PODCAST HIGHLIGHTS:
Understand the importance of healthy bowel movements. How Traditional Chinese Medicine views the large intestines and lungs. Best way to retrain for daily bowel movements. The connection between depression, anxiety, irritability and Constipation. Learn about laxatives and Dementia Risk. How Acupuncture and Electroacupuncture can support constipation. Fiber and supplement recommendation for constipation.
PODCAST HIGHLIGHTS:
00:00 Introduction
05:00 Importance of healthy bowel movements
08:14 Large Intestines and Chinese Medicine
09:18 Lungs and Chinese Medicine
10:39 Retraining to have daily bowel movements
12:48 Depression, anxiety, irritability and Constipation
14:09 Vagus Nerve
18:15 Floating a Boat Analogy
23:20 Laxatives
25:49 Laxatives and Dementia Risk
27:49 Acupuncture, Electroacupuncture and Constipation
29:33 Fiber recommendation for constipation
32:07 Brand of Buffered C
32:37 Boiling flax seeds
33:08 Melatonin Supplements
34:16 Papaya Seeds and Skin
Transcript from Webinar:
Howdy, y’all. I’m just waiting for a few more people to get in, and then we will take off.
Okay. We’ve got a pretty good group and a few more continuing to join us. I’m going to. One thing I’m going to talk about for sure Today is the importance of healthy bowel regularity. Now that can mean tons of stuff. Often people that are, you know, pooping once a day and everything’s pretty good don’t want to hear this. You need to hear this. we’re going to go over a lot of issues and these have a massive effect on health in general and then of course, on bowel health specifically.
00:00:56
Kathryn sent out an email newsletter that had a cute little title. What was it? This Poo Shall pass. I was recently looking at some recent studies on constipation risks and even more importantly, on looking at what certain medications do to increase certain risk factors. I want to go into a little more detail with that and field any questions about it because it’s really a neglected issue. In Chinese medicine, when my wife was in school. She and many of her friends got T-shirts made that said, “I pooped today.” So, they would constantly talk to each other about their poop.
00:01:59
It’s a huge topic in Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine which is quite understandable. One, it’s very important and two, it was something that you could actually see. They didn’t have labs or diabetic medicine, Chinese medicine, Japanese medicine, etcetera, and older Western medicine. So, you had to look at signs and symptoms. You’d look at people’s skin like we still do in Chinese medicine, take pulses which they used to do in Western medicine. Also looking for correlations, looking at the tongue. I can remember watching cartoons on Saturday morning when I was, well it was probably 65 years ago, and they had a cartoon where Daffy Duck would be the doctor and he’d be talking to, um, what’s his name? Um, the duck …
00:02:52
Anyway. Yeah, but anyway, they’d be talking. The one would be the doctor want to be the patient, and he say, Stick out your tongue. And he’d stick out his tongue and there would be a big overcoat on it. He says, ‘oh you have a coated tongue’. We have a serious problem here. Unfortunately, doctors don’t do that anymore. You can tell massive things about someone’s health by looking at their tongue. In fact, you can do complete diagnostics by looking at someone’s tongue. Now, I’d like to get more information than that, but it’s a very powerful, complete system.
00:03:49
I’m going to share my screen with you in a moment, and we are going to talk about poo. All right. I’ve seen a lot of ulcerative colitis patients. That’s an inflammatory bowel disease similar to Crohn’s, generally not quite as severe. One of my patients I see had treated her entire family for ulcerative colitis. She brought in a book called “The Book of Poo,” and then she went to Europe and found it. There it was “the book of poop.” They put a “P” on the end, or vice versa. Don’t remember, but apparently, they’re different. Um, and then my son, when he was a little guy, 2 or 3 years old, had a book entitled Everything Poops and it talked about how to analyze poop, etcetera. Okay, so it’s a really important subject.
00:04:23
Now I really am going to share my screen with you here. At least I’m going to attempt to. Oh! There’s a reminder here. Beginning March 26th, we will have Sunday clinic hours. Delightful, delightful acupuncturists coming on board with us. And she’ll be here from eight and on Sunday morning until 2:00 in the afternoon. A lot of experience. And so, we’re really looking forward to having her here. Her name is Gabi.
