Hi, welcome back to the Chinese medicine podcast. I'm Mary Hopkinson Chinese medicine practitioner and today on the channel. We're going to be talking about spleen energy deficiency. What is it? How can we help it? And what can we do to understand? Like why would understanding it even helped us to be able to treat those things the symptoms of it ourselves as patients rather than needing to go and see a practitioner what could a Chinese medicine like a herbalist or an acupuncturist actually do for you? What is the spleen energy deficiency? And how can we help you if you have that so it's a very very common Chinese medicine diagnosis and what happens when you get spleen Qi deficiency, the main symptoms people get is bloating problems with their bowels, like diarrhea or loose loose bowel movements on the loser side and the constipated side and they tend to get things to do with their digestive system or in a western medicine sensor cambree can be the Endocrinology kind of system as well. So things to do with hormones Regulation of your digestive system thats related to don't like your gut health your absorption of nutrients and things like that. So if we go back a little step because this is a true talk going to be a tutorial video. So it's a little bit more informational rather than like a bang bang bang. Here's the here's the I'll give you some things you can do to help Chinese medicine is all about understanding how our body interrelates with itself in a Chinese medicine. Framework, but also within the environment and it is a very different system of medicine to Western medicine. So if you're not familiar with the general basics of Chinese medicine and I'll pop a couple of links in the description below and you can go and check that out. So the first video I recommend you watch to so inform you about this either at the end of this or before this and I'll cover some of that stuff in this video is called why eat mostly cooked foods and that explains how the spleen and stomach works as a digestive system. So it's just another way of explaining it. So if you listen to this video on your life, I still don't really understand go watch that video and that kind of gives you a bit more information. Now, you might be listening to this on iTunes or Spotify or anchor or different platforms there that the podcast is broadcasting on now, so welcome if you're listening only if you're watching on YouTube Welcome as well. And so if you are listening to this podcast on the iTunes and things like that and you want to watch the podcast I put all of the episodes on to you. YouTube and you can watch on YouTube as well. So welcome to this episode. We're going to be talking about your digestion mainly and one of the very common diagnosis is of Chinese medicine in TCM or traditional Chinese medicine called spleen Qi deficiency. Now, what does it mean so firstly the chi of your body is the the energy or the functional aspect of your body? No sort of ad lib a little bit and explain a bit more about this broaden this topic out a bit now the style of Chinese medicine I do. It isn't tasty M. So this the the diagnosis of spline chain efficiency. We kind of think of that more as encompassing the Earth element of your body. So the Earth or the still still the same idea, but we just don't use that label of spleen Qi deficiency in classical Chinese medicine. So you might be watching this and you are a patient of classical Chinese medicine. Well, welcome as well and I'll try and Encompass these ideas into that whole system so you can kind of understand that as well, but I know a lot of patients get this diagnosis, And they don't know what it means and then I Googled it and that's why I'm making this video to kind of help you explain and help you understand and for me to explain that what that means. So your spleen in Chinese medicine belongs to the Earth element, which the Earth relates to spleen and stomach now, why is that important? Why bring that up Marie because it's a functional system looking at how our body functions in relationship to the environment and the Earth is related to your digestion for a very good reason because it is exactly like the Earth. It's like as in the dirt the Earth If you think of a pot plant that's growing but is needed for that plant to thrive. Let's say for that plant to grow and nourish and you can think of the pot plant example embodying all of the five elements in Chinese medicine. So the plant itself the growth of the plant is it would be would write because it is wood so plants are wood in Chinese medicine and then you need sunshine, which is fire. You need the you need the warmth of the sun wood fire earth is the actual Earth of dirt that is in the Pot plant and then you have the metal which is like the dryness of the environment and also the elimination of the environment. So metal is like lungs and large intestine. So the actual air that's in some in ayurvedic medicine. They think of metal is are the element and then you also have so the oxygen that sort of stuff and the the outside air environment and then you have water which is the water that you put on it now for that in order for that. Like to grow it kind of needs the homeostasis that needs the environmental support of all of those things. It can't have just one of those things if it gets too much of one of those things, it won't Thrive Italy it still might grow but it might not Thrive or it might not grow at all or it might start to die. And so that's kind of how we think about things in our body. So if you have a plant that is the earth of the plant needs water, but it doesn't like too much water. And so how do you get Rid of too much water. And now this is what we're thinking about in Chinese medicine. We think about spleen with the titles video. It's like spleen Qi deficiency. What does