re: sleep apnea and headaches--and how should a practitioner treat the whole person

[Guest guest]

Bill,

 

I based that value judgement mostly on intuition but also on experience .

Let's read the case again:

 

 

> I am presently treating a thin woman with sleep apnea, not the primary

> reason she came for tx. No spleen damp, but ki & liver yin def. She

> wakes up every morning with a headache. Age 50. Meditates and does

> yoga every day. She will be doing the sleep study next week. I, too,

> usually associate this symptom with overweight people.

 

Here's a 50 year old woman who I would suspect lives in an urban environment,

probably a successful professional, I would suspect highly organized, abhors

Western chemical medical solutions and as such seeks out Chinese medicine not as

a last resort, but as a first choice. She is driven not only to succeed

professionally and maintain her lifestyle, but also do everything in her power

to maintain her mental, emotional, spiritual and physical health as well. Yet

despite all of her intelligent, proactive empowerment: meditation, yoga, and

probably excellent body tone (she was thin, right?), something is just not

working, she is kd and lv yin vacuitous (as most professional women that I have

seen in their 40s and older are), and she suffers from morning headaches, as

well as sleep apnea.

 

That's my intuitive read. Maybe I'm way off base. But there is yet a more

important issue here: We do not treat just symptoms nor diseases (though our

medicine resolves them), we do not treat just patterns based upon a patient's

differential diagnosis (though we use the patient's differential diagnosis to

guide the direction that our therapy takes), rather we treat people, whole

people not just a snapshot of a person in a test tube, embodying every possible

influence and stimulus in their lives. I personally believe that many

practitioners are not successful because they just don't get that critical

point. We need to explore the patient's employment, their important

relationships present and even past, their emotional history and current

emotional state, their spiritual needs and habits, their diet (and not just what

they eat, but also how and when they eat), and if there is any dysfunction

behavior, which should include, IMHO, whether they thrive on 1.

multitasking (though they may be good at it, I feel that this puts a burden on

the sympathetic nervous system leading to illness), 2. compartmentalizing

(performing as a different person depending on the " role " that an aspect of

their life dictates. I feel this creates tremendous insecurity. The talmud

teaches that " any scholar whose inside is not identical to their outside is not

a scholar " . This is, of course, in contradistinction with what I remember being

said about either Socrates, Plato or Aristotle, I don't recall which, in which

they wrote extensively about high morals, but lived a life of depravity) or 3.

anesthesizing (people use food, alcohol, caffeine, tobacco, drugs, prescription

meds, sex, gambling, adreneline, music, and even " fun " to kill pain, because

their lives make them so unhappy, and they so desperately need to feel good).

 

When we treat the whole person, we promote the process that puts them in

balance, and person in balance feels good and doesn't need to use anything else

to artificially or temporarily help them escape.

 

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Yehuda

 

Bill Schoenbart <plantmed2 wrote:

I don't understand how daily meditation and yoga can be interpreted as

signs

of " over-thinking " . Unless there is an obsessive component, the exact

opposite is likely to be true. Both practices encourage calming the mind.

 

- Bill

.............................................

Bill Schoenbart, L.Ac.

P.O. Box 8099

Santa Cruz, CA 95061

 

office phone: 831-335-3165

email: plantmed

.............................................

 

>>>>Intuitively, when I hear a woman who meditates and does yoga every day,

I sense over-thinking which damages the spleen qi, and this process just

continues to manifest during sleep with the clenching. >>>>>