. I think that’s just fascinating to know hand in hand. That’s just a lived experience of what you’ve done for us. Thank you for that, Vanessa. And can you also talk a little bit about how doing it in a group matters? We got a chance to speak earlier, and you were talking about how, for example, Tai chi is done in a group and the power of doing these sessions in a group, please.

Vanessa:

Yeah, absolutely. I get that question a lot. There are a lot of people who want to know what is the actual mechanism behind that. And, if you look at psychology studies, you’ll find that group therapy has fared, well, better than one-on-one individualized treatments. And the theory behind that is they think, well, it’s just when you’re in a group setting, you don’t feel as alone, right? You’re like, oh, I’m not the only one with this problem. I’m not the only defective person here. These people have this. You see that it’s more accepting. You are more accepting of it because you’re like, okay, this is not just a me thing. This is a bigger thing that I’m part of, thing. But yeah, we know that. Again, it all comes down to chief flow, right? Individually, we all have our own Qi, but when you’re collectively in a group, the amount of Qi that’s there is greater than the sum of the parts.

It amplifies. And this is why when you’re at a concert or something, you have those high highs and you’re excited to see this band everybody loves is because you’re all in that same wavelength and you’re all riding that same adrenaline wave, which is a form of chief flow. And conversely, if it’s something negative, you’re in some mob that’s going on, you’re feeling that intensity too. It intensifies the energy of the group. It’s always been more beneficial. And there was a study that was just done in 2020 here in Calgary with people who were undergoing cancer treatments for breast cancer. They created two groups. One group was going to get ear acupuncture, but only individually. one session a week, the same amount of time, same needles, and whatnot. And the other group was doing this within a setting of half of the group, I think it was 20 people.

And they found that just the results were much better. People had less pain, they slept better. Their digestive health seemed to be in some way improved. Their overall well-being was just greater than if they did it. I know some people do have hiccups with trying something out and being like, well, I don’t know if I want to try that in a group setting, and I don’t know who I’m going to see there or whatever. But once you get into that, you feel more supported. And it fosters, if it is a group of like-minded professionals, like the fire department study, then they feel more open. It’s a safe space to have conversations that they might not otherwise have. And I think that’s one of the great benefits if you can find a group where everyone has that same commonality because again, they might feel alone.

They might think they’re the only one who feels this way, and they find out there are 10 other people who are in the same boat struggling with the same issues. And maybe there’s somebody who had gone through it two years prior and is now offering, here’s what I tried, here’s what helped, here’s who you should talk to. And then in doing that, they have that connectedness. And I think that is just a really good depiction of what happens in society when we become disconnected from one another, when we decide to isolate ourselves, which sadly happens when we’re traumatized because we feel nobody else understands what I’m going through. And you don’t want to be around people, you isolate yourself, but then you don’t get better that way. It is this coming back into a community that will enhance your healing because you’re not alone. You’re not just an isolated variable. You’re a member of society, a very valued member of society. Once you start feeling that, then healing is just more open. It’s always been greater in groups. I’m glad you asked that question.

Scattering Qi and More on Ear Acupuncture

Jenny:

Yeah, it’s interesting. And while you’re saying that too, it makes me think about, and this isn’t a question necessarily, we can take this away question, who are our communities these days? This is part of the challenge we have that we don’t have, my kids don’t go to the local school and we have the local store and local things. There’s a lot of, even on the fire department, you’re not generally at a hall. Same thing with my work. I didn’t have one company I worked for, I worked for nine. There’s a whole bunch of, and the same thing with sports is different groups when school, it’s all very separate. Again, going back to this not having this holistic approach. Yeah, it’s just all very interesting. Do you have anything to add from what I just said there?

Vanessa:

Yeah, well, I would just say that that’s when you’re doing that, that’s like you’re scattering the Qi. You go to work, and like you said, you’re at different jobs. You don’t have a community there, a dead end. Your kids don’t all go, everyone who lives on the same block no longer goes to the same school. Again, a dead end there. At every point in our fabric of society, we have this disjointed qi that’s happening that it’s not flowing, it’s stopping and starting. And that’s why we see the irritability that’s out there and the aggression and the anger, and everybody wants to blame everyone, right? It’s as if we just got back to visiting with one another, visiting in nature, doing things as a group, like sadly, someone’s house burns down or something. Everyone comes together as a community and helps rebuild the house. We don’t see that as much as we used to. And I think if we get back to that, many things will benefit, but also it requires every individual to make the effort to find those groups and become part of them. I think just in my own opinion on that, but yeah, you’re very right.