that mean? So what happens is the earth can't support the proper nourishment of the soil and either gets too waterlogged in either gets like bogged down with water. So there's too much water and not enough drainage and so that plant starts to rot in there and that's is very often the case when you have spleen Qi deficiency. It's like the spleen energy the Earth Energy. And so look energy is a is a mystical word and it's our money using it because you've probably been told that I'm trying this medicine and but I tend to think of energy as function. So the the functional aspect of that's plain the functional aspect of the earth is deficient. It's not working properly. So what should This Plane do we have to know that to know how would it get to fish? And what would that be? So your yourse please job is to transform and transport what that Is like the Earth like the actual dirt the pot plant when it's job is to transform the water. So actually to utilize the water goes into a pot plant in order for that tree to grow that plant to grow. It has to absorb the water so that the Earth's the the spleens job is to kind of help do that. So you drink water and then your body can metabolize that water either can take that water into it and utilize it for some purpose or it can excrete that water out. Out and this please job is kind of deciding that's discriminating. Do we need this or do we not need that in the digestive tract now, there's other elements that kind of helped out with this as well. But that's one way of thinking of it. And so it's transforming food and fluids. So the talk about the fluids and what about the food? Well, you get fluid from foods to and the different kinds of foods you eat. This is why diet makes a big difference in spleen energy disharmony because you you can sometimes cause it to happen by eating too many foods that are what we call. Anthony Foods, so too many waterlogging kind of foods foods that don't facilitate that free flow of that movement that's needed. And so therefore the pot plant might not have enough drainage now, I don't even have had a pot plant and you put too much water in it. Well the roots just rot. Right? So what if you've put like a lot of water in something or you've used I'm a little container at the bottom that keeps the water in there you've gone away on holidays and you come back and that would have stagnant and hasn't moved anywhere that has it's been very cold in your house it will you put too much water in. And there's been no way for it to drain away. And so that stagnant water has that's actually like dampness is kind of stagnant water. It's not able to move it's become thick and like probably got bacteria and stuff like that growing in it now in that in that pot plant and it's not helped. It's actually hindered it. So what is good, but not too much water. Like what is good if there's if there's if it's fresh water and what is good if it's been used but when it's not being used it kind of gets makes that plant kind of get bogged down well that transforming and transporting function. Working very well anymore. So how can the body digest the food and fluids properly black and that's why you get that main symptom of floating. So it's more in the whole like the whole abdomen rather than just in this part because in this part, it's mostly like your epigastric area is mostly related to your stomach which is still related to the Earth so it can be it could be that but if the if it's that area there right under your sort of right under your breast bone, that would be more the epigastric area and that's often a stomach disharmony. But it could also that that in a Chinese medicine sense this idea of spleen Qi deficiency gives you this sense of bloating. So you get this fullness. And now for the average person, it doesn't really like when you go to her boss, they're going to know like they might give you different hubs based on where that bloating is, but for understanding it from just a from a just a general perspective. It's not because make too much difference exactly where that bloating is, but if you have bloating it means there's an inability of your body to transform and transport that that fluids now, why is that happening that might A bigger bigger issue might be a bigger reason. So if we go back to the pot plant could be because there's no drainage system for the water. So the water comes in but there's not enough drainage for it or there's just too much water being put in that person. Just watering that plant like, you know, when you're little kids just love to water but that's not my nephew just loves the water plants is like one and a half years old and he'll just keep watering them. He doesn't know when to stop he just keeps watering the plants and those plants are going to die if they have too much water because it's no not that they can. Get too much water going into that one space. So the other way to get rid of the water would be one to get rid of the to drain it out. But secondly to get the sun on it. So if you water something a lot and there's no son you live in a damp environment a place where it's very gloomy or like I'm in Sunny old Perth, so we don't have that problem very much but mostly dryness. So we have to we have to have more water a lot more than you know, the average area I guess because the things dry out really quickly and why do they dry out because the sunset so in Herb sets or food stamps. You can you can either stop eating the foods that are causing the damp that would be good thing to do. You could reduce those Foods down or you could actually like include herbes in your diet or use acupuncture to kind of facilitate either the drainage of water or to dry things up like in a dryness are drying up warming set. So there's hopes that kind of warm the spleen warm the Earth and help to dry