 My experience with the medical institution we can call it has been pretty interesting. So as a kid I had always suffered from digestive problems. I was never a seriously ill kid. I had asthma that was severe that I still have to this day since birth and I'd been hospitalized for asthma, but I was not a sickly kid. I didn't miss a lot of school. I didn't have very many health problems, but as I got older in my early 20s I realized hey as a kid you know pooping once every five to seven days is really not normal and it's really not healthy. But as a kid you don't really think about that because that's just how your body is. You don't know that there's another way that's probably better and healthier. Now the caveat was that I was always severely underweight. I did not have a normal BMI above 17 in the normal category until I was almost 23 or 24. So by comparison when I was 18 years old or 17 I weighed my heaviest weight ever which was 115 pounds and even grown as an adult at 23 I was six foot two and weighed 135 pounds. So I was female supermodel skinny and I wasn't anorexic. I didn't have an eating disorder. I just ate normally. I just ate naturally when I was hungry and I was just rail thin. Now my mom has always been very rail thin and she's always eaten right and exercised every day for decades and decades, but I was severely underweight, could never put on weight and I had all these digestive problems. Now the first time I went to see a doctor for them was in my early 20s, my last year of my undergraduate at Clemson and I noticed that I was starting to have abdominal bloating and kind of some pressure in my abdomen and almost in my groin and I realized that you know if I had a big sandwich like I went to Subway at the time and I had like a foot long and had tons of bread and I wouldn't go to the bathroom for like three or four days consistently. I think before that it was a little bit more than once every five days as I became an adult but it was still not even comfortable and regular. I think once every three days was my most common frequency and I started seeing doctors. So the first person I saw was my general practitioner really good guy. I liked him a lot, very genuine and he asked me a couple questions about my bowels and he referred me to this dietitian he liked. So I saw the dietitian and her first piece of advice was to add more fiber. So I already ate healthy and she was like you know you need to eat more you're a little thin and I was like yeah well no kidding. I mean I'm not withholding food. I'm not avoiding food. I don't have an issue with food. I just eat when I'm hungry. This is just how I am. Now what I later learned with Chinese medicine is that of course if you don't poop for five days why are you going to have a big appetite when there's that much inside of you? Pretty obvious. Now the dietitian first recommended more fiber. This is a very common modern medical approach, dietitian nutritionist approach. So despite eating healthy every day and even being close to vegetarian at that time I tried it for like six months there was no improvement and in fact adding literally brand fiber to my oatmeal in the morning gave me such bad bloating and such bad pain. I had pain for the first time in my life that I couldn't even sleep some nights. So the irony was that you know we thought that brand and fiber would increase the bowel movements but later I started looking at research that suggested in certain people with compromised digestion it only makes it worse because it doesn't actually increase the transit time of a bowel movement but increases the pressure. So I had all this pain no results from the nutritionist. I really liked her but nothing. She refers me to the GI specialist. Now the GI specialist was the only doctor I've ever had that I did not like. I'm a very big believer in conventional medicine. It works. There's no sense I mean it didn't work for me for this but in general it works in the way that it serves its role in society. Now I saw a GI specialist and he palpated my abdomen for about 10 seconds and he asked if I had any other issues and I said asthma since childhood and it kind of piqued his interest. He said huh that's interesting and he wrote it down. So something about the link between asthma and digestive problems was interesting to him. Now he recommended a colonoscopy. At the ripe old age of 22 his very first recommendation was go get a colonoscopy. So I signed up for the colonoscopy and a day later realized just how stupid that was where I don't I'm not bleeding I don't have severe pain after I stopped the nutritionist the dietitian advice. I don't have any serious issues besides lack of bowel movements and lack of appetite. So I canceled the colonoscopy and the GI specialist said you know sounds like IBS so that was my last diagnosis and the last time I ever went to the modern medical system for treating my problem. Now years later I had read most of the modern medical biomedical textbooks for digestive disorders. The Yamada or Yamashita textbook on gastroenterology the merc manual and all these things and it was ironic that almost none of them mentioned diet. It was a little bit peculiar to me so some years later elapsed and sometime passed and I became an entrepreneur. I'd been a personal trainer. I took my business online because I love to travel and the stress of running a business and having a day job at the same time made these issues a lot worse and I started having other sleep issues and things that were going on. So around this time I met a guy in a cafe and he was dealing with a very severe almost life threatening illness and he said you know you should check out this dude he does Chinese medicine and it's funny because I lived in China for over a year and yet I never thought about studying Chinese medicine. I never even thought that it would be a path I would go down and so I saw this guy and the very first session this acupunctureist said to me you know it's not surprising that you have asthma and you have these digestive disorders because the lung and the large intestine share the same channel pair in Chinese medicine. So they are literally a channel pair which means they can have shared pathology and they have shared functions on some levels. They both deal with descending. Now that was the first time anyone ever said these two things you have you've had since birth there's a reason for them. So that was a huge sense of relief for me to get an explanation for once in my damn life. The whole medical system had never even given me an explanation. So now my interest is peaked and he said you know what this is what you need to do and this is why you have these other problems and he completely nailed it. He gave me an explanation. He told me why. He said what we were going to do as far as the treatment approach goes and then he gave me an herbal formula and the very first formula he gave me I had an almost daily bowel movement for 29 days the first time in my life in 26 years that I had ever almost had a daily bowel movement and obviously I felt amazing. Now that was really you know that little thread of destiny that brought me to Chinese medicine. That was just a small piece but for me it is not like I philosophically agree with Chinese medicine or I like the idea of Chinese medicine or it's spiritual and deals with spirit. I'm in this field because it works clinically and in fact many of the patients that we see don't even get results from conventional medicine. So it's ironic that alternative medicine is perceived as something that's ruined doesn't get results but in my experience it's the exact opposite. It's often clinically more effective than modern biomedical practice and that is a little bit about my story about how I found my way to Chinese medicine and since then I've grown to understand how it not only is a philosophy of healing that works clinically for very very very sick people all the way from just bloating to cancer but it's also a philosophy that can help you live a better life and that has been proven over millennia. So I hope that helps there's a little bit about my story about how I was led to this medicine and why I'm here and why I believe that it should be first and foremost viewed as a clinically effective medicine for making serious problems go away and I hope that if you've been pondering whether or not to try it first you should and let you know the results are right there the proof is in the pudding. I hope that video helped give you a little bit of insight into who I am and my experience with dealing with illness over decades and how Chinese medicine helped me a lot. Now the best way to stay in touch is to come grab that free guide five daily rituals to add 10 years to your life with traditional or classical Chinese medicine. You can download that on my website right there for free or in the description box there below.