00:04:55
Okay, so “This, Poo, Shall Pass.” So, let’s talk mostly here about constipation. Now in Chinese medicine, loose stools are very significant to us also, however A little bit of loose stool doesn’t concern me anywhere near as much as a little bit of constipation. Most of our population is constipated. In China, the average number of bowel movements is three per day in a rural population. Not urban necessarily, but in rural populations. It’s three bowel movements a day. In most indigenous populations, you know, people kind of living off the land hunter/gatherer type environments three bowel movements a day is typical.
00:05:45
In the United States, now this is the entire US, and that’s different than California, but the average number of bowel movements is one every three days. So that means rural China, they’re nine times more likely to have or have bowel movements nine times more often than people will here in the US. And what’s significant about that, other than being just feeling horrible, is that the rate of bowel cancers is about ten times higher in the US. Not a coincidence. You poo one tenth as often and you have ten times the bowel cancer. What does that tell you? You need to get those things out of your system.
00:06:30
Now, that’s not the only problem with constipation. There are many. You can develop diverticuli, which are excruciatingly painful out pouching’s in the intestines that become infected. You may need surgery. Also, the bowel. The large intestine is designed to reabsorb fluid and other products from the lumen of the intestine, from the inner intestine, the hollow part. And so that gets pulled across the tissues into the bloodstream and into the system. And that includes toxins, poisons, et-cetera. Hormones is a big problem. Some women are over utilizing the hormones by 5 to 10 times because they keep absorbing them when they should be passing out with the stool. So, it’s really important to keep that flow very, very open. And so, as Kathryn pointed out here in Chinese medicine, organs are not just organs connected to each of the organs is a complete energy system.
00:07:44
And these can be traced out. And it’s very easy to prove they’re, quote, real and can be stimulated with acupuncture and lots of other methodologies. And they’re measurable. The levels of energy in them is measurable, the course of them is measurable, etcetera. And so, with each of those energy systems connected to an organ, there is a particular affect, often called an emotion, but that’s not really a big enough word and affect and energy that’s associated with it.
00:08:14
And it’s important to know that if you’re constipated, that doesn’t just affect the physical large intestine, it actually includes other elements. Now the large intestines paired organ is the lungs. The paired tissue is the skin. The number of people who have concomitant bowel inflammation and skin inflammation approaches a 1 to 1 ratio. If you have bowel inflammation, you will probably have skin inflammation they’re that closely hooked together now. The energetic relationship in the body and the organ means the organ and the energy system is that the large intestine pathway is associated with emotions of sadness, loss, grief and guilt. Now those are largely because of its relationship with the lung. The lung is often called the repository of grief.
00:09:23
Okay. So, all of those things will happen because of that lung/large intestine relationship. Now, the stagnation is directly a large intestine problem. You’ll find people who have stagnation in their lives. I’m going to call it where they are just you know, they’re sluggish. They really can’t move. Once they change that emotionally, often their bowels will open up. And often if they work from the other side and open up their bowels, they don’t have as much stagnation in their life. So, you need that free flow. And that can lead to all sorts of pathologies or illnesses that really make it difficult in the flow of life.
00:10:09
When those emotions become really deeply habitual and ingrained, the body can manifest this as constipation, diarrhea, lower abdominal cramping, etcetera. And those energy imbalances can actually lead to physical weakness and provide emotional introversion where you can’t or don’t want to actually participate so much in life. And when it says engrained, that’s a really good word.
00:10:39
I find that with a lot of adults and teenagers, I actually have to retrain them in how to poop. Okay. It seems ridiculous, but the mechanism goes something like this. You know, you’ve got the kids are getting up before school. They don’t want to get up, so they’re running around late. They don’t take time to really eat breakfast and relax. And they particularly don’t take time to sit on the toilet. The time of the large intestine is 5 to 7 a.m. That’s when you’re much more effective at having healthy bowel movements if you’re sitting on the toilet before 7 a.m. Now, you know, it’s not an absolute, but it’s just much easier.
00:11:21
So, I’ll have a lot of like teenage girls with acne and acne is often probably most often a liver, large intestine heat problem. We’ve got to get that stool out because it’s just overheating their body. They’re getting flooded with toxins. The toxins have to go somewhere so they come out in the skin as acne. So, I will actually have them drink something warm, do a little massage on their abdomen in the direction that the large intestine flows and sit on the toilet, whether they have to go or not. And within a few weeks they will start to have more and more healthy bowel movements before seven in the morning. Now what happens is as children, they’re in a hurry. They don’t want to take time to go to the bathroom, so they start suppressing the urge. They get to school.
