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Howdy. How y’all doing? Check in. Check in with yourself. See how you’re doing.

Remember the secret. The secret is PMA. That’s always the secret. Positive Mental Attitude. There’s nothing to do with what’s happening. I listen to a really great basketball coach today. I really have a lot of respect for. And they were saying, how can you stay so positive and stay on track with all this stuff that’s going on and all these injuries… And the PMA positive mental attitude. So that’s what it always comes down to.

And with your health, people with positive mental attitudes live longer. They live far longer than pessimists and they live somewhat longer than people who are, “more accurate.” That we’ll see kind of more nuance. The people with positive mental attitude outlive everybody. So anyway, give it a shot.

So today we’re going to have a little bit broader viewing audience. Today is a day that I talk about the Traditional Chinese Medical issues and also go through a little bit of the physiology or actually that’s not doing more into the anatomy of the liver, gallbladder, etc..

And so I invited some of the people from our Tuesday afternoon Q&A group, which is also Tuesdays at 3:00. 

Welcome, everybody. So I’m going to start out. I’m going to share my screen and I’m going to go through a little presentation. Are there any questions first? Okay. No questions yet. Here we go.

01:58

Okay. So two sections. I’m going to talk about the gallbladder and gallbladder stones.

And then I’m going to talk a little bit about the liver and gallbladder in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Now, I would love to talk about this for many, many hours. Any of the organ pairs in Chinese medicine could be talked about and are very, very interesting. The liver and gallbladder, though, are really at the core, and I find that they’re the predominant issues in American culture. Very, very important. That’s why we do the liver flush and why I don’t do kidney flushes anymore.

I used to do kidney flushes and more kidney oriented treatments, but I find that the liver and gallbladder really deserve most of the attention. So section one, let’s talk about this a little bit with a pH changing from inch to inch as you’re going through the digestive system. But I also include included on here about how much time it takes at each stage of the digestive system. So the saliva is pretty much neutral 6.5 to 7.5. Neutral is 7.0. And it says up to one minute you should actually chew your food at least one minute. As we talked about the last few days. Digestion starts in the mouth. If you don’t properly mastigate your food, you don’t properly chew so that it gets well-mixed with the digestive fluids that are actually in your saliva. Then it slows everything else down the upper stomach or the fundy.

It’s actually should be the fundus. That has a moderately acidic 4.0 to 6.5. And it should stay there for about 30 to 60 minutes. That’s where a lot of the churning goes on and then it goes to the lower stomach. So we tend to think of the stomach as just this one big container. But actually it because of the muscularity of it, it can divide itself into several different ways. And the lower stomach. You can see, has a very acidic pH, 1.5 to 4.

04:22

Now, again, this is assuming that this person is not doing any antacids and it will stay in the lower stomach for 1 to 3 hours, depending on what it is. Now, if you drink a smoothie, it should still stay in your mouth for about a minute, actually. But these times are much, much shorter. It’s going to go through very quickly. Then it goes into the duodenum which is here you can see 7.0 to 8.5.

So that’s alkaline. And so you can see it can go from 1.5 to 8.5 and just a couple of inches. And that’s because of the tremendous amount of bicarbonate that is produced in the body and pumped into the duodenum in order to keep that acidic quality from burning holes in your small intestine. And also so the digestive process that requires the alkalinity can really do its job.

Then the small intestine, where it goes back to being more acidic and where it will stay for 1 to 5 hours again, depending on what it is. And then it goes to the large intestine, which is again acidic, 4.0 to 7.0, again 7.0 being neutral. And there it can stay for 10 hours to several days. Now, none of my patients are going to keep that in their large intestine for several days because that is inviting bowel cancer and death.

05:58

So 10 hours, that’s fine. So I like a total transit time of about 18 hours, 24 hours okay. You don’t want to get much under ten because then you’re not really getting full absorption. So anyway, this is how long it takes to get through your digestive system. So here is a picture. This is the liver, this large piece here and stuck up underneath the liver. Those of you who I’ve done a test for, your gallbladder is called looking for what’s called a Murphy’s Sign.

