 How long is it going to take me to heal? You know, it's one of the most difficult questions to answer when I see my patients. And it's honestly one of the trickiest to answer because for some people after 20 years of illness, within a month, I have them pretty stable using Chinese herbs and formulas. And for other people after 20 years, the chances of them recovering or healing, healing may be not even an option. But maybe we can prevent them from backsliding or getting worse. But in this video, I thought I would take a moment to answer that question. How long does it really take to heal? Hey guys, Dr. Alex Hine, Doctor of Chinese Medicine and licensed acupuncturist. So before we jump into this video here today, two very important links right below the video. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, the contact info for my private practice and clinic is right below this video. So let's talk about what healing really looks like when we talk about a chronic illness. So when we talk about something like migraines or something like chronic digestive problems or even chronic menstrual irregularities, chronic anxiety, chronic depression, whatever it is, there's something that I think we need to talk about. And it's this idea that constitutional illness is not something that can ever fully, fully go away. So let's say for example, you're like me. And since you were a kid, you always had lifelong digestive problems. Or let's say migraines, because this is a perfect example, I see people who have such debilitating migraines that five days a week, they can barely go to work, right? They're taking high dose migraine medication. They're taking such high dose, etc, that they then stop that and they get rebound migraines because they've been abusing abusing that medication for so long. So let's say you're the migraine sufferer and five days a week, you have migraines debilitating. It occupies your whole life. Well, when you come to see me, and we're working on the underlying cause of why you're having migraines, what often happens is that let's say within a month, now the person is not getting them five days a week, but a couple days a week. And then within another three months, now the person is getting them maybe once a week or zero times a week, pretty damn good from five days a week, aka more days you have it than not to an average of about zero days a week. But you're still getting them on a monthly basis. Maybe you're getting them once every two weeks. Maybe you're getting them, you know, instead of 50% of the days of a month, now you're getting them 10% of the days of a month. So more than half the month, you're not feeling well. And now, you know, maybe before you had 50% of the days in the month, where you were having migraines to now 10% of the days of the month, you're having migraines. So that's a pretty damn good improvement from being half the days of your life, you are not there to 90% of the days of your life, you now are there. But realistically, what happens is as time goes on, the person goes from having migraines, let's say 20 days of the month to one to two days of the month. And then over the course of the year, maybe we have the first month of no migraines where they feel normal. My life's good. I used to have this every single day that I could remember, minus a day or two, to now zero days in a month. That to me is what functional healing really ends up looking like. But this person is always going to have a tendency towards migraines. That can always creep back in if there's a lot of stress or they begin not sleeping well, or they eat really poorly for a few months because they're really bogged down at work. You know, the tendency will always be there. They're always going to get irregular migraines. But the frequency is so infrequent now as to being non-existent. But it doesn't mean you're never going to have them ever again. And so I think it's important for people to know that constitutional healing, that's what that really looks like on a daily basis. That's honest to God what it actually looks like. Not that you have migraines every single day of the week or five out of seven days and now suddenly you don't ever and they'll never come back. It usually doesn't work like that because your body maintains that tendency towards an illness. And we just call that constitution. Now my mentor gave me a very useful piece of advice that he gives to his patients. When they come in asking how long to treat a chronic health problem, he says one month of formulas for every year that illness was chronic. So let's break this down. Let's say you were on PPIs or reflux meds for 10 years. That right there is 10 months of taking an herbal formula every single day, twice a day, three times a day. It's a long time. But for an illness you had for 10 years, you've had for a large percentage of your life. That's not a bad deal for healing, right? We're talking about healing, not about having to stay on the same medication and increasing the dosage every six months. If you've been having migraines and you've been having migraines for five years, well, that's about five months of formula. Or if you've been having insomnia and you've had insomnia for let's say the last 10 or 15 years or so, then that's right there a solid 10 months to 15 months. I saw it about a year, year and a half of taking a formula every single day to heal. Again, if that sounds like a lot to you, then just keep taking whatever you're taking for your symptoms. There's nothing wrong with that. But if your goal is healing, i.e. you want to be free of everything, then this is often a realistic estimate that I see for many people, especially when illness is really chronic and especially when medications have been used chronically to deal with the symptoms. So I think that's a useful benchmark to really have people be all in on the long term healing and not just expecting that because it wasn't fixed in three weeks. Meanwhile, you took Xanax for 20 years, that it's never going to work or something's not working. I think that's very unrealistic. It's the same as weight loss, right? If I did nothing to take care of my weight for 10 years and then expected it to be gone in a month, obviously every personal trainer in the world would say you're crazy. That's unrealistic. But with illness, it's really pretty similar sometimes. So I thought that benchmark was useful to keep people inspired and not give up, but it's a useful general benchmark for people to know for healing problems that have been going on for a really, really long time. All right, guys. So I thought that'd be useful. That's all I got for today. Two other related videos for you right there, and I'll catch you in the next video.