00:12:13
They don’t want to raise their hand and say, you know, I have to go to the bathroom. And they’re too busy during the breaks being with their friends and they don’t want to seem weird having to run off to the bathroom. So, they then learn to suppress the urge even more. And after a few years of suppressing that urge, you don’t even feel it anymore. So, they don’t even know they need to poop anymore. And so, you have to retrain that so that they can feel that. I know that can sound weird, but I see it all the time. It’s a huge issue now that stagnation can lead to depression.
00:12:46
In Chinese medicine when we talk about depression, we generally talking about something that is depressed, like there’s energy holding something down. So, you can have blood depression where the blood isn’t moving. You can have heat depression where there’s heat trapped in the body. You can have damp depression where the dampness isn’t moving, but so it’s actually being held down. Then you get irritability and then apathy and discouragement, and then it can also stimulate panic responses that patients often have no idea that those panic responses are being triggered by their gut, and then they produce spontaneous defecation due to the body’s reflex actions.
00:13:34
It’s very well known by police officers that often they’ll find at the scene of a car burglary or some other burglary or attack that they’ll find that someone has pooped on the sidewalk or under a tree or something, because that stress can stimulate a reflex action to release the bowels. Very, very common. So, imbalances that affect the large intestine are really common in our modern society due to excess stress.
00:14:09
The vagus nerve is called the Wanderer in earlier times. It is the nerve that creates the most relaxation in the body. And it is the most important for stimulating the organs of digestion in your body. It’s what controls, to a large measure, heart rate and variability, large intestinal flow, small intestinal digestive processes, stomach digestive processes etcetera. So, when you are under high stress, the vagus nerve isn’t being activated or very little, and the other nerves are being activated that put you into a high stress, parasympathetic nervous system state.
00:15:06
So, your digestion stops. Literally, it will stop. For hours and people wonder why stress causes stomach aches and all these problems. It’s because under stress you release epinephrine, one of the jobs of epinephrine is to lower the blood flow to your internal organs and increase blood flow to your extremities and your brain so that you can run away from the tiger. If you’re faced with digesting your breakfast or running away from a tiger. The body will prioritize running away from the tiger. it will pull the blood out of your intestines. This is a major problem for fertility because it pulls the blood out of the ovaries and out of the uterus.
00:15:56
So, they’re not getting the proper blood supply. And those are very important issues for unexplained infertility. It’s that stress response. It’s not a single event of stress. It’s the constancy that is so, so difficult for us that stimulates the body’s parasympathetic nervous system, which controls all of these glandular and sphincter responses. Now, one of the things that I’m reminded of when we are talking about having three bowel movements a day is this. There is a reflex that whenever you chew or just put things in your mouth in general, but particularly when you chew, it stimulates a reflex in the large intestine to start peristalsis.
00:16:52
So, if you’re eating three meals a day, you should have three bowel movements a day and those will usually occur half an hour to an hour or so after you eat the meal, that’s normal, that’s the way it should be. One a day is our minimum. If you’re not pooping once a day, you have a problem, and it’s a serious problem that can lead to increased dementia risk, etcetera … Bowel cancer risk for sure. And so, we want you to become a whole person again. So, when you eat, you get that stimulation to your large intestine, and it stimulates you to go to the bathroom. Now, after surgeries often they’ll have people chew gum just for the purpose of starting that peristaltic activity in the large intestine.
00:17:42
Yeah, I’m sorry. When the parasympathetic nervous system is constantly stimulated, the body can’t rest and digest which leads to a lot of the digestive disturbances that we have. It’s kind of, you know, in Chinese medicine, one of the things that I love about it is it’s so poetic, right? For example, until the 1700s, there wasn’t even a word for sex. You know, you had to kind of do these workarounds, you know, conversations in the bedchamber. They didn’t have really words for the sexual anatomy. And so, everything is very beautiful, actually. So, when the Chinese describe having a bowel movement, they say it’s like floating a boat or sailing a boat. First you need a boat, right? You need something to move. And a large portion of that is the fiber you eat. Although about 50% of a typical bowel movement is actually bacteria, probiotics, bad bacteria and also some skin tissues.