it up. Now the second main symptom that you get with think problems in the the Earth element or spleen Qi deficiency is diarrhea loose stools. That means anything basically from a properly formed stall right through to complete liquid, right? So that would be loose. Now the worst the more liquidy the bowels are the less formed they are so bowel movements should be properly formed which means like a sausage kind of shape like so in the Bristol stool chart their course soft sausages. It's a bit gross. Okay, let's talk about poops. But that is basically what it was when it wanted to talk about it. So so anything from like when it starts being less and less formed towards being looser and looser and then the other thing that happens is it gets more and more frequent. So your body your Earth element or your spleen loses the ability to hold the Yang to hold the functionality of your body in it. And so it comes out comes out more easily more quickly and this can happen when people get problems with digestion where they eat something and I have to run to the toilet straight away or they just like In an extreme sense, like this could be in illnesses like Crohn's disease or inflammatory bowel disease or something where like if you bow like so it again this is another kind of conundrum of Chinese medicine CEO Marie, but that's your bowel. That's not your spleen, right? Yes. You're right. It's not your point about your spleen is an inflamed like it was a minute. Let's say, oh you've got new Flames flying you must have that's why I've got diarrhea like well that doesn't make sense at all, Marie. You said diarrhea and that's not your spleen at all. Even you split doesn't do any of that stuff. F in Western medicine, so it's a functional system relating to these ideas and these elements. So that's why the Earth element is such a good example an analogy for it to think of that. So I think that's why Wes as westerners. We get really confused because we're thinking well the spleen why is Chinese medicine just giving it different function? Why can't Chinese medicine to say what it really does and so that it just it regulates the blood cells and things like that in our body. Well, it's I don't know. I don't know the answer to that but it is functional. And it is these understanding of what when you understand all of Chinese medicine, which I don't I'm still working it out. But the more you eat the more macular you kind of look macro macro macro alarm accurate, but more macro you kind of look at it the wider the more, you know, the more the microbe its kind of make sense and so all of Chinese medicine school pretty much the whole first year, and if not the second year. I was completely Infused I just went along for the ride and I was like, well, I really want to learn this and some of it made sense enough for me to keep learning it but a lot of it didn't make sense it just kind of and then one day it's kind of like, oh the penny dropped and I was like, yeah that actually makes sense and even like this like the last three years. I've been learning a different system of Chinese medicine and like their stuff that I learned in first year Chinese medicine that like I learned said again in a in a different way. I was like, oh actually now that makes sense and the whole time. I've been just not understanding exactly how it works. So that's part part of As medicine is a commitment to a lifetime study of it. So don't think you can get fully understood in the in a YouTube video. That's not the purpose of this but I do want to make people aware of that is a bit more that everyday people can understand about it. And I think the more you understand about how it works the more you're likely to be able to use it for yourself and then you get the benefits of it and if you don't understand it or it's dismissed or and sometimes it may be dismissed because people think well, that sounds like we worry that sounds like mystical and you think well this plane doesn't Do that in real life like well, it does in a Chinese medicine sets in a holistic encompassing way when we look at it as the Earth function. So it's not the spleen organ that's doing it. It's the functional spleen system. Let's think of it like that or the functional Earth system which encompasses the stomach as well. And in Chinese medicine the Earth's system encompasses a lot of hormonal regulatory functions like the done by I into kind system in digestion. Metabolism, so what we actually create out of the food that we eat the the nutrients that we eat and how we metabolize those into products our body users the the catalysts and things like that that we need to make those changes. That is an Earth element function. So making that stuff which is hence why I like there's that can be met like it's it's not just this place. It's often. It's not just the Earth. It's often the wood element that's got involved in this as well. But then you have like functional changes that can happen with people where they just can't digest things properly but they have food allergies or intolerances and stuff like that. And that may that may they may have started with a spleen Qi deficiency where they just have like bloated and a bit of loose diarrhea like maybe loose stools every so often and then the longer that goes on the less straight their functional Earth element has and so what happens is when they eat certain foods they get very severe. To the point where they say. Well I'm allergic to that. I can't eat that. I can no longer have that and this is how Chinese medicine kind of use things like gluten intolerance or celiac disease and things like that. You can have a really extreme form of an intolerance where you have like an allergy to it and your body cannot take that product in without having a massive reaction to it and you or you could have a