I actually have to reach up underneath the liver and poke on the gallbladder. And so here are the hepatic ducts coming down from the liver. The bile is made in the liver, comes into this hepatic duct, comes down, goes here into the cystic duct, where it goes into the body of the gallbladder. Then when you stimulate the gall, the gallbladder with cholecystokinin  and tell it “we need the bile, we need the bile. We’ve got a fatty meal coming down.”

Then it gets pumped back out into the common bile duct and comes down toward the duodenum. Now here is the gallbladder and this is the pancreas. And so here’s that common hepatic duct running down and you can see that the gallbladder is going to empty into it, but also the pancreatic enzymes are going to join it there and then it’s going to get dumped, all of it into the small intestine.

07:40

Pretty amazing system, actually. This is an impacted gallbladder. So when you wonder, you know, you might think as we’re going through this process, it’s kind of difficult. Why bother with it? Well, this is why. This is a gallbladder that is completely full of stones. Now, A, this is going to be very painful. Every time you ingest fat, the gallbladder is going to be stimulated to squeeze. And you can just imagine these walls squeezing around all of these stones very, very painful and very ineffective, because there’s no room to even get bile in there.

So you’re not going to be utilizing the gallbladder at all when it gets to this point. Usually the gallbladder does have to come out. And I’ve mentioned before, probably 1% of my patients that has a hot gallbladder, you know, that we can find either through pulses or by testing for a murphy sign, etc. About 1% of them will actually need to have their gallbladder taken out. And this would be one of those. I’m being sarcastic here, of course, when I say a tiny gallstone.

So this is someone’s hand right in a glove. And this giant, giant stone came out of someone’s gallbladder. Yeah. Talk about painful. Now, by the way, in our liver flush, you’re not going to flush that. It’s not. That’s not moving. That’s staying in the gallbladder until someone cuts it out.

Now, these are kind of typical stones. Stones are fascinating. They can come in many different colors. I find these to be kind of pretty, almost like an agate. These are reddish because the bile contains a lot of red blood cell breakdown. A lot of them in here. Some of them are more green or it’s just more from the bile. Some of them are black, as you saw in the picture up here. So some of these are more greenish black and these are just pure green.

It depends on what the chemical composition is. Sometimes are quite lovely like these, but they’re more lovely outside of your body than inside your body. Okay, I just do this in here because someone asked me about it in terms of bowel movements. You can look at this up. It’s the Bristol stool chart. And you know, each of these shapes means something differently, like a smooth, soft sausage or snake. Dr. Oz calls it banana poop.

10:23

So it looks like a banana. That’s perfect. Banana poops are perfect. If they’re small blobs and obviously there’s often, often not enough fiber. And then when you see this very liquid consistency with no solid pieces, that’s generally because there’s a significant inflammatory process occurring in the bowels. Now, in doing this program and if you’re doing buffered C, or some other thing to get your bowels moving, if then you have a liquid consistency stool.

Don’t worry about it. That’s fine. You’re just pulling water back across the lining of the large intestine so that we can get a get more fluid in there. So you have an easier time with the bowel movement. But within a week after stopping the Buffered C, your bowel movement should go back to type 4. And if they aren’t, as the commercial says, talk to your doctor. You know, running into your clothes, sliding glass door, embarrassing. Forgetting your neighbors name. Embarrassing. Talking with your doctor about your poop. Normal.

All right. That’s what the commercial says. So anyway, if you’re not in Category 4 or maybe Category 3, make sure to speak to somebody so that you can fix it. Okay. Now, I’m going to talk about one of my favorite topics, the Hun.

00:11:56:22

And you know, depending on what dialect you speak in Chinese, you’ll have different pronunciations for that. But basically, we’re talking about a very specific idea, and we’re going to talk about the relationship of the liver and gallbladder. Here’s Bodie Dharma, who reportedly brought Zen from India to China. And famous meditator still is a mountain. Nothing could move him.

Okay. So in Chinese medicine or East Asian medicine. You have two types of organs. You have the Zong and the Fu. And the zong are the active organs. They’re doing something. Your heart’s pumping blood. Your lungs are exchanging gases. Your kidneys are separating the pure from the impure and carrying out of your system, your spleen. And this is not the anatomical spleen, by the way.