00:18:48
So that’s about half of the boat and the other half is generally fiber. So, you want the fiber to kind of wash through kind of it’s like sweeping a broom through the intestines, but it will form a boat, which is a stool. So, the second part you need to float a boat is water. It’s got to have something to float on. And that’s the water that comes in, comes from the large intestine. Now, remember what I said before.
00:19:19
The job of the large intestine is to take this very, very liquid matter that’s passing through the intestine and pull out the water or a lot of the water to solidify the stool. And a big part of that is so that you don’t become dehydrated and die. Many of the worst diseases on the planet. The biggest killers kill people through diarrhea. A lot of the things that you hear about that people died from historically, these huge epidemics of typhus and cholera, etcetera. People died from pooping out too many fluids and they would dehydrate and die, literally.
00:19:59
So that’s an important job for the large intestine. However, it can do its job too well, right? Particularly if the stool is in the large intestine for too long a period of time. it will pull out too much water. Then we need to do something. One is to speed up the bowel transit time, but also take something that’s going to help increase the water in the large intestines.
00:20:23
Now we use something called Buffered C, which is kind of a magical blend, and I can’t figure it out because I can take all the ingredients and give it to patients, but it’s not as effective as using this one supplement. And it’s basically primarily a vitamin C and magnesium supplement. And those are both known to reverse the osmotic flow so it pulls the water back into the intestines and it will make softer, more watery stool, or at least not such a hard stool. Now there are drugs that do that. The drugs are actually, we find it quite dangerous for dementia risk. So, I prefer the natural methods.
00:21:07
And then the third is the wind. Or in Chinese medicine, we call it the QI, the energy. Right. That’s actually moving the boat across the water. And that’s the peristaltic action where the nerves are stimulating the large intestine to rhythmically spasm and move the stool along through the intestine. So, the important thing. Critically important If someone says I’m constipated is figuring out which of those three problems or something else, it is, right? Is it the wind? Do we need to stimulate peristalsis through either doing acupuncture to stimulate the neurology or some herb that’s going to stimulate peristalsis?
00:21:55
Are the stools to dry? You see this a lot with older people. They’re actually given a bulking agent. Psyllium seed, for example. And it makes them worse because now they’ve got an even larger mass of stool, but they haven’t increased the amount of fluid. So, they get even more constipated than ever. So, you need to know which of these is the problem. Now closely related to the water part of it. The river is a sub element, which is oil. Getting enough oils from seed chia seeds, flax seeds, walnuts, etcetera, can cause a little more oil in the large intestines, which also lubricate and help move things through.
00:22:48
One question I get often is people are kind of surprised. They go, you know, first thing in the morning, I have kind of a hard poop. I’m a little constipated. It’s hard to pass. And then half an hour later, I get almost diarrhea and well, and that makes obviously perfect sense. That first bowel movement has been in your system for quite a while, right? Everybody’s different, but it’s going to be in there at least since the day before. So, the intestines have pulled out more water, more fluid from it so it’s more likely to be hard. Once that gets through, behind it is a fresher bit of stool that hasn’t had all the water taken out so that’s going to pass very easily.
00:23:33
Our goal, of course, is to make the first bowel movement pass as well as the second bowel movement. So anyway, if any of those isn’t working properly, you’re going to get constantly constipated. And the most common form of common form of treatment in the West is laxatives. There was a study done very recently, published just in February 22nd of this year in “neurology,” the medical journal, the American Academy of Neurology. And it says people who regularly use laxatives may have more than a 50% increased risk of developing dementia than those who do not use laxatives. So, I hope you’re listening right now.
00:24:25
We know that if you don’t poop often enough, you can have up to ten times the rate of bowel cancers and hormonal problems, etcetera. But if you have to use laxatives, you then have a 50% increased risk of developing dementia than people who do not use laxatives. Scary. They found that people who use only osmotic laxatives, that’s the type that attracts water into the colon to soften the stool and an even greater risk. Now, one of the problems with that and why I’m willing to use vitamin C and magnesium for that is that we’re looking at different realms of treatment principles, not treatment principles, but types.
