How to Keep Your Immune System Strong according to Traditional Chinese Medicine

So I'll be honest here, working in the alternative medicine industry is both very fulfilling and extraordinarily frustrating. Because on one side I deal with very practical questions like, Dr. Hein, how can I improve my immune system going into cold and flu season, naturally. And on the other side, I deal with very, very far-fetched questions like, because I have this very difficult, hard-to-cure illness, is it past-life karma causing this? Well, I don't know. Maybe. I have no idea of how I would ever verify that or how I would know if that's what this is really coming from. But I find that day-to-day, when it comes to something like improving your immune system, we often lose sight of what is the simple, the essential, and the proven. And we get lost in this world of supplements and herbs and pills and tinctures. So in this video, I'm going to revisit what is the most fundamental concept in immunity in Chinese medicine so that you can use this in your own life. Hey, it's Dr. Alex Hein, Chinese medicine doctor, internal medicine specialist, and author of Master of the Day. So I've included two very important links below this video. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine, you can click the link below to see where my private practice is located, as well as how to reach me and to book an appointment there. I've also included a free guide, which is four daily habits you can use to add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. So those links are both available beneath this video below. So look, people chase supplements, they chase herbs, they chase the latest fad, they chase crazy algae from across the earth, special clays, special salts and minerals, all of these far-fetched things to work on their immunity during cold and flu season, and even more so now with COVID going around. But I think we often lose sight of what is the most essential and what is really the most important. So I want to introduce you to this concept that one of my mentors, a doctor, a mentor of mine, Brian McMahon, talked about on one of our clinic shifts seeing patients, because I think it's very, very, very important to know what really to focus on. So I was on this shift seeing a patient, and my mentor was saying that he was describing this term in Chinese medicine, these terms. And what he was describing was that what they are are really the depth of illness in a usually sequential pattern, but what they really represented was the base state of the patient's health or vitality. So, for example, for the average person, they get a cough, and in Chinese medicine, I mean, they get like a cold, upper respiratory thing, maybe it's the transition and fall. And if usually their reserves are pretty good, they just get a typical cough, they have cough, maybe sneezing, congestion. But every once in a while, there's someone who gets a cold, and it morphs into either they, let's say they start with influenza, the flu, and that goes into pneumonia and or potentially kills them. Obviously, the average person gets the flu, and they're fine. They have fever, and they have chills, and these represent different stages and different levels. But there are elderly people where pneumonia kills them, I mean, it's called an old person's best friend, or a flu that kills an elderly person. And these represent much lower base states of health or vitality. You know, for the average person, just being in good health will keep them at this upper level, 80% vitality, 80% wellness, they're going to have a very mild expression of a cold or a flu. But if they're at a lower level, they're going to have to need some support to make sure it doesn't go to a deeper, more serious pathological level. So what this represents is the base level of the patient or the person's health or wellness, which is closely tied to their immune system strength, because those are closely tied. Wellness to like a general state of wellness is closely tied to the general state of the immune system. So these levels can be one way to conceptualize and visualize that. And focusing on the main practices that bring it up to here, where the reserves are strong and not much extra is needed. So really this concept of the baseline level of vitality is the most essential concept for having a strong immune system. If you're sleeping five hours a night, but then you're pounding 30 supplements and vitamin C, and you're taking zinc, and you're taking every micro supplement, micro greens, spirulina, it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous to assume that you're going to optimize when you're already in such a suboptimal state that nature has provided you with to have peak immunity. It's given you what you need to have a strong, resilient immune system. So let's talk about this a little bit more. When you look at conventional care, my biggest beef with it is that conventional medicine generally has no philosophy of really what is wellness as well as what is disease. Because you end up speaking with your physician or you speak with a specialist, most often what they have in terms of solutions is they know how to get some degree of clinical or symptom relief. I'll be very vague and very general. They know for this condition, in this bucket, with this flow chart, you can use this medication, this intervention to get some clinical relief. And that's important. That's important that we have a system that's proven to work to some degree to get a clinical result. That's really important. But there's no fundamental philosophy because there's no fundamental way to assess a physician independently to be like, is this person in good health versus poor health? And what