So in Chinese, there are two different characters that can get translated as the spleen. One of them is the organ that lives on the left side of your body, just under your ribs, and is basically the opposite from the liver is the spleen. And that does many functions related to blood. And but the spleen in Traditional Chinese Medicine and East Asian medicine speaks more to the function of the small intestine and the pancreas. It’s concerned with digestion and absorption. They say it draws clear energy from your food and then it allows the waste products to move on their way. And of course, they’re very poetic and how they say that. And there are many different passages for that. But essentially, it’s pulling the nutrients out and absorbing them, and it’s letting the waste products go back down through the liver, which, you know, as we’ve talked about, does well over 400 different jobs. From a Western medical standpoint, it’s an amazing organ.

The pericardium or the heart wrapper, and then the fu are the storage and passageway organs. Like the small intestine doesn’t store things. It’s the passage that things flow through while they’re being digested. The large intestine stores, the products of your waste and passes them out when it’s appropriate. Urinary Bladder is hollow. It stores your urine. Your stomach is a hollow organ. The food rots and ripens there. The gall bladder is a hollow organ where the bile sits, but then gets pumped out. The gall bladder doesn’t make the bladder.

00:14:48:26

I mean, doesn’t make the bile. Triple warmer, I’m not going to go into that’s a much different concept or not much different, but it’s a little harder to grasp in a in a short discussion. Now each of those Zong and Fu organs has a paired relationship. Now, I didn’t put down here the pericardium and the triple wormer are a paired relationship. But again, that’s a little trickier. So the heart is paired with the small intestine, the lungs and the large and the small intestine.

I’m sorry. Lungs and the large intestine. The liver and gallbladder. The kidneys and the urinary bladder and the spleen and stomach. Now, this makes a lot of sense for most of these. From a physiological standpoint. The liver and gallbladder work together, the kidneys and the urinary bladder work together, the spleen and stomach work together. In our common understanding of that now, the lungs and the large intestine. Once you’ve studied a little bit, you’ll see a tremendous correlation there between the lungs and the large intestine. The lungs have a great responsibility and are in charge of the skin and the large intestine. Also, if you have large intestine problems, they’ll often show up on the skin. So anyway, these are the organ relationships.

00:16:16:12

Now each organ, Zong organ has many, many things that are I’m going to say attached to it, attributed to it. It has a spirit. There’s an element or an aspect that’s attributed to it. Each organ is has a particular sound, a particular taste. There are particular tissues of the body it controls or affects. Each one is affected by different foods in different seasons. So it’s a really huge, huge level of understanding for Chinese medicine around these organs.

00:16:56:22

And when you understand it, at first it seems like that’s kind of silly. That’s ridiculous. But the more you look at the science, the more that it bears out that these are really very, very accurate ways of looking at these organs. Now, a few of these the kidneys and I put endocrine system that’s not really quite accurate. It’s the hormonal systems, including the endocrine system.

00:17:29:00

If you were to look up kidney yin deficiency and if you were to look up the symptoms of menopause, you’d see about a 90% overlap. If you look at kidney yang deficiency and you look at the signs of male andropause, you’d see about an 80% overlap. If you see kidney qi deficiency and you look at the symptoms of aging, you’ll see that those fit perfectly also.

00:17:57:13

So they were talking about with the kidneys, they were talking about the adrenal glands which sit like little hearts on the kidneys. Now, we’re very familiar in our culture now, which wasn’t the case 20 years ago, but we’re very familiar with the catecholamines, the stress hormones, cortisol, epinephrine, nor epinephrine. And we know a lot of the people that aren’t involved in medicine know a lot about the effects of those. People are less familiar with the cortical hormones. The body’s own ability to put out the fires in innards and in the body. And so they produce prednisone and cortisone like substances for that that issue.

00:18:47:18

But they also produce all of the sex hormones. Now, for example, in menopause, we know that the ovaries stop producing estrogen as either completely stop or at least really slow down. Then the body, so it doesn’t go into shock, looks for a secondary source of estrogen. And that’s the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands are always producing a little estrogen, also a little progesterone, a little testosterone. So the body will look at menopause to the adrenal glands. It’s like, hey, we need more estrogen.

00:19:27:15

Well, in our crazed country and really we are nutcases as a culture. And the amount of stress that we live with and deal with and don’t even know we’re stressed. Many times the adrenal glands, it’s like, Yeah, no, get away from me. I have no extra ability to make estrogen. I’m busy making all these stress hormones. So then the third source of body fat I mean, the third source of estrogen is body fat. And that’s why in the United States, on average, when women go through menopause, they gain about 20 pounds of body fat.