00:25:11
And so, in the West, you’ll often have docusate sodium to do that or polyethylene glycol. Polyethylene glycol is what you find in antifreeze. Now, I’ve got to think that is not really very healthy for you. So, if you’re taking that, I could certainly see a potential increase in dementia. All right. So, at any rate, you want to get your bowel movements really, really well balanced. So regular laxative use changes the microbiome of the gut and that can affect nerve signaling from the gut to the brain. It can also increase the production of intestinal toxins that affect the brain. Lots of different mechanisms by which it can work. The important thing is it does increase dementia risk.
00:26:02
So, they found that regular use of over-the-counter laxatives was associated with a higher risk of risk of dementia. Again, people who use multiple laxative types or the osmotic laxatives and they took 502,000 plus people in the UK Biobank database, average age of 57, who did not have dementia at the start of this study. And a 3.6% reported regular use of over-the-counter laxatives and regular was defined as using a laxative most of the days of the week. During the month, over an average of ten years, 1.3% of those developed dementia. Of those who did not regularly use laxatives, only 0.4% developed dementia.
00:26:58
So that’s saying here, although they quoted 50% before that, three times more people are developing dementia if they use over-the-counter laxatives. And the more different types of blacks that were used, the greater the risk. 28% increased risk if there was one type, 90% increased risk. Do You hear that double the risk of dementia for people who were taking two or more types of laxatives. So, when you’re thinking about, Oh God, I’m a little constipated, I may not go to my doctor or my acupuncturist or whatever, you know, is it really worth it? Well, I don’t know what is it worth to you to reduce your dementia risk by almost half? I think it’s worth a lot.
00:27:49
In another study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, they determined that acupuncture and more specifically electro acupuncture, were passing a low intensity electric current between the points. Was a very safe and effective treatment for chronic, severe functional constipation. So, this wasn’t mild or moderate. This was severe constipation. They found that this was very effective. And then you’re not needing any other laxatives even from us, if we just use acupuncture and, you know, goes on to talk. They were received a certain number of sessions of acupuncture, and they tracked the number of bowel movements. But the bottom line was it was extremely, extremely effective.
00:28:39
All right. So, any questions about poo?
00:28:42
Kathryn: Yes.
00:28:45
John: It’s interesting. I had to go to the hospital a couple of years ago. I had something. I had to stay overnight and had a cyst that was drained, and I had seven different doctors and seven nurses and four doctors. Not one person uses the term bowel movement. And until last year, I would always say, are you having, you know, a bowel movement every day? Because I thought that was appropriate. 11 of those people, not one of them said that I asked if I had a bowel movement.
00:29:16
Um, nine of them said, ‘have you pooped?’ And two of them, the delightful Filipina nurses, said, ‘Have you had a poopy today?’ So, it’s I don’t use the term bowel movement much anymore because nobody else does. So anyway, did you have a poopy today, everybody?
00:29:33
Kathryn: Yes, it’s the most medical term. Um, what fiber do you recommend for constipation?
00:29:40
John: That’s a great question. Everybody’s a little different. Some people do better with soluble fiber where it dissolves. Some people do better with insoluble fiber. The bottom line is I like all fiber for constipation. There are fibers that I prefer a little bit more for blood sugar reduction, things like that. Those are the konjac-manon, the glucose-manon, etcetera. The nice thing about those is you can handle the bowel issues and some blood sugar issues at the same time, but really lots of vegetables, chia seeds, flax seeds. Flax is hugely used throughout South America and Central America, often black flax.
00:30:25
But I don’t think it has to be that. But they’ll take like a tablespoon of flax seeds, put it in boiling water and let it sit until it’s of a temperature you can drink, and it actually turns into a gelatinous mass. It looks like snot, but it has no flavor and drink it. And it’s amazing in terms of helping with bowel movements, but also relieving all sorts of intestinal problems. So, I love the seeds for that.
00:30:55
But any, you know, any vegetable pretty much and most fruit. Apples, fabulous apple pectin is very powerful for many, many different things, including helping with constipation. Kiwi is great also and what I use to stimulate peristalsis in people where the Qi is a little weak are just regular old prunes. Right? The old idea of prunes or prune juice. I also like apricots, so I’ll have them do two prunes, two apricots. The 99% of the time they start pooping normally. Okay, so those are fabulous. Some people use beets.
00:31:37
The advantage of using beets is you can track the color of your bowel movements and see how long your transit time is. There is dye that you can buy for that purpose that your doctor will do. But beets do the same thing. The red will show up in your stool so you can see how long it’s taking for material to pass through your GI system. If it’s passing through too quickly, you may not absorb nutrients well enough, and if it’s taking too long, then you could be re absorbing toxins.