small reaction that you have to something. So let's talk about that gluten intolerance where people don't have celiac disease so that That means they don't have like an actual allergy to gluten, but they actually just if they eat gluten or the products if they eat something where there's gluten in it, they they feel uncomfortable they feel bloated. And so if they stay away from gluten, they were like, well my Earth elements fine, I don't have those symptoms. I don't have any problems. Does that mean that that person has to stay off that food forever. Does that mean that their body will never recover from that and does that mean that we should be even eating that if that's giving you those those those issues so - medicine one thing that makes us different to some other natural therapies is that we think there is a chance that we can strengthen your spleen or your Earth element to the point where you could tolerate those things that once you couldn't tolerate so not talking about an allergy. I'm talking about intolerance. It doesn't mean that it's good for you to have that so it doesn't mean it's good for you to have tons and tons of bread or lots of things with gluten in it like cakes or stuff like that, but you may be able to have things Is that have gluten that I'm not as processed? So if you are interested in kind of understanding that there's a video that I've done about dampness. What is that - and that talks about processed foods like the impact of eating a lot of processed and how that induces a dampening effect on our diet, but there's things like let's say barley contains gluten, but it may be a less more easily tolerable type of gluten to your body. Then that's a process bread or muffin. You've got like lots of process you got sugar. You've got processed grains. You've got other things kind of added in it's got lots of layers of processing and some of that product includes gluten. So it's not just always about the actual thing. The one thing the one thing of gluten it may be about how you've consumed it. But how does this work out in the treatment sense or a Chinese herbalist or an acupuncturist? If they give you a diagnosis plenty deficiency. First thing they're going to want to do is to look at alleviating the main. Is that you have as well as strengthening your spleen or your digestive energy and that will in turn alleviate those symptoms. So if you have diarrhea and I have a bad case of they are losing a lot of liquids through the through frequent bowel movements, then if we don't stopped that that will eventually just make your body more and more depleted. So that's it. That's an important one. Sometimes eliminating the foods that are aggravating you for a Out of time whilst you're doing the treatment some practitioners recommend to do that because it's no point in taxing your body even further, but then you won't know whether the treatments working until you go to the cafe and have a muffin or have a cake and see what happens. Now, there's lots of foods that are available very readily and society that we shouldn't eat a lot of that. We just shouldn't consume tons and tons of those foods that doesn't mean that just because there are available we can get them like processed grains and processed meats and And things like that that have got a lot of sugar salt additives and then there's also the highly production and aspect of things that doesn't help the spleen or the Earth that kind of makes it work harder. And so that it's easy to kind of consume a lot of nutrients and that could also make people get overweight because they easily could consume a lot of calories in one kind of sitting of are beating those votes. So there's a couple of things there to kind of chew on or food for thought if you pardon the pun. So I hope that this has been useful and helpful to you just to understand how your body like how Chinese medicine views that the way that we get spleen energy deficiency and that aspect of the Earth element becoming damp or becoming overwhelmed with water or bogged down with water and for it not to be able to sort of separate the pure and impure So that's its main function that it wants to do is he wants to separate the pure and impure when the spleen and Geez deficient it means the function of separating a pure and impure is not working properly. And so the pure and impure can't be separated. That means you can't absorb what you need to absorb. And so then you would have issues with bloating or getting diarrhea, especially if it gets to a point where you get what we call split Yang deficiency where it's even worse than that, then you'll get like undigested food in the store. So you'll eat something and then bits of all kind of a passing through body doesn't even get a chance to kind of digest it just pains like well, so I'm so tired. Tired. I'm so busy. And that's the other symptom you get is tiredness like a lethargy your body feels really heavy your limbs can often feel heavy and lethargic and you feel tired. You don't feel better from exercise. You feel worse from exercise kind of tired. If it gets even worse and your Earth gets very very weak. You might feel so tired that you just have to lie down a lot and that's an even worse kind of like a Yang deficiency of the earth and you just can't like get the energy to do things and you just want to lie down a lot. Was it them you get with spline energy deficiency is you get a craving for sugar often? So it's kind of like your body wants a little bit of energy to help it digest the fruit. So especially if you get a craving for sugar after you've eaten a meal and you're like, oh I just need something sweet. That's a sign that your spleen energy struggling to digest the food you put in it. So a couple of things you could do for yourself to help is one eat your Foods more slowly and then you'll