 If you've ever felt lost because you have so many symptoms that you're trying to fix that are varying all the time and you aren't quite sure where they're coming from, I think this video is going to help you quite a lot because it is some of the most essential healing advice I had received when I was the sick patient and it is now something that I transmit to some of my own patients. Hey guys, Dr. Alex Hine, doctor of Chinese medicine and licensed acupuncturist. So before we jump into this video, there are two very important links right below. If you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually throughout California via telemedicine, there's a link right below to contact my private practice. The second link is a free download, which has four daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine, and that is right below this video as well. Now, one of my biggest pieces of advice and a piece of advice given to me by my mentor, Dr. Heiner Fruhoff, that helped me a lot, was to not ever chase individual symptoms because if you chase individual symptoms, you will be running on a wild goose chase your entire life, not fully understanding where they come from and what is the root or the origin. Now, a perfect example that we see today a lot is brain fog, right? Does my brain feel foggy because I didn't sleep enough, I have a dietary allergy, I have a proper headache because of head and neck tension, from drinking coffee and I also have a stuffy nose, I mean, there can be 10, 12, 15 causes of brain fog. And if you end up chasing that one symptom, what you look like after a week or two or three or four weeks of tracking it is very confused because what you're going to see is that some days you eat and you have brain fog and other days you eat a doughnut and you don't have brain fog. It's not dietary, maybe it is. Some days you sleep six hours, no brain fog. Other days you sleep eight and you have brain fog. Is it sleep? Is it not sleep? You know, sometimes you drink coffee, you get a stuffy nose. Sometimes you drink coffee, nothing, you feel good. So is it coffee? So if you chase these individual symptoms without understanding the symptom picture, you will become very, very lost and cannot see the forest for the trees. And that I think is one of the uniquely genius aspects of Chinese medicine where if you look at the pattern, we call it pattern differentiation, diagnosis by pattern differentiation. So we take brain fog and now we know in Chinese medicine brain fog falls into a few but primarily one very common pattern. So let's throw in some other symptoms you may be having. What if you have brain fog but you also have acid reflux, you feel a little hot, you get some burning in your epigastric area and you have dry stools. Now what if you have brain fog but you have low appetite and you get a lot of bloating and you have food sensitivity and you have softer and wetter stools, right? Those are two patterns brain fog commonly occurs in, probably the two most common. And they are treated somewhat similarly but somewhat differently. And the difference is the pattern differentiation that helps us decipher how we treat it. So what's very important is to track your symptom. Let's just call it your pattern because it's more useful because what's essential is understanding that when you may break down under stress, you may not just see one symptom come back. You may see brain fog, heavy fatigue, some insomnia or heart palpitations or bowel changes, appetite changes, bloating, increased food sensitivity, stuffy noses, sinus pressure, right? You may see all of that. And if you know the pattern, if you treat the root of the pattern, you can see half a dozen symptoms improve or go away altogether. So let's say we have the most common brain fog pattern I see, at least recently, is that person has brain fog. They are feeling bloated with a variable appetite. They're either constipated or have looser stools. They have anxiety, sometimes insomnia and the person's a little pale, especially their face. Now that is the tie in constitutional type, the spleen and the lung. And these people often have respiratory problems or allergies or asthma and may often have digestive problems as the through line of their life, especially when they get run down. That is the area that breaks down. Now that's important because when we give a formula in Chinese medicine, all of those symptoms often improve, not just one because the tie in those organ dysfunctions, let's just call it digestion for ease sake. That is the root of all of those. So brain fog fatigue and anxiety can all improve or go away with the same formula. And that's very, very important because otherwise brain fog could be due to dozens of things. So what do I do? Do I just remove wheat? Do I stop coffee? Do I track my sleep? Do I take one herb? In Chinese medicine, we try to get away from that kind of thinking. That's the linear one-to-one thinking and that is a wild goose chase. Now one final piece of advice here on understanding this pattern differentiation is understanding that when you get stressed again, any or all of those symptoms can come back, right? When you stop sleeping well because there's some stress going on in life or you're in a phase of life where you're not eating well, you're not eating consciously or you're not exercising whatever it is, that pattern, when it breaks down, you can experience one or any of those symptoms or all of those symptoms. And what's very important is that you write down and understand what your symptom pattern is, not just individual symptoms, but the pattern because then you know when your body has reached that inflection point where it has reached the stress threshold where now it is expressing those symptoms again, you don't have to go on the wild goose chase to understand why I have brain fog, fatigue, anxiety, palpitations, and zombie again. You just go back and you treat the core of the pattern. So from my perspective, we treat it verbally with formulas, and that's often how I treat myself when my pattern crops up again due to problems in life. But for you, maybe you understand that your pattern really is primarily digestive, not emotional, not sleep, nothing else, primarily digestive. So for you, you know on that index card, these is this is my pattern when I break down, I get these five symptoms, most likely, and you know that the one thing that will bring it all back into harmony is, you know, the specific carbohydrate diet, the whole 30, whatever it is, that is your one thing for someone else. It may be completely different. It may be just sleep. It may be just exercise. So tracking your symptom picture is super essential because then you can understand that these symptoms coming back, I don't have to worry. I don't have to stress. This is just my pattern when I've pushed my body too far in one direction. And even though there are five symptoms happening every day, I don't have to stress because I know that's just the pattern. And when I go back towards the middle with whatever therapy or modality that all of these will improve or go back away. So I hope that gives you some peace and some solace that knowing that you don't have to chase this craziness of the brain fog and the acid reflux and that anxiety and whatever the symptom may be, but understanding that the pattern differentiation is very essential and very unique to Chinese medicine actually. And this is I think high level medicine because you can give one thing that fixes five. So that's the definition of killing two birds, five birds with one stone. And I think that is the sign of mastery, right? Being able to do more with less track the pattern even better if you write down the pattern. I did this about 10 years ago in my own healing journey and I track it to this day because I know exactly when I'm at 10% off balance, what 50% looks like and what symptoms I might experience because I wrote them all down. And it's very, very useful for me because I have that for the rest of my life. All right, guys, that's all I have for today. Again, right below this video, I have the link if you'd like to become a patient of mine in Los Angeles or virtually in California via telemedicine. I have the links from our private practice right below this video. There's also a free download for daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine. So check it out below this video and I have two other related videos for you here.