Jenny:

Yeah, and I agree. I think this is very much needed. And something you had sent me a note after we met last time, talking about essentially Bioregional organising, which is what the work we’re trying to do in parallel to this conversation is trying to get people back in community talking on these important things that hold us together. Because ultimately, the big picture is our needs. It’s all that we all, for example, water is one of the biggest overarching issues. We all need water. We are water, 80% of us. This whole idea of making sure we’re looking after water. And what’s interesting too is we’ve done the same thing on the landscape. When you talk about affecting the chi, we’ve put patterns that weren’t natural in the landscape, we’ve cut into the earth that way. That doesn’t allow for the water to flow in the way that it should, which is why they’re discovering that there are big issues with the water cycle.

Vanessa:

Yeah.

Jenny:

Absolutely. This is all the stuff that we need to be working on. Why I’m grateful to be hearing how there is 2,000 years of knowledge behind how we gain balance again. This is just, I’m going to come away from this with so many ideas. Okay. Yeah, if you wouldn’t mind talking a little bit more about your day-to-day work too. You’re doing this ear training, Sorry, I’m just going to be clear. You do this, we’re just going to hit this for people. The ear acupuncture group treatment first, stress and trauma, that’s on Tuesdays and Thursdays from nine to five at Wayfound Medical Health Group.

It’s $40 a visit to do that, and it’s recommended to do it over 12 weeks. Yeah, I’m thinking about this for myself, it is something that is local and simple and potentially could bring people together in community. And there’s a lot of, I talk in my groups, there’s a lot of stress around the environmental crisis, right?

Vanessa: Absolutely.

Jenny:

I think I’ve certainly had some very tearful evenings thinking about what potentially we’re up against. I’m sure other people in my sphere could benefit from that. But you also do a whole other practice. And I do want to say, because I feel like we dove into this quick, and you were being potentially modest, but Vanessa, you hold a PhD in acupuncture, is that right?

Vanessa:

Not quite a PhD. We are called Doctors of Acupuncture as a designation from the Alberta government, actually in 2020 as well. But yeah, my background is essential, I started in athletic therapy at Mount Royal. I went to U of C, did Kinesiology, and then from there I thought I’d become a physiotherapist. But I went to the open house at MacEwan University in Edmonton for the acupuncture program, and immediately I was like, Nope, this is where I need to be because we’re going to that root cause. Why do you have back pain? Not everybody has this back pain. Why do you have that specifically to you and solve it in a little bit more of a natural way? That’s basically where that went. Perhaps I will further some studies down the line. But yeah, just Dr. Acupuncture comes from the Alberta government designating us as that. Hopefully, we’ll see a PhD program one day, but not quite yet, especially not in North America.

Day-to-Day Acupuncture Treatments

Jenny:

Okay. Well, thank you again for your modesty, and I appreciate that correction. Yeah. Okay, in your day-to-day practice, I do want to touch on when we met. You said to me when I, upon leaving, you need to be in the mountains and you need to be near water. I know that’s one part of the work you’re doing. The acupuncture itself does a whole job, but if you can just talk through it, I don’t know a little bit if you’re comfortable with that, how you do your assessments and how you decide how to treat people, maybe.

Vanessa:

Yeah, absolutely. There’s a whole framework for that in Chinese Medicine. And it’s funny because a lot of times people come to me, they’ve never had a treatment before, and they always comment on, wow, she listened to my stuff. I had to say, she took the time. She asked me a lot of questions. She looked at my tongue and she felt my pulse and all these things. And from I guess a patient perspective, it feels like I matter. I’m being seen, I’m being heard, all those things. But that’s ingrained in how we have to look at everything and diagnose. As you’re talking to me, I’m looking at your face and I’m looking at the dryness or the texture of your skin, and I’m listening to your voice and hearing, is it high pitch, low pitch crack? Do you have anything going on?

