 When my patients come to me, they're often impressed by how I'm often to piece together these weird symptoms that don't really seem to make much sense. And they certainly don't when you go to a traditional doctor. But they often fit into a certain organ pattern in Chinese medicine. Because again, Chinese medicine is very concerned with the relationships between things and how the connections create illness or create wellness. Now in this video, I thought I would share three common and weird symptoms I hear from my patients. And they're often very interested when they hear where it's potentially coming from in Chinese medicine. Hey guys, Dr. Alex Hying, doctor of Chinese medicine and licensed acupuncturist. So before we jump into this video here today, two links right below this video that are key. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, there's a link right below this video to my private practice contact info. There's also a free guide for daily rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine. Weird symptom number one and where it likely comes from is tinnitus, i.e. ringing in the ears. So often when patients come in, they say they have high-pitched tinnitus or low-pitched tinnitus. And what's interesting is that tinnitus often has some interesting biomedical correlations as well. So most often what you hear in Chinese medicine is that more high-pitched tinnitus is related to the liver and more low-pitched tinnitus is related to the kidney. There's a biomedical precedent for this because there's a study. One study done on more than 69,000 women found that aspirin, Tylenol and NSAIDs substantially increased the risk of tinnitus and basically the greater the NSAID use, the greater the risk or the chance of tinnitus happen. So these kinds of medications that are often hard on the liver and sometimes the kidneys are correlated with tinnitus even biomedically and a huge sample size, 69,000 is pretty good. And in Chinese medicine, generally what I see is that more acute tinnitus like for example, tinnitus is common in post-COVID infection or post-viral infections, I've seen people with it. But more chronic tinnitus especially in Middle Asia when someone is currently in a very run-down state is usually considered a kidney sign. Now the kidneys don't always overlap with the adrenals but some of our kidney treatments are adrenal stabilizing treatments so to speak, the HPA axis. But tinnitus when it's more chronic, when the person's older or when they're more exhausted in the course of long illness is often more of a kidney problem actually. So the second weird symptom where it comes from likely is itchy ears. So I'll tell you, I see a lot of patients with digestive problems, right? Bloating, yeast problems, SIBO, candida and a very high percentage have a cluster of other symptoms. The other symptoms are sinus problems, stuffy noses, chronic sinus issues, frontal head pressure or headaches, brain fog. Ear issues and then general yeast issues as in bloating for women there may be vaginal discharge but the ear one is very interesting because the ear one, the ear symptoms are most often what people comment and they say, you know, this just sounds weird but I get this thing in my ears, itchy ears or full ears or crackling ears and very often this is I'm going to say a yeast symptom as someone who's not a big believer in this whole yeast thing but this idea of gut dysbiosis being a primary cause because the formulas that I use to treat their gut or their SIBO or the bloating or the discharge will often resolve the itching in the ears. So weird symptom but very common. If you look at just that symptom it makes no sense but if you look at the cluster what we call the pattern in Chinese medicine makes a lot of sense. The third weird symptom is waking up at 3 a.m. This is the most common time my patients say they wake up it is by far the number one time referenced in insomnia and in Chinese medicine one of the theories for this is that people who wake up at 3 a.m. are waking up at the transition of liver time. So there's an organ clock in Chinese medicine that each organ has two hours where it is I guess fulfilling its function or something about it is particularly active and as these organs the clock transitions to the next organ one of the ones that's most common is the 3 a.m. wake up because that is the liver time. So that is the time the liver is transitioning to the next organ. So what's also important is that we really stress sleeping certainly before midnight if you can but preferably before 11 because that's one of the best times to get that deep quality sleep where we say the liver stores the blood and you could just visualize this as a deeper resource that will help you feel more rested and have more energy throughout the day. I know even people who anecdotally talk about adrenal fatigue or HPA access dysregulation will say that even if you fall asleep at one and you sleep well you are still potentially draining yourself more because it's not as good quality sleep as it could be. That transition 11 to 1 and 1 to 3 1 to 3 being the liver time is very common for patients to wake up wide awake and then even just fall back asleep or sometimes can't fall back asleep. So one of the reasons this is that we call this liver cheese stagnation the liver being one of those organs that buries the brunt of stress. So if life is very stressful you don't have good ways to discharge it like exercise being my number one pick then often that liver cheese stagnation will create almost like a pressure in the body and that's one of the reasons why when that organ is going through its cycle it's waking you up there almost like you know ding the chicken's done but 3 a.m. most common time I see patients say that the time they wake up and very often it's correlated with reflux what we call liver cheese stagnation liver or gallbladder problems whether it's digestive reflux burping burning or it's something more bowel related alternating bowels but in general that can often be helped with formulas or with regular exercise if it is related to liver cheese stagnation. So those are three weird symptoms where they come from in my experience I thought that would be unique and interesting to share and again before you guys go check out that links below the video and I will catch you in the next video.