Recurring or Persistent Urinary Tract Infections

Most people with a vagina have experienced a urinary tract infection at some point in their lives.  But some of us have had wayyyy more than our fair share, and fall into a very frustrating cycle of UTI followed by antibiotics (possibly followed by yeast infection) followed by UTI followed by antibiotics, etc., etc.  If a person’s trigger is sex, this become an even bigger quality of life issue.  Many, many women struggle with this, and all the wiping from front to back and urinating immediately after sex is not enough to prevent some of these chronic cases.  This is on my list of things that should be shouted from the rooftop about East Asian medicine:  Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture can put chronic UTIs into remission.  Please spread the word.

There are many ways that bladder infections can manifest.  In the same way that Western medicine chooses the appropriate antibiotic for the appropriate bacteria, we choose our formulas based on exactly what your particular body is doing.  Do you get your UTI at a particular time in your menstrual cycle?  Do you get strong burning pain and discomfort, or are you more the type to just go more frequently even though nothing comes out and have a bloated sensation at the pubic bone?  Or maybe you go straight to blood in the urine, which can look pretty scary but the herbal solution to this problem, like the others above, was described thousands of years ago and is effective.

Some women, after a spate of infections, will have all the sensations of UTI, yet their urine shows no bacteria.  This may be due to previous infections creating irritating scar tissue in the wall of the bladder, or due to biofilms that shelter the bacteria as it makes its life within little biofilm apartments, inside of you but separate.  People in this category usually receive the diagnosis of interstitial cystitis, which is considered a bladder pain syndrome.  In these cases, antibiotics are no longer appropriate or effective.  Fortunately, this does not matter for Chinese medicine.  There were no labs to culture your urine when our treatment principles were developed, so we are always treating “difficult urination”.  And we can treat difficult urination whether or not it is interstitial cystitis or an actual UTI.

Antibiotics are an incredible, life saving medicine, and will treat an acute UTI effectively and prevent you from dying a very ugly death due to a simple bladder infection traveling to your kidneys.  It is my personal experience that antibiotics are far superior in treating one-off, acute infections than our herbs.  But if you or someone you love fall into this other category of frequent, chronic, or resistant urinary tract infections, please get in touch.  There is so much we can do to return your body to full health.

Why Did My Acupuncture Treatment Make Me Cry?

You may just as easily be asking: make me laugh, make me feel antsy, make my limbs move involuntarily, make me burp, or make my abdominal muscles move in a comfortable, wave-like fashion?  OR, make me remember something unexpected from a long time ago, significant or insignificant?  These are all common responses to a treatment, and all are signs that the needles are working.

Everything that has ever happened to us is stored in our soma (body).  This is not a metaphor, but, as body-workers, Vipassana meditators, yoga teachers, somatic therapists and trauma therapists can tell you, quite literal.  Not only can muscle tissue and fascia contain memories, but even hormones and even gasses that you have become sequestered safely away.  When releasing large muscle groups, it is not uncommon for the room to smell like chemicals that the patient has been exposed to earlier in her lifetime.  When a patient comes in, their symptoms and life history suggest areas to work in, and when these areas are released, emotions, memories, and sensations can come to the surface.  The body’s memory is fascinating and precise.  If you have ever experienced a big shock, or lost an important person in your life, you may notice that your body remembers the event on its anniversary even when your conscious mind does not.  Some examples are a 9/11 first responder who experiences a severe chest cold every year around early to mid September.  (The lungs are associated with grief in East Asian Medicine.)  Or someone who was assaulted unexpectedly by a stranger, only to feel pain at the same time of year the following years in the same areas of her body where she hit the ground.  When someone has a seemingly unrelated symptom out of the blue, I make sure to ask, what happened in this month in other years of your life. If the symptom is related to a somatic memory, that question will prompt an answer.  

This is especially true with scar work.  Scars are a rich area to work in, as they invariably block the fascial planes and tissue beds that make up the meridians.  Over time this can cause an imbalance.  Sometimes when taking a life history I will notice that an injury to a channel is followed one or more years later with problems in the associated organ.  This is an example of how constricted tissue in one part of the body can affect another area.  I continue to be surprised by the responses elicited by scar work.  I have seen several instances where releasing scar tissue prompted the patient to have a pre-lingual memory.  That is a very, very early memory, yet the body knows.  (This is especially interesting, as scientists theorize that it is the syntax of language that allows us to form memories.  These clinical experiences, however, suggest that the body’s memory functions differently.)  I have had patients feel very specific phantom sensations; after working around a decades old C-section scar, one patient had to check her lower belly repeatedly because she kept feeling the same sensation of leaking fluid that had alerted her many, many years ago that some stitches had ruptured.  Of course, there was no leaking fluid, but this sensation persisted on and off for a week. 

And so it is with emotions.  Whether or not we are working on a visible scar, there are sections of our bodies that become stuck by strong emotion.  Acupuncture works to course the qi through all the riverbeds of the body.  As stuck areas begin to flow again, whatever was in the stagnant areas comes to the surface to be experienced and pass away.  The emotional release that happens on the table helps your body to work more completely, which means symptoms will resolve and you will feel lighter.  

If you suspect you have some stuck emotions or stuck tissues, book a session with me and we’ll do a complete life history to see how I can best go about unsticking your tissue planes.

Photo by Amanda Flavell