We’re always observing number one, we’ll probably smell your breath as we’re talking and things like that. These will all be little clues. And then as we’re asking you, essentially, we call it 10 plus two. 12 questions that relate to your temperature and your digestion and your energy levels, even your libido. Your sexual activity will tell us something if you have any pain in your body, anywhere and your emotions. Once we get a broad view of what’s going on, what’s a problem for you, or what’s standing out, that’s where I say we can narrow down our pattern of disharmony into really one major thing that we need to treat. One major boulder in your life and it could be, this is a constitutional thing, you’ve always had it. You always need to overcome it thing. Or you’ve acquired it because you’ve worked your butt off for too long and didn’t get enough rest, or you didn’t eat properly, or you’re in a high-stress situation, or you are a parent and you have kids.

And that alone is diverting all your attention. We always try to find that. And in doing that, we’re going to look at your tongue and we are going to feel your pulse. The tongue is also a map of your whole body, it’ll tell us what organs have something going on. The colour will tell me if there’s too much heat, if there’s not enough blood if you’re anemic, it will tell me basically if there’s a lot of dampness or anything like that, you’ll have a coating on your tongue. Either a thick yellow coating or a thick white coating. Yellow will be more “damp heat” white will be more “damp cold”. That means we need to lay off the smoothies and the ice cream and the ice cold things or the french fries and deep fried things, anything that has dampness qualities to it because that’s going to slow down your Qi flow, probably mostly in your digestive center.

We’re going to look at the shape. If it’s pointed, you have a lot of yin deficiency. Again, that cooling nature of your body is depleted again because you may be working through the night or I used to be a flight attendant, that’s going to deplete our chi because it’s a dry environment. We’re not on a set schedule. And many times I worked red-eye flying, That definitely will take a hit there. We’ll look at your tongue and that will tell us something. And then your pulse will corroborate what we see with the tongue and everything that you’ve told us about your symptoms. That’s really how we filter all this basket, weave it all through and come down to one solid pattern or a couple of patterns that might be interrelated. And then we start treating that. We always say we treat the root, which for me would be like a kidney cheat deficiency, kidney “yong” deficiency, you as well, you’re probably more kidney yin deficiency.

That’s why I say if you get out into nature and you get to the mountains, especially mountains, tophi, the kidney energy because they’re cooling and quenching and restorative and calm and quiet and kind of dark. And also water will do that because especially if you’re on the dry side of things or the hot side of things, we want to nourish sort of the ability to quench your system. That’s why I said that specifically to your pattern. But that’s what we’re always trying to do. We’ll always come to our pattern of diagnosis and then from there, we’ll treat the root. For me, if it was kidney cheat deficiency, I’m going to use acupuncture points specifically that we’ll do that. And how we know that is every organ has a meridian attached to it. Let me just grab my dog here, I’ll show you.

Every organ will have a meridian. You have a kidney meridian, a heart meridian, a pericardium meridian, a lung meridian, a large intestine, a gallbladder meridian, and a bladder meridian. When you’re having issues with any one of those organs, we can use points along the actual meridian to influence. And each point will have different functions. Some points will clear the heat, they’ll cool you down. If you have that yin deficiency and you’re hot and you’re sweating and you’re dry and your eyes are having problems focusing, you have dry eye, that will cool you down. And those points will help quench that. If you’re cold to the bone, like a hypothyroid female who’s overweight and lethargic and sleepy all the time and probably anemic, you’re going to want to use points that will “tonify”. They’ll warm things up, they’ll nourish that Y energy and add more heat to your system to give you that energy, that burst of fuel that you need to get things kind of back on track.

Each meridian will influence those organs and each point along the meridians will have specific functions. With that being said, in the Western way of looking at things, we have studied some of these points, and we know that when you needle stomach 36, which is just below your kneecap, two hours later, your white blood cell count goes up. And it’s funny because one of the indications for stomach 36 is any time you need to boost someone’s immune system. And if you use that regularly, you will have a very strong robust immune system. And you could do that with acupuncture, but you could rub it and have acupressure massage it. You could put a cup on there and have a little bit of suction that will stimulate that point as well. Or we have a thing called combustion, which is when we burn a little herb called mug wort.

