Latest / Truth in Motion with Dr. Jocelyn / Treating the Root

Transcript

Treating the Root · Truth in Motion with Dr. Jocelyn

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Truth in Motion with Dr.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Jocelyn, where insight, clarity, and wisdom help you thrive.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: I am really glad you're here with me today.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: In our last episode, we got practical.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: We looked at how broadly Wisconsin law defines the practice of medicine, and how the word medicine has come to mean drugs.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: We talked about applied pharmacology, using drugs to change what's happening in your body.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: We got a first look at the many root causes of disease, and we talked about what to expect from a good doctor and how to be a proactive patient.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: Today we're going to talk about what it actually means to treat the root.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: We'll go a little deeper into functional medicine, and I'll tell you why I call traditional East Asian medicine the original functional medicine.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'll also take you inside the treatment room to show you how East Asian medicine gathers information and introduce you to muscle testing.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Let's start as always with why this matters.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you've lived this.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: You get a diagnosis, you get a prescription.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: The symptoms quiet down, and then a few months later, something else shows up.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Another diagnosis, another prescription.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Each problem treated on its own, as if they had nothing to do with each other.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: When we only treat what shows on the surface, the cause underneath keeps working, and it keeps finding new ways to show itself.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: Treating the root is how that cycle ends.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: So let's talk about what that really means.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: Picture a tree.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: The leaves are turning yellow.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: You could paint every leaf green, and for a while the tree would look fine.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: But if the problem is in the soil or the roots, those leaves will keep turning, and new ones will follow.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Symptoms are the leaves.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Treating the root means asking what's happening underneath.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: What's feeding this?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: What's draining it?
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: What has the body been trying to tell us?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: In episode two, I shared a line from the Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: The patient is the root.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: The practitioner is the branch.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: That same text uses this picture another way, too.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: It says that in treating disease, you must seek the root.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now, sometimes the branch has to come first.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: If you're in severe pain or in a crisis, you treat what's urgent.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: The tradition teaches that too.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: In an emergency, treat the branch.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: When things are calmer, treat the root.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Both matter.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is when we only ever treat the branch.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that's exactly the problem a newer movement in modern medicine set out to solve.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: That movement is called functional medicine.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: The Institute for Functional Medicine was founded in 1991 by Dr.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: Jeffrey Bland and his wife Susan.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Their definition is simple.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: Functional medicine is a systems biology-based approach that focuses on identifying and addressing the root cause of disease.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: Symptoms biology means the body isn't treated as a collection of separate parts.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: Your gut, your hormones, your immune system, your brain, they're all talking to each other.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: Functional medicine also recognizes two things that sound simple but change everything.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: One diagnosis can have many different causes.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: And one cause, inflammation, for example, can show up as many different diagnoses, even something like depression.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: So what does it look like in practice?
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: Longer visits, a detailed timeline of your life and health, a lot of lab testing, and treatment built around nutrition, lifestyle, supplements, and when needed, medications.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: Two of their tools show how they think.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: The first is a timeline.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: It maps your whole life, your birth, childhood illnesses, injuries, losses, moves, stressful seasons, so you can see what came before your symptoms started.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: Often the story makes the root obvious.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: The second is the matrix.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's a map of how your body's systems connect.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Digestion, immunity, energy, detoxification, circulation, hormones and nerves, and structure.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: And at the center are the things you live with every day: sleep, movement, nutrition, stress, and relationships.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: The point is that you can't understand one system without the others.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: Today you'll find functional medicine practiced by medical doctors, osteopaths, naturopaths, chiropractors, nurse practitioners, and others.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it's grown quickly because people are hungry for someone to ask why.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: But here's the thing: asking why isn't new.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: So far on this podcast, I've mostly said Chinese medicine.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: The broader name is traditional East Asian medicine, because this tradition grew and was refined across China, Korea, Japan, and beyond.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I call it the original functional medicine.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Think about the name.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: Functional medicine is about function, how things are working, not just what they look like.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's how East Asian medicine has always seen the body, not as parts on an anatomy chart, but as relationships.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: What's flowing, what's stuck, what's too much, what's not enough, and how it all affects everything else.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: It was a systems approach 2,000 years before anyone used the phrase systems biology.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it has something no modern method can claim.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: Time.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: Generations of practitioners observed, recorded, and refined what actually helped people.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: Across millions of patients in real lives over centuries, what didn't work was set aside.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: What worked was passed down.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: It also never separated the body from the rest of life.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Your emotions, your diet, your sleep, your work, the seasons, the place you live, all of it was always part of the picture.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: So how does East Asian medicine actually find the root?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: Let me take you inside the treatment room.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: It starts with questions, a lot of them.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's a classic teaching called the Ten Questions, and it covers far more than the reason you came in.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: Do you tend to run a little hot or cold?
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Do you sweat and when?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you have pain?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: How are your bowels and your urination?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: How is your appetite and your thirst?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: How do you sleep?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: How are your ears and your hearing?