probably eat less food won't be overwhelmed with the amount of food. So if you're in a hurry and you Busy and you just coughs coughing that food down too quickly then that can also cause you to get overwhelms overworks your spleen. That's no good for you. So if you eat more slowly often, you'll enjoy the food more. So with carbohydrates a really good thing to do. This is in the healing with Whole Foods book by Paul Pitchford. He says eat your foot to your carbohydrates 30 times in each in your mouth so that the food combines with your saliva and that helps the process of digestion eating and doing things at the same time, really Access your body as well. So what that means is if you're mentally engaged with something. So either one your emotional which is the worst level of that mental engagement or you just busy with your mind like you're watching TV you really engage in that thing or you're having a very deep and meaningful conversation with someone eating at the dinner table is a is the best way to eat rather than watching TV and eating and you can have a little bit of a conversation you can have enjoyment over food and that's a good thing to do and food is A very social thing, you know with our weather in our culture, but it's not a good idea to get emotional while eating like if you're eating and you're getting upset having an argument what you're doing you're trying to do a business deal while you're eating those are things that affect our spleen energy now if you just did that once or twice in your life, it's not a big deal. But the issue is that the habits that we create so if that that becomes a habit, that's what you do all the time when you're sitting at your computer and your kind of eating your food, that's not a good thing to do. So take 5-10 minutes away from that. Soft and then that hopefully that will lead to a little bit more time. But if you get a half an hour lunch break it don't be on your phone watching scrolling through your Facebook and your socials whilst you're eating like Spencer time. Just going to go to the park, you know, enjoy nature and sit there and eat your food or eat with it with a friend where you know, reintroduce some social aspects into eating rather than being something where you're kind of stuck on your phone or your iPad watching TV and things like that. So that would be my advice. Two years to create some really good habits around eating so that you are nourishing your spleen and your Earth Energy and the other food that flavor that's good for helping you if you explain energy or your Earth energy is getting bogged up by a lot of water half the flavor that helps similar to the sun is like pungent Foods. So warm and pungent. So Ginger would be something like dried Ginger or fresh ginger. You can even use a use that a lot in your cooking. You don't want to have so much pungent that Kind of sweating that's a different thing. So if you're trying to sweat out a cold and you're having that much pungent that you kind of sweating but there's different kinds of like dryer pungent. So why not? One of those things is such one pepper like peppers a good one. So you put that social and peppers like a Chinese herb, but and it's used in a lot of Chinese dishes of pepper, but you could just use any old pepper that you buy like your fresh Cracked Pepper and put that onto your Foods. That's a good thing to use. So pepper Ginger and if you go to a Herb or so be able to give you a specific formula that's right for you to kind of work out. What does your Earth element need to the Herbst to kind of dry up the Earth with acupuncture kind of looking at facilitating the spleens function removing any blockages that might be there from a an acupuncture perspective so that it helps the free movement and then it kind of frees up that movement. So that's very good. If you've got like the issue what I said with the Earth being fulfilled with water and they can't drain away because there's a blockage that there's a kind of a Marco aspect but that's how acupuncture is really good beneficial to kind of work for that. So I hope this video has been useful and helpful to you and thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel. We're on the journey to reach a thousand subscribers this year. So, please click the Subscribe button that below share this video with your friends or family people that you know, that might be interested in.
Spleen Qi Xu - Spleen energy deficiency is a very common TCM diagnosis,  In this video I will help explain what it is from both a classical  Chinese medicine perspective of a weakness of the earth element and the  TCM concepts. This video covers aspects of healthy and unhealthy Spleen qi / function  and spleen dampness. what happens when he Earth gets overwhelmed with  water? Dampness or water logged earth energy. Common symptoms of Spleen energy deficiency (Spleen Qi Xu) can be  bloating, diarrhea, gas, tiredness, low appetite and food intolerance. Also some people find feeling anxiety and worried are common mental  health symptoms that happen when the spleen /earth element is weak, it  can't regulate the normal functions of thought. I welcome your questions and comments. let me know what areas of Chinese  medicine you would like to be explained  in an upcoming video. Watch this video (and others like it) on YOUTUBE... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AksAgKKSp2o Marie's practice details:   MARIE HOPKINSON, Registered Chinese Herbalist and Acupuncturist in  Australia (AHPRA)  Consultations for treatment (individual) please call my clinic office to  book in: 08 93289233 (Perth Natural Medical Clinic) or  go to : http://www.bespokemedicine.net/ Email hello@bespokemedicine.net  Facebook:  fb.me/bespokemedicine  ---   Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/marie-hopkinson/message 