aspect of their health is out of balance? Besides if someone is very, very physically sick or they appear to be well. What is it? A blood test? A CBC? That's, I guess, a good benchmark, one of the positive benchmarks. But I see lots of patients whose blood work looks good and they don't feel very good. They don't feel well. And the thing I most admire and really deeply respect about Chinese medicine is that there's a very sophisticated way to assess the degree of health or illness, the state of vitality, the state of immunity that a person's in, without ever asking them about any symptoms, how often they get sick, how energized they feel. The traditional diagnostic methods in Chinese medicine can accurately tell. You can tell the patient how healthy they are without having them need to tell you about their symptoms or their past medical history. Now let's talk about some pragmatic steps. I was seeing this one woman who was a patient and this is a composite of many, many people where she was coming in because of low immunity. She got sick easily. She would catch every cold or upper respiratory infection that was going around in each season. And in general, she ate pretty healthy and she had a pretty healthy lifestyle, but just was always getting sick. So in Chinese medicine and in general medicine and conventional biomedicine, I mean, immune system was probably pretty weak, but why? This woman took her vitamin C and her zinc every day. She took her echinacea and her golden seal whenever she felt like she was getting sick. She exercised and did yoga and ate plants and stayed away from sugars, but she was still catching colds. There was nothing in her lifestyle that looked like it was related to what was causing her to get sick. So how do we interpret that? Was she lying? There's some deeply misdiagnosed or undiagnosed illness? No, it was not so complex. Through using Chinese formulas, what we did was to boost her immune system, even though I don't think of it like that, but to boost that base level of vitality in the body that allowed her the following year to not catch any upper respiratory infections or get sick even once. And she didn't change any habits. She stopped her vitamin C and her zinc and her spirulina and all her supplements. She stopped all of those things, but then did not end up getting sick anymore. So what we were doing was that little tune-up was trying to bring her base state of vitality from here just up to here, from depleted just to a nice, gentle, moderate baseline, at which point her body didn't need anything extra to fend off the invasions coming from the flu, from the cold, that first cold snap in the fall. They didn't bother her anymore, and she didn't need to add on anything else. Whereas for years, she'd always been going to the latest supplements and was always in the know about what supplement is trending this year. Her turmeric, her echinacea, her goji berries, Himalayan salt in the morning and water with some lemon. She was always aware of the latest fads. Natural fads, good for health fads, but nonetheless fads. But the missing piece was Hockham's razor. The simplest was bringing the base state of vitality back up to normal again. Now, the big concept here is that basically there's yang and yin, and there's activity and there's rest that humans engage in, just like most animals. But for most of us, we spend too much time in that active phase of our life, where as humans we're supposed to spend about 16 hours awake and active, eight hours resting. And so in terms of general practices, the big thing that helps us replenish our state of energy, replenish our reserves, is primarily the yin part of the day, whether that means more hours for sleep, more hours of sleep, or just in general, less active hours. It could be unstructured time, it could be play time, it could be rest time, it could be watching Netflix time, more general time in that yin state, which in Chinese medicine we think of as like winter, gathering, calm, like how you want to be in winter, cozied up, maybe reading a book, not doing that much. More of that time is a very, very useful and essential state for most people to begin rebuilding that state of that yuan qi, of building their reserves up again, because as you allow everything to calm down, then the stores can begin to replenish themselves again. But that by itself could be a month, could be years, depending on how hard you've been pushing, but that general idea of building more of that yin gathering, that winter time into your life, is really, really important for building immunity, and generally we would think of that as lowering cortisol, so lowering one of the key stress hormones. Less active you are, the less you're going to be firing off those stress hormones. Decreasing workouts, no more hot yoga two hours a day, drop the five cups of coffee, all these things of just less, condensed, move slower, it's a big essential piece to rebuilding that base state of fight you have within your body. So kind of a long-winded video, I apologize, but I hope this brings us back to this essential concept, focus on the big wins. You will not need those millions of other little pieces, those 50 supplements every cancer patient seems to be on. Focus on the big win, and nothing else will be needed, all right? Again, if you'd like to become a patient of mine, I have information below. You can also email me, drhein at alexhein.com, to schedule a patient visit or an online telemedicine visit, and I've also included below this video that free link for the four daily rituals that can help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine, all right? So check those out, and then before you go, I have some related videos here that can help.