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: What illnesses have you had before?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: And for women, what is your cycle like?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: That can feel like a lot when you came in for a sore shoulder.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: But every answer is a clue.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: Together they show how your whole system is working.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Let me give you an example.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: A woman comes in with headaches.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's all she wants to talk about.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: But as we go through the questions, more comes out.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: She wakes up around three every morning and can't get back to sleep.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: She's bloated after meals, her hands and feet are always cold.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: Her headaches are worse the week before her period.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so is her temper.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: And she's been under a lot of stress at work.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: On their own, those sound like six separate problems.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: Together, they form one picture, a system under strain where stress, sleep, digestion, circulation, and hormones are all tangled up.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: If I only treated the headache, I'd miss the root.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: When we treat the whole picture, the headaches usually ease along with everything else.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Then we look at your tongue.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: The tongue is like a window inside of the body.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: Its color, its shape, its coating, how moist or dry it is, all of it tells a story.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it changes as you heal.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: So it's one way we track progress.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Then we feel the pulse, not just to count the beats.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: On each wrist, the practitioner feels three positions at three different depths.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: Is it strong or weak?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: Fast or slow?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: Smooth or tight like a wire?
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: A trained hand can feel a great deal there.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: Then there's touch beyond the wrist.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: We call it palpation.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: As I work, my hands are gathering information.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: Is this area tight or soft, warm or cool?
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: Does it feel full or empty?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: Is it tender when I press?
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: Every tight spot, every tender point is information.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a wonderful old name for the tender spots you find simply by pressing, and that's called ashi points.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: It roughly means ah, yes, there it is, because that's what people say when you find one.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: Some traditions, especially in Japan, pay special attention to the abdomen.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: A trained practitioner can learn a great deal just from how the belly feels under their hands.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: None of this needs a lab, just attention, training, and time.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: There's one more tool I want to introduce because I use it in my practice.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's called applied kinesiology or muscle testing.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: It was developed in 1964 by George Goodhart, a chiropractor in Detroit.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: He drew on reflux points described by an osteopath named Frank Chapman.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: And interestingly, he later brought the acupuncture meridians into his system.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: Here's how it works.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: You hold a muscle steady, usually your arm, while I apply gentle pressure.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: When something is stressing your system, the muscle briefly loses strength.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's another way of listening to the body and letting it point toward what needs attention.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: One system that builds on muscle testing is called nutrition response testing.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: It was developed in the 1990s by Freddie Eulin, a chiropractor and nutritionist.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: It uses reflex points, specific spots on the body that each relate to an organ, a gland, or a function.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: The practitioner lightly touches a reflex point while testing your arm.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: If the arm weakens, that area is under stress.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Then nutrients and whole food supplements are tested against that reflex to see which ones your body responds to.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: And at each visit, the same reflexes are checked again, so you can both see what's changing.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: In my practice, I use muscle testing to help sort things out.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: Which foods might be stressing your system, which supplements or herbal formulas fit you best, whether an emotional stressor is part of the picture, and what to address first, because the body often has its own order of priorities.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: For you, it's simple.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: You stay fully clothed, it's gentle, and it takes just moments.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: Many people feel the difference in their own arm and are surprised by it.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I never use it on its own.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's one more voice in the conversation, alongside the questions, the tongue, the pulse, and what my hands find.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: So if both functional medicine and East Asian medicine ask why, how are they different?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: Here's where they meet.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: Both look for the root cause.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: Both treat the person, not just the diagnosis.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: Both take diet, lifestyle, sleep, and stress seriously.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Both see each person as unique.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: Two people with the same diagnosis may need very different care, and both care about prevention.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: Here's where they part.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: Functional medicine speaks the language of biochemistry.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: It looks for the root in lab results, hormones, nutrients, gut markers, and genes.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: East Asian medicine speaks the language of nature and relationship.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: It reads the root directly from the person, through questions, the tongue, the pulse, and touch.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: The way we just talked about.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: And its tools work with the body's own ability to restore balance.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Needles, herbs, food, movement, rest.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: One isn't right and the other wrong.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Functional medicine can show what's happening in the blood.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: East Asian medicine can often see the pattern before it ever shows up on a lab test.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: Used together, they're powerful.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: Now compare that to how Western medicine is usually practiced today.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's organized around diseases, not people.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: Each body system has its own specialist, and those specialists don't always talk to each other.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: Visits are short, and the main tool, as we talked about last time, is applied pharmacology.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: Let me be clear again.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: When you're in an emergency, Western medicine shines.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: If you break your leg or have a heart attack, that's where you go.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: But for the slow chronic problems that so many people live with, asking why matters.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where these two approaches have so much to offer.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: So let's bring it all together.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: Symptoms are the leaves.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: Treating the root means asking what's happening underneath.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: And the old teaching still holds: in treating disease, seek the root.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: Functional medicine is a modern systems-based approach that looks for root causes, mostly through lab testing and biochemistry.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: Traditional East Asian medicine is the original functional medicine.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: It has been asking why for 2,000 years, reading the root directly from the person, and refining its methods across generations.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: It finds the root through the 10 questions, the tongue, the pulse, and palpation, including reflex points.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: And muscle testing offers one more way of listening to the body.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: They share a lot.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: They speak different languages, and both offers something that most of today's Western practice, built around disease and drugs, often leaves out.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: And here's what I want you to sit with until next time.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you can see the root, you don't have to wait for the tree to fall.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: Next time, we'll talk about exactly that healing and prevention.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because these therapies aren't just for when you're sick, they're for keeping you well.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'll see you there.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Keep the conversation going.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Find your next steps in notes from a fellow traveler, my blog.