00:20:04:01

That’s how much they need to keep the estrogen levels up. The alternative, and I’ve probably had this conversation at least a thousand times, is to de-stress. If women at menopause can de-stress, they’ll lose weight. If they won’t de-stress, their body will not lose weight. I have women on 800 or patients on 800 calorie a day diets. They workout like fiends, and that causes them to gain weight because the 800 calorie a day diet, the body sees as a stressor. The heavy workouts the body sees as a stressor. It was already overstressed.

00:20:43:29

So it’s going to put on more fat. And it’s really, really hard to get people to understand this. It’s a huge, huge problem. So, the kidneys. The adrenal. The endocrine system. Now, the affect or the spirit that goes along with the kidneys is Zhi. Zhi is willpower. And that’s why it’s so frustrating when patients go into a chronic fatigue state.

00:21:14:12

And usually those are women that have worked very, very hard, have children, and because of their hormonal needs, they will go into chronic fatigue more easily than men do. And these will always be women that have been incredibly productive. I mean, most of my chronic fatigue patients are female attorneys with children. That’s it, right across the board. And so the people around them can’t quite figure it out. Here was this woman who ran the company, ran her children, did everything, and now she won’t get off the couch.

00:21:49:26

And so the urge is to say, hey, just will yourself through it. That is absolutely an impossibility. There is no willpower because willpower arises from the endocrine system. And the endocrine system itself has shut down. So that’s why it’s such a difficult condition to recover from.

00:22:13:29 – 00:22:33:01

The heart, the Shen or life force delivers the Hun or the ethereal soul where the lungs are the Po or the Corporeal sole. Corporeal stays with the body. Ethereal, fine, delicate. Can leave the body.

In fact, in patients who have fatigue in the morning when they get up. One of the questions I ask them is about their dreams. You know, did you dream a lot? Well, yeah. Were they kind of mundane dreams where you were like at work or were you traveling around the universe? And if they say much more like traveling around the universe or astral traveling or something, that’s the one leaving the body.

00:22:57:24

And it is exhausting because it doesn’t stay with the body overnight so that it can get properly nourished and rested. And patients will wake up more tired in the morning. Then they were when they went to sleep. So that’s the ethereal soul in many systems of thought.

00:23:16:28

The corporeal soul dies with the body. The ethereal soul is released. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about that. But that’s a very common belief system.

Okay. So during our lifetime, it’s the Hun that bestows the gifts of wood. And wood is about growth. So growth is really from the Hun. It’s what allows us to grow and change and move through life. So it allows us to be clear about our purpose, find our path and know where we’re going, and orient ourselves in the right direction. I mean, you see some people, they just know from an early age exactly what they’re going to do.

00:24:08:03

It’s what helps us to navigate the rapids of life. So no matter what you set out to do. Write a book. Build a company. Climb Mount Everest. Doesn’t matter. The certainty is there will be obstacles. Always. There will always be obstacles. Often we know what they’re going to be before we start. But there will always be obstacles. And it’s the one that allows us to override any fear or any of the issues that come up and keep on our path. So it’s like the map and the compass of our soul.

00:24:51:15

So back to the liver and gallbladder. Now the Hun is what runs all of that. The liver is the General. He makes the plans, gives clear orders and oversees them. So the liver is delegating the general. General Eisenhower during World War II, is delegating to all of the generals under him and giving them orders.

Now, when it’s ill, when it’s pathological, it gets out of balance and then you’ll get yelling. So instead of giving clear and even, you know, when it’s healthy, it can be loud. It can be giving loud orders. That’s fine. But an illness that yells, it’s a very intense, it’s frustrated, irritated. It can’t plan. And so the general has lost its bearings.

00:25:44:23

Now the gallbladder, the paired organ is the administrator. It carries out the orders in an orderly fashion, clear, concise, orderly, organized movement. So it’s like an architect and a general contractor. The architect draws up the plans for this beautiful, beautiful building. They don’t do the work. The contractor takes the plans and carries out the day to day mission of building the building. So that’s very much like how the liver and gallbladder react emotionally in our systems. Now. I didn’t put this in the presentation, and I should. 

