 Chinese medicine, like all ancient traditions, was intimately linked to nature and even potentially comes from nature. But one of the reasons for this is that all ancient people observed that, for example, there was a seasonal pattern to illness. Just like there's a seasonal pattern to crops, there is a seasonal correlation with illness. We have a flu season. We have that time in the fall where everybody gets those initial colds. And ancient people were wondering what is the link between the seasons and illness because there is a link. Now, in Chinese medicine, a lot of what we talk about is the relationships and the connections between things because it is much easier to see patterns and correlations when you look at things as they are connected, not how things as they're different. So in this video, I thought I would share a little bit about this idea of seasonal chi or the tendencies of certain seasons to produce certain illnesses or exacerbate certain conditions. Hey guys, Dr. Alex Hine, author of the health book, Master of the Day. So before we jump into this video, there are two very important links right below. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, you can reach my private practice below. There's also a free download for daily rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine. So first, let's start with a little refresher. The organs even thousands of years ago in Chinese medicine were correlated with certain seasons. And these seasons are to some degree, they reflect the holographic aspects of those organs, the physiological tendencies, but also to some degree, they reflect their inherent weaknesses or their susceptibilities as well. So for example, we say the liver is associated with the spring. The heart is associated with the summer, the lung is associated with the fall, the kidneys associated with the winter, and the spleen or the earth digestive organs are often associated either with the center or long summer. I've heard a couple of different variations, but the earth is often like the glue that holds the human together, right? The earth literally metaphorically is like our earth, it is the foundation of us living on it and everything else that lives on it. Now these seasons mirror the functions of certain organs. So again, this the season is not maybe literally correlated with the organ, right? I don't know if there's more kidney disease in winter than there is in summer, I'm not sure. There may be a correlation with heart attacks more in the summer because it's the fire organ in Chinese medicine. I don't know the clinical research on that, but what it does is it reflects a certain kind of function, okay? So when we say kidney and winter, these describe the holographic or multifaceted functions of the organs. So the kidney organ is one of those organs involved in storage. What we consider really your genetic potential for longevity or disease, that's considered the battery with a capital T and a capital B that stores your essential genetic material from your parents. That is your allotted kind of lifespan. But the storage aspect is literal metaphorical, right? So so many people have anxiety and insomnia and we conceptualize that as this kind of upward flaring. So if you've ever had too many cups of coffee in your bodies like this, you would not say you feel grounded or settled, but as a metaphor is not literal. It's not you are literally on the ground, right? We have these terms and these idioms and sayings in our culture that reflect functions in Chinese medicine. So the kidney is one of those organs involved in storage, not only literal storage, but also physiological storage. The opposite of that is anxiety or adrenal burnout where the person is just on edge all the time and they just cannot rein it in, right? There's too much of this buzzing activity, can't sleep, headaches, all these ascending symptoms and that's a pathological function of the kidney, it's pathology. So that's kind of an adrenal pathology, basically, from our perspective. Kidneys not only involved in storage, it's reflected in healthy adrenals. The person feels calm, they can sleep, they're not anxious, that's healthy, right? That's the body in a healthy winter mode, the kidneys natural tendency winter mode. But in burnout, that becomes pathological and what is supposed to descend as the winter calm, quiet, peaceful, cabin in front of the fire in the woods, no stimulation. So now these kidneys begin to experience or the adrenals begin to experience pathological flow which is the opposite. Healthy adrenals versus calm, rested, relaxed, pathological, crazy anxious. So that's the opposite of winter. So let's give a specific example now of how this actually correlates or what it means clinically, right? At the end of the day, this is about helping people heal and about clinical medicines, not about philosophy or theory or mysticism or spirituality, anything like that. It's about medicine first. So let's take the metal organs. Lung is associated as one of the metal organs, depending on which map you look, the lung is associated with the large intestine and on the other side, associated with the spleen pancreas. Okay, two different systems of looking at this. Let's just talk about asthma because it's a lifelong asthmatic growing up in New England and Connecticut and New York. The fall was always the time where my parents knew they had to watch me because my asthma symptoms would be really serious in the fall where it suddenly got cold and it suddenly got a little bit damper because as it started to rain, the leaves would fall and there would be a lot of more dampness and moisture, more of that damp earth kind of smell just around our house, right? And the coldness with that kind of dampness, the leaves fermenting was a big trigger of my asthma. So we knew as soon as it got cold and damp, I had to be really careful about, you know, whatever it was that was my asthma triggers. The lung and the large intestine in one system in Chinese medicine are associated with the metal and the fall. Now again, in one way, it describes a physiological function, right? Healthy metal function goes down descends. What is considered pathological lung function, pathological colon or large intestine function? Too many things going up or not going down, right? So for asthmatics, coughing, wheezing, this ascending is considered counterflow lung chi and for a large intestine that's not emptying the bowels, this is also kind of counterflow. So the two metal organs are going up instead of down where they're supposed to be healthy function of them is descending. But in the fall, for example, with asthmatics, it's a serious time of year where asthma attacks are more common very frequently. It's also a time of increased susceptibility to lung pathology. So I remember when I was doing my doctorate, it was the same two week period. It was like September 22nd to September 29th. And then that first week of October in Portland, Oregon, where as soon as it got cold and gloomy, the first cold snap, the leaves started to fall. And as soon as the temperature changed, 50% of the students got a cold. I mean, hundreds of people all coughing, sneezing, snorkeling, blowing their nose in class every single year. I mean, it was absolutely incredible. Four years in a row, the same two week window, everybody got sick. That was susceptible to getting that virus. And that's a perfect example of seasonality of there's a tendency of the atmosphere of the season to produce unique circumstances that can then generate or bring out illness only in people who are susceptible. So it's very useful to understand, because if this is a season you are susceptible or you have a tendency towards illness to be extra careful the few months before, the season before. And for us, for me, clinically, what that means is the patients that are the most susceptible, I try to treat them in the preceding season for three months with formulas so that we have regulated whatever that organ function that's predisposing them to getting sick is so that the next time they're going to be good when the spring comes. So this idea of seasonal Qi is very interesting and very useful. And I love how Chinese medicine always correlates organs with seasons with functions with holographic functions. I think it's something that's really powerful and very useful to know clinically if you want to stay healthy going forward. All right guys, that's all I have for today. I will catch you in the next videos over there.