It’s a member of the sage family, and it will also, the properties of that herb are very warming. If you put that on stomach 36, now you’re cooking with gas because you’re adding warmth to that point that already is going to enhance you or tonify you. It’ll do that to a greater effect. That’s really where we begin. But then if someone says, Hey, but I also sprained my ankle, or I also have this headache thing going on, well, that might be a branch, that might not be the underlying cause of something. Let’s say back pain, if you came in with back pain, I’d want to help you feel better. Your back pain is reduced when you leave. But I also want to know why did that happen? If you’re blood deficient, you could have back pain on the regular. If we nourish your blood and the deficiency goes away, you’re going to have less propensity to have this back pain returning again and again because the underlying condition that allowed that to happen has now been resolved. We’re always trying to do root and branch at the same time. Hopefully, that explains a little bit about how we see things in a treatment setting.

Diet and Environment in Eastern (Chinese) Medicine

Jenny:

Yeah, it’s fascinating how some of these things you know inherently, just happen. Number one, I was saying I like to be in the mountains. I am always trying to be there. I think it’s something that inherently I know without knowing this science. And then also foods, we talked a little bit before Vanessa, and when it comes to the summer, I think you were saying this, you want cooling foods. Most people are hot regardless, I suppose, of your, is it your Qi? Am I saying that right? Yep. Anyway, you want to eat those foods, but I find that come the fall, you don’t want a salad, it seems odd. And last time you were saying you need squash in the fall. Again, when I go back to my heritage of being Ukrainian, I mean we had certain things you eat at certain times of the year. Well, number one, what’s available of course, and also what is likely to serve you at that time, right? Eating an apple out of season, for example, oh, I guess that’s a bad example. But eating strawberries out of season, they don’t generally taste as good when you have them in season, right? Anyway, yeah. Can you say a little bit about diet and how that fits in with your work too? I know that’s part of what you also recommend, right?

Vanessa:

Yeah, absolutely. And again, because when you can give people diet and lifestyle advice, it gives them agency over their own healing. They’re, okay, I can do these. And there are very small changes that make a big profound difference. When I was a flight attendant, many people had asked me, okay, how can I help this condition? Or do I have this problem or whatever? I break down a list of foods and some teas that they should be drinking and things to avoid and then come running across the airport two months later and whip open their lunch kit and show me all the stuff that they had in their lunch. And they’re, look, I’m eating beets now. Oh, I have dates. I have oatmeal for breakfast, and I feel much better. And I was just amazed that they paid attention.

They tried this out because some people, it’s just knowledge in and knowledge out. They don’t take it to heart. But they tried it and they felt better. And I was just like, it’s a small of a change. It doesn’t require you to go to the health food store and spend $800 a month on supplements, but it’s just like you said, it’s stuff that you probably intrinsically already know. When you’re sick, you don’t crave ice cream. You try to have sometimes a glass of orange juice. And if you’re already cold and chilly, you want something warm, you want soup or at least something cooked because you’re like, I want to help myself feel better and warmer and whatnot, cold things are not going to be good. Unless you have the hot version of cold and you’re sweating profusely, then you do want to cool down.

Maybe that orange juice is going to be quenching, but you definitely wouldn’t want to add any more spice to that. Yeah, again, you’re always trying to find what is the balance and every element, the five elements that have different organs related to them, we’ll have different foods that will help them. Kidneys, and again, it comes to that colour wheel. The kidneys are associated with the colour black, anything black will be great for the kidneys. Blackberries black beans dates, spirulina and the blue-green algae, the darker they are, the better they are. Eggplant is good for the kidneys, especially the blood, but kidneys in general. And then our spleen, stomach, and our spleen are going to want more root vegetables. Anything you can get your hands on for squash would be excellent. At any point in time if you have a spleen deficiency, if you are a chronic worrier and maybe you eat a little bit more on the greasy side of things, you probably have spleen deficiency.