00:26:31:23

When a liver is out of balance and pathological. The primary cause for that, according to Traditional Chinese Medicine, is unfulfilled desires. Too much time of unfulfilled desires. Now, if you think about it, this is why in in the United States, the liver and gallbladder are the organs that suffer the most, because pretty much from the time where little kids were experiencing from day to day, from moment to moment, unfulfilled desires.

But I was talking to a parent about this. Why would my kid be frustrated, you know? They’re just not even, in third grade yet. I said, well, think about it. Because you’ve told me. Studied in order to get into the best preschool. And then had to be in a competitive competition to get in the best kindergarten. So that they could get into the best grammar school. So that they could get into the best high school. So that they could get into the best college. So that they could get into the best graduate program. So that they could get the best job and for their entire life in that job, they are continuing to aspire to additional heights.

00:28:01:08

Every one of those steps will leave them with unfulfilled desires. That constant, constant need to move forward. Now, if they have a really healthy liver and a really healthy gallbladder, they can do that. But other factors that can kick in and make it very, very painful, so unfulfilled desires. If you look at, say, ancient Chinese culture, ancient Japanese culture, Native American cultures, they didn’t have that type of frustration.

Now, they may have not had enough to eat, and that could be a problem. And they could have war or pestilence. But from the day they were born, they knew what their job was going to be. It was whatever mom or dad did. They were probably going to have an arranged marriage. They didn’t go through dozens of different relationships trying to figure out they didn’t get divorced once or twice or three times. So it was a very different, very different energetic for the liver and gallbladder. So unfulfilled desires.

If you don’t have a clear vision or path for your life, we treat the liver. If you can’t make plans, you feel overwhelmed. You lack creativity we’ll mostly treat the liver. If you’re angry, irritable, frustrated, we’ll definitely treat the liver. And if you have plans like you know what you want to do, but you just can’t take the steps to reach it. You just can’t move forward.

It’s like you know what to do and you can’t do it. Than we need to treat the gallbladder. If you have a goal but you can’t start, we treat the gallbladder. So again, now often there’s an overlap. We’re treating the liver and the gallbladder.

00:29:53:08

That’s all I want to share with you about that. And so any questions about the liver flush, detox, etc.?

I don’t see any in the chat.

00:30:12:14

Oh, we had one on tart cherry juice.

Oh, tart cherry juice? 2 to 4 ounces. You can drink it straight or mix it with whatever.

That, by the way, is very good for a multitude of things, which I won’t go into right now. But it’s not for sleep. No, probably not. I mean, in a really roundabout way it could because it can lower pain from certain things. It can lower your likelihood to get kidney stones or gout. And so in kind of a roundabout way, but not in a direct way that I that I’m aware of anyway.

Any other questions?

00:30:56:22

I have one. If your Hun is deficient or all the symptoms that you’re talking about present or is that.

No, it could be any of those symptoms. And it depends on the level. You know, there’s no in Chinese medicine, by the way, there are no absolutes. Zero. Actually, in physics, there are no absolutes either. They talk about absolute zero, but you can always get a little colder. And so Einstein said it really well. E=M.C. squared. Energy equals matter times, a constant, which was the speed of light. But basically he’s saying energy and matter are exactly the same thing. It’s just that one’s moving a lot faster than the other.

00:31:42:12

And in Chinese medicine, we have the yin yang symbol. It’s never absolute yang. It’s a never absolute yin. Now it can get the maximum yang or maximum yin, and then it flips back over. But it’s not ever 100%. And it’s like that with any condition. So the one I mean, I guess with death. Okay, you got me with that. Then you get an absolute condition short of that. You don’t.

00:32:12:24

And so the Hun can be mildly distressed. It can be severely distressed. You could do a liver cleanse and get your Hun much healthier and find that you’re making much better decisions if that happens a lot.

Also, I didn’t I’m not really talking about the spleen much here, but one of the questions when I was teaching Chinese nutrition is if someone can’t get rid of unneeded objects, so this could be a hoarder or on a much milder level, it would be me who can’t get rid of any of my books. I don’t need a lot of them anymore, but they’re not going out. And that’s the symptom of a weak spleen.