00:32:07
Kathryn: What brand is the Buffered C?
John: Yeah, we use Orthomolecular and again, I don’t know why it’s better, but we find that it’s almost foolproof with our patients.
00:32:19
Yeah. I think Thorne has something similar.
00:32:22
They do. They do have something similar. I didn’t get quite as good a result that could be bias on my part. It could be that we didn’t have enough a large enough sample size, but I just know the Buffered C is works almost all the time.
00:32:37
Kathryn: When you boil the flax, do you use whole seeds or ground seeds?
00:32:41
John: You can use either. The boiling water. And again, remember, don’t drink it while it’s boiling. The boiling water will add, and you don’t boil the water. You take the boiling water and just pour it over it in a glass or cup and let it just sit. I’ve used whole seeds, mostly. I think that having them ground would be a little more effective, but I don’t. I just don’t whole.
00:33:08
Okay. I got some great questions from Erin about eye supplements and also about how some strange results from melatonin, which you can get very strange from results from melatonin. Melatonin may be the master antioxidant. It’s at least one of the top antioxidants for the brain. But you can get some paradoxical results where instead of causing you to sleep, etcetera. It can cause you to wake up. It can cause you to have wild, crazy dreams.
00:33:40
I don’t have time to go into that today. But I will go into it next week. And also, this person mentioned several different macular degeneration preventive supplements and wondered about them and wondered if there are any others. And the answer, Aaron, is yes, there are others, and they all work slightly differently. Yours are mostly Anthocyanins and there are some other ways to go about it, and I’ll talk about those next week.
00:34:16
Kathryn: Um, how about papaya slush seeds?
00:34:20
John: Slush seeds? I don’t know. I’ve never used it. My recollection and this is like from 50 years ago, is they’re a little bitter but made me making that up. So, I don’t know. I would recommend doing a little more study with that because I’m unaware.
00:34:36
Kathryn: Yeah. The prunes and apricots. Do you soak them or just eat as a dried fruit?
00:34:41
John: I eat them as a dried fruit, or I have my patients eat them. But you certainly could soak them. That’s fine.
00:34:46
Kathryn: It tastes good dry?
00:34:47
John: Yeah. Okay.
00:34:49
Uh, that’s it. So have been poo with happiness. Guess that’s the key. And poo a lot. The more the merrier. Up to three times a day. It gets much more than that. Then there’s probably an inflammatory issue. But 2 or 3 times a day is ideal. One is the minimum. You got to poop at least once a day and you can learn to do that without any assistance other than maybe some warm tea, etcetera. The other thing that’s one of the best bowel stimulators is a cup of coffee.
00:35:21
I mean, all my teenagers that drink coffee and I’m trying to train them, it’s like have them drink a cup of coffee, do a little bowel massage a little, you know, external abdominal massage, sit on the toilet, and it’s pretty much foolproof. They will start pooping regularly within a few days. All right. All right. So, anyway, thank you for tuning in. I want to just really thank you for sending in your questions and joining us. And stay tuned. We’re going to you know, over the next few weeks, we’ve got a bunch more stuff coming up.
00:35:53
I want to talk about our cardiology series that I think although it’s designed for practitioners, I think many of you have plenty of understanding that you could get value from it. Our book will be published. It’s in formatting right now, so it’ll be a couple more weeks. Yeah, probably end of April. And then we’re going to start doing some podcasts, going through that, and talking about different tests and think you might be interested in that.
Okay, so until next Thursday, be happy, be healthy.
REFERNCES:
Association Between Regular Laxative Use and Incident Dementia in UK Biobank Participants Zhirong Yang, Chang Wei, Xiaojuan Li, Jinqiu Yuan, Xuefeng Ga, Bingyu Li, Ziyi Zhao, Sengwee Toh, Xin Yu, Carol Brayne, Zuyao Yang, Feng Sha, Jinling Tang Neurology Feb 2023, 10.1212/WNL.0000000000207081; DOI: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000207081
Zhishun Liu, Shiyan Yan, Jiani Wu, et al. Acupuncture for Chronic Severe Functional Constipation: A Randomized Trial. Ann Intern Med.2016;165:761-769. [Epub 13 September 2016]. doi:10.7326/M15-3118
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.