Almost every digestive issue can come back to the spleen in some way because its whole roll is the food that you eat. It’s supposed to break it down into good nutrients and good-quality blood. If it’s not working because you’re worried all the time or you’re eating on the go and you’re not sitting and digesting, or you’re maybe watching the news and getting all panicked about the state of the world while you’re eating, that’s not going to help either. You always want to be slow eating and kind of in a peaceful environment and shadowed every, just focus on eating, be present when you’re eating, and you’ll digest that food a lot better, and get a lot more out of it. All the organs will have a different colour and a different type of food that will help them. Lungs are white, cauliflower, that kind of stuff. And funny enough, cauliflower looks like the shape of a lung A and kidney beans are the shape of kidneys. It is funny how things walnuts are like your brain, that’s brain food. But liver will always be helped by anything sour or bitter, sour, like lemon in your water or plums, anything that makes your mouth like pucker or vinegar, pickles, any of that stuff is get sour key candy if you’re going to eat candy, sour keys are the best. What else do I want to tell you about?

Jenny:

My mouth is going, I can feel that even talking about them. I loved them when I was younger.

Vanessa:

Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes you crave that. You’ll be like, if you’re stressed out, you’ll be like, I just want something that’s a vinegarette or something that has that tanginess to it, or you’ll crave sour candy, something that’ll get your mouth going because it will move your liver energy. It will, the sour flavour has that effect of moving chi. That’s one great way to do it, every organ will have some food and some colour and some things that will enhance it. And of course, conversely, some things that could detract. Again, if you’re talking about someone who has a lot of dampness, this is going to be digestive problems, phlegm, mucus, like nasal drip or sinusitis all the time, or you have mucus stools, or you have maybe yeast infections. Those are all signs of dampness. You want to get rid of that.

And one of the best ways to do that is with acrid foods. Green tea is probably your best friend. If you have a cup of green tea a day, that will go very far. And that’s probably why you see green tea in all the Asian restaurants. It helps you digest and not absorb all the fatty foods that you might otherwise be getting. But yeah, we’re always looking again to just get whatever is in the way to get it out of the way. And then once you restore that balance, things just, go back into harmony on their own, right?

Takeaways

Jenny:

And then it’s like the system can keep flowing, which is neat about it that it’s not like you need a constant series of treatments right after you’ve got that thing. But it is of course a part of staying in balance. Anytime you’re not is when you pursue this. Yeah. Well, thank you. This has been a wonderful start to, I think many, well, at least another, if not more conversations with you, Vanessa. I think there’s much to this knowledge, it’s fascinating that we’re talking about something that came into view because people were in an affordability and access crisis, and here we are again in the affordability and access-to-healthcare crisis. I think your work is going to become very important, and it’s accessible for people too. I think that’s important to know. Yeah. Thank you so much for this. Is there anything before we close, I want to make sure I give you a chance too. Blue Frog Wellness is Vanessa’s business. It’s in Nolan Hill in North-West Calgary. And then again, the acupuncture group treatment sessions for stress and trauma are available on Tuesdays and Thursdays and we found a mental health group. But Vanessa, please, if anything is burning that you always want to share, I feel like you were saying last time, and I think it’s important you say it again, that how much evidence there is of these treatments and how affectional they are. If you can just maybe list that off and anything else that you wanted to touch before we wrap.

Vanessa:

Yeah, awesome. Right on. Yeah, exactly that. And I think that was probably one of the biggest criticisms when I was going through acupuncture school was, oh, there’s not a lot of evidence on that. There’s not a lot of data. And there are two things I want to point out about that. Number one, there is a growing body of evidence there. Like I said, if you type in, especially Google Scholar, go to Google Scholar and type in acupuncture for X, whatever that is, insomnia or digestive or fertility issues or what, you’ll find hundreds of articles, and you can niche that down too to specific groups. Or if you have a specific type of cancer, you can look at acupuncture for carcinoma, whatever. You can find a good body of growing evidence that is out there. It’s not just the anecdotal stories of, oh, my neighbour went and he said he feels much better, or These people had a fertility issue and they had a child, whatever it is.