00:33:01:22

So for me, the spleen is the issue. And so once people get their spleen healthy, you find they can suddenly throw away those objects. I mean, with these hoarding shows, it just makes me crazy. It’s just I want to go in and heal their spleen. If you notice, they’re almost always overweight, very damp, which are Spleen QI deficiency signs. If you would treat their spleen, they could stop hoarding,

With the liver. If you treat the spleen, they can have a much happier. Life and much happier relationships. And the liver we associate most strongly anger with the liver.

00:33:47:13

Now, there are other conditions that can have people be angry. Lung Yin deficiency. But the Lung Yin deficiency, people are like your neighbors. You never do it right. Why’d you cut your lawn so short? Wow. Now your lawn is too long, you know? You know, you came home at 7:00 last night. That’s awfully late to come home. You know, you woke me up, so they’re always going to find something to complain about.

With liver, it’s much more of a personal attack. It’s really directed at the person that they are dealing with.

00:34:22:28

And lung, if the lungs affected, it’s cutting. It’s like I have a relative who has lung anger and in the middle of a sentence, they’ll just walk away and not say a word. It’s like they’re done with you. They’re going to cut you off. They’re finished.

The lung is the metal organ. And it cuts. They’ll just leave. Liver people will never do that. They are going to let you know how screwed up you are in great, vivid detail.

You’re going to have to take it. And that’s liver-ish, anger. Generally cutting people off. And traffic is liver-ish also or road rage issues. And you watch people after a road rage, after they cut someone off in traffic, they’re not done. They’re going to scream at you. They’re going to honk their horn. They’re going to talk to themselves way after the person that irritated them is gone.

So it’s kind of fun.

00:35:26:15

Kathryn: I have another question when you say you treat the liver for the last slide. What would you recommend to college students who are struggling with life decisions?

John: Everything. So in Chinese medicine. It’s a puzzle, It’s really taking as many pieces as we can and looking at these patterns. But we don’t actually treat diseases. We treat patterns. And so. In those patterns. There are many signs and symptoms that can point in a direction, but there are a few things that are called cardinal signs. So if that’s present, then always a particular organ is is at play.

For example, fatigue after eating, particularly after eating lunch or carbohydrates. That’s always a Spleen Qi deficiency. There may be other things going on, but there will always be a deficient spleen because that’s a cardinal sign. With the liver, sighing is a cardinal sign.

Ahhhhhh.

What’s happening is and in this Chinese cosmology, at least, the energy of the body should flow in a North-South direction. It should go this way. It should not go sideways. That’s called a counter flow Qi. And so a common problem that we see in our culture, one of the most obvious manifestations is in PMS. And we say the liver is overacting on the spleen.

00:37:14:17

And so what’s happening is the energy delivers on the right side, spleens on the left side, and the energy’s going this way, it’s going sideways. And so the sighing is an attempt to release that energy that’s stuck in the ribs, etc.. So it’s Ahhhhhhh.  It’s to try to get that energy out, get it moving. So things that work really, really well are breathing. Breathing exercises, I mean, or just being conscious of breathing.

00:37:48:20

You’ll find with anxiety, people always breathe on the chest. If I want someone to be anxious, all I have to do is get them to breathe in their chest for a couple of minutes and breathing in the lower abdomen will bring relaxation. It’s almost impossible to stay anxious if you breathe in the lower abdomen and get that flow occurring.

So if you can get, whoever the person is to take a few minutes to breathe. That’s really helpful that I mentioned that there’s a color associated with each of the organ systems.

The heart is red. For example, the the lungs are white, the kidneys are dark, blue, black, etc.. The color of the liver and gallbladder is green. It’s the color of growth. Growth happens from the liver. And actually physiologically, that’s very accurate also. So it’s really that growth from the liver. So green color is very vital for the liver and gallbladder.

00:38:53:16

And so with my patients who are very livery, I really do everything I can to get them to go for a walk in the woods as often as possible.

Put some greenery in their house. NASA has published a list of houseplants that will clean your air. So put some of those house plants in, spend a little time in the garden. But really walking is really critical. Like my son is going to a college that I didn’t want him to go to. It’s in Oregon. This was the beginning of the pandemic. I wanted to kind of stay closer to home, but then I drove him up to the college and it’s such an incredibly gorgeous place.

I can see why he loved it. And the students up there are incredibly fortunate because you really can’t get from one building to another without walking through the forest. So you come out of one class stressed, you take this 2 to 300 yard walk through the woods, surrounded by greenery, breathing clean, fresh air. It’s so magnificent for their health. So those are two things.

Things that stretch the body will help course we call it coursing the liver.

We want the energy to run on the proper course. Like a race course or a golf course. There’s a directionality and we want to rectify the Qi. So that means making it upright. So the breathing will help that stretching, yoga is very, very good for the liver system. The way the sinews and tendons are stretched is very, very valuable. So if you can get the person to do a little bit of yoga, that would be very helpful.

Acupuncture is probably the single best thing because it causes changes very quickly. Kathryn sent out an email today and it talked about some of the more recent research done on the effect, the effectiveness of acupuncture and in dealing with the vagus nerve and dealing with stress. There are multiple studies that have come out recently.

00:41:10:02

There was one by the Cochrane Collaborative where they looked at thousands and thousands of cases and they determined that acupuncture was more than twice as effective for anxiety and depression then were drugs, prescription drugs.

Right now, they they’ve got no dog in the fight. They’re not fans of acupuncture, but they said it was over twice as effective as drugs for anxiety and depression. And that’s because we have direct connections, direct to the vagus nerve. And so if you haven’t opened that email, you might want to take a look at it. It talks about the powerful connection of the vagus nerve in the ear, and that’s why ear acupuncture can be very powerful, but body acupuncture, too.

00:41:58:09

So that’s number one. Now, acupressure, where you work, stimulating those same points, and particularly with the ear, often will send patients home with ear seeds. And so when they feel depressed, anxious or any one of a number of other modes, we have them press and rub those ear seeds because we place them right over places that are going to stimulate the vagus nerve.

00:42:26:04

Our food can make a huge difference. People with liver issues will be attracted to alcohol and they’ll be attracted to the sweet flavor. Because that sweetness calms down the liver. Short term, it gets rid of irritability. Short term, as does the alcohol. It relieves the stress. But in the long run, both of those make the liver more damaged. But they will tend to seek out sweet things. One thing the sweet flavor stimulates serotonin release also, so they get all these goodies.

So managing their diet, often a diet.

That would be a keto diet would be great for a liver gallbladder person. Generally as long as the gallbladder is not highly inflamed. Lots and lots of vegetables and lots and lots of fat. Just really feeding the system and a little bit of protein would be great for a lot of liver, gallbladder people and stay away from the sweets. Yeah. I think that those are the main things. Yeah. And I’ve got a Q&A question over here.

And also selecting what you put your attention on for going back to the livery stuff. Definitely don’t want to watch stressful TV. Lots of comedies. You want to laugh. Laughing stimulates the breathing. It stimulates the vagus nerve and really gets things moving. So under stress. Don’t watch stress.

Okay. That’s good.

Yeah. All right. So that does it for me. It’s been a little longer session today than I’d planned. But I want to thank you very much for tuning in. And so for Q&A, people, I’ll be back next week to do Q&A. And I’ve got some really interesting, I think, information to share with you. All right. Be happy. Be healthy.

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Dr. John Nieters L.Ac, DAOM, is an acupuncturist, Chinese herbalist, functional medicine, writer, teacher, and leader in the community. In this episode, John talks about his experience with the importance of finding your vision and purpose in life, in order to create the right goals for you.

Disclaimer: Dr. John Nieters received his Doctor of Oriental Medicine and Acupuncture degree from Five Branches. His use of “doctor” or “Dr.” in relation to himself solely refers to that degree. Dr. Nieters is a licensed acupuncturist in California. This video is for general informational purposes only. It should not be used to self-diagnose and it is not a substitute for a medical exam, cure, treatment, diagnosis, and prescription or recommendation. It does not create a doctor-patient relationship between Dr. Nieters and you. You should not make any change in your health regimen or diet before first consulting a physician and obtaining a medical exam, diagnosis, and recommendation. Always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. TheBalancingPoint.net, Alameda Acupuncture, and Dr. John Nieters L.Ac, DAOM are not liable or responsible for any advice, course of treatment, diagnosis or any other information, services or product you obtain through this video or site.