But with that being said, the reason why, if you’ve seen studies that show that maybe acupuncture is inconclusive or it’s no better than what other treatment was offered, or no treatment or placebo or whatever, it’s largely because of this whole paradigm that we’re coming from. It’s usually not followed. The Western model wants to follow scientific protocol, which I’m a hundred per cent fan of. I think we need that structure and discipline, and that’s how we advance things. But with that being said, for example, let’s say we want to do a study on asthma, right? Okay, we’re going to get 20 people all in the same group who are all asthmatics. We’re going to treat them all with the same 10 acupuncture points and see who gets better, and who doesn’t, and I guarantee you that only half that group or even less we’ll see some improvement whereas the others will see no improvement or just marginal improvement.

And it’s because we didn’t find the pattern. We didn’t find out, “Oh, Suzy has yin deficiency and Vanessa has Qi deficiency, and so-and-so has a damp obstruction” or “Something else going on”. If you could do a proper study this way, the better way to do it would be to get all those asthmatics in a group and then find out, “What is their pattern of disharmony first?” Get a TCM diagnosis and then go from that. Okay, we have four different groups for diagnoses. All four are going to be treated with different acupuncture protocols and have a different result. I guarantee it’ll be far more effective than just treating everybody as a blanket treatment. And that’s really what I’ve kind of taken from that data into my ear study is to look at, we know that five native protocol points are really good for addictions and helping people with behavioral health issues, but not everybody has those same five points that are indicated for them.

We all experience trauma in different ways, we want to find out specifically what points do I need versus someone else. And we can do that with modern technology, with your acupuncture locator, and you can find out what points are not working well and use those points. And as people change, you adapt and you make your protocol a little bit different based on that. I’d say there is good data out there, but just know that we can’t blanket treat everyone because we don’t look at the disease. We don’t look at just asthma. We look at, again, that person in their environment and what’s going on, and we come up with that pattern of disharmony and treat that, and that way we give individualized treatment, but we also really have an effect that’s far greater than just trying to get everybody with the same blanket protocol.

Then in addition to that, I think if I could close, I would just say with everything that’s out there, the other criticism I see a lot is like, oh, it has to be one way or the other, Western Medicine or Eastern Medicine and it, you’re missing, you’re missing the point if that’s sort of your philosophy because the two go hand in hand, and that’s why we call this integrative medicine, where we know that our current western medicine model is fantastic for acute care, for emergencies, for things that are like dire need. You’re having a heart attack or a stroke or whatever, a massive bleed, an aneurysm. I could use acupuncture points for those things, but I guarantee you I’m calling 9-1-1 before I put those in because I want to get that done.

But then where Chinese Medicine shines is chronic diseases and preventative care and a lot of the pain stuff. Instead of being hooked on opioids for the rest of your life, maybe you want to do acupuncture once every two weeks. There’s a nice melding of both, especially when you understand how each system can contribute, and we are luckily seeing a little bit more leeway in terms of hospitals here in Calgary that are allowing acupuncturists to come in and treat some of their patients that are undergoing cancer treatment or they’ve had a surgery or whatnot. Even dementia, Alzheimer’s and memory issues and things like that. A lot of brain scalp, acupuncture they’re using for things like that. We’re seeing it more accessible, but I would just caution people from saying, oh, I’m totally against this or that. It’s like, try them both. You have all the tools at your fingertips. Why do we not try to use everything to try to help ourselves get better, which then makes your family better, which then makes your community better, which makes the planet better, right? That’s our whole goal is to heal people individually and that collectively heals everything around us. That’s what I would leave you with there.

Jenny:

Yeah, that was fantastic. Thank you so much, Vanessa. Yeah, I think there’s much to, as you said, being open to, and nothing needs to be better over another. Let’s integrate them. There are a lot of parallels between these things when we really, it’s about root cause analysis and that’s successful in both paths and both short-term and long-term. It is amazing how it all goes hand in hand and how you get those positive feedback loops in all those areas when we’re working in the right direction. Anyway, thank you so much. I appreciate especially you doing this again, and I should say for everybody else, I forgot to say that Alex had gotten sick this week, unfortunately, he wasn’t able to join us, but of course, he was disappointed to not be able to sit down with you again. Next time. Have a great night. Take care.

Vanessa:

You too. Thank you. Take care.

Jenny:

Bye.