Why Chronic Leakage of Breast Milk is Debilitating

I remember my midwives saying that there is no such thing as oversupply.  At the time, that made sense to me, but if I had known then what I know now, I could have saved myself years of feeling unwell and likely have prevented a few miscarriages.  Let me explain.  While the idea of milk oversupply may be debatable, from our Chinese medical lens we know that if the milk is falling out, this is leakage, and a loss of precious vitality.  Leakage looks like waking up in puddles of milk, soaking through your milk pads, or losing 4-6 ozs out of the breast your child is not feeding on while you are feeding on the other breast.  Regular loss of this amount of breast milk is extremely taxing.  Why?  

Because:  it is our bodies’ job to take in food and turn it into ourselves, which includes our blood, and eliminate the waste.  In menstruating bodies, the blood that is made goes to the uterus.  This precious substance either grows another new human body or it is shed monthly.  In a postpartum body, the blood is redirected to the breasts, where it becomes a very precious substance that grows a child.  In the same way that losing too much blood out of your uterus is taxing, even debilitating, losing too much milk out of your breasts is also very debilitating.  A body that is prone to leaking breast milk is often the same body, because of its constitution, that will take a long time to stop bleeding after birth, continuing to have a light flow 4, 6, or more weeks after childbirth.  Even if the amount of bleeding is light, this is a huge loss of qi, blood, and yang, and can cause a self-perpetuating loop.  Down the road, leakage can cause things like fatigue, weakness, dry tight muscles, scanty periods, insomnia, or poor hormonal health, even constipation.  Dry tight muscles might look like chronically aching neck and upper back, or an upper back that is especially tight before your period, or stomach muscles that are so tight that you chronically feel slightly or very queasy.  The same weakness that can cause you to leak things can become exacerbated, so that you begin to leak out of your lower orifices (pee and poop) or out of your uterus (heavy bleeding) or out of your pores (too much sweating).  

This sort of postpartum illness is insidious.  You may have had an easy time right after birth, only to look up 1 to 2 years later and realize that you really don’t feel well, and that it has been a while since you have.  I monitor for this kind of leakage in my postpartum patients in order to stop it before it becomes a problem.  When new patients come in two to three years after having a child and they tell me that their bodies are not what they used to be, often our intake reveals that they too have been leaking breast milk or other precious body fluids (sweat or blood) over a long period of time.

Traditional medicines provide excellent postpartum care because they can both identify issues before they are an issue, and more importantly, they have effective treatments that firm the edges of your body so that it can contain what should not be lost.  We also have ways of replenishing fluids and blood.  

Years after finishing breastfeeding, I slowly but very surely got better thanks to long term herbal medicine.  Had I known what to look for in the moment, and what treatment to use, I could have avoided years of feeling weak and other symptoms.  This would have meant more abundant healthier blood, and a much better chance for my later pregnancies to have taken.  It also means feeling strong and more like yourself.  If you relate to any part of what is described above, please find a skilled postpartum herbalist to help you start healing now. If you would like to schedule a free 15 minute phone consult, send me a message through the email form below.

Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine are Uniquely Suited to Treating Chronic Illness

Do you feel somehow cursed because, unlike your loved ones, you can’t eat a slice of pizza without debilitating pain or running to the toilet?  Is your internal thermostat off, to the point that you are sweating and wanting to rip your clothes off and stand in front of a fan while others seem perfectly unbothered?  Do you have to budget your energy expenditures, knowing that a normal friend outing will require half a day or more of recuperation time, or that a typical work day even at a job you love leaves you without the energy to fix and eat a meal?  Does a normal sized meal sit uncomfortably on your belly, so that you eat less than everyone else at the table, and yet mysteriously still gain weight?  Do you track public restrooms or a tried and true way to ask to use the employee restroom because you can’t run an errand or watch a movie without getting up to pee?  These are all symptoms that drive my patients to multiple doctors, where they sometimes get a diagnosis and sometimes do not, because despite something clearly being wrong, their ailment does not show up on blood work or imaging.  Or their abnormal bloodwork does not turn up a diagnosis.  Or their diagnosis in conventional medicine has no treatment.  Sometimes frustrated patients are told to lose weight or exercise more, two things that their body has long ago declined to do despite dedicated and sustained efforts.

The medicine that originated in ancient China and spread throughout Asia, now referred to as East Asian Medicine (EAM) is uniquely suited to treat chronic illness.  When you explain your bizarre conglomeration of symptoms, we hear things that were described in ancient texts, and are excited to begin an effective treatment that will restore confidence in your own body’s ability to interact with this world and experience joy.

We ask a lot of follow up questions in order to determine whether your body has not enough or too much of certain substances and to find out where things are getting stuck or are falling out.  We then, in very basic ways, get to work.  If something is stuck, we open through; if blood or cooling fluids are missing, we help the body make more; if there is too much heat, we cool it; too much cold, we warm it.  If an organ’s function is going in the wrong direction, say stomach qi is going up when it should go down causing nausea, vomiting, or regurgitation, we help it find the right direction.  If something (like urine) is falling out too frequently, we help it to stay in.  Persistent symptoms become less frequent, and less intense.  Slowly, being chronically unwell becomes a memory, a hard thing that someone went through and came out of on the other side, stronger, more confident, and, for having suffered deeply, more compassionate.

Your mysterious illness is not mysterious to us. If you are tired of seeking a solution to feeling unwell and are ready to get off of the sick train, call (626) 817-3556 for a free consultation or book an appointment below.

Is the Stomach Bug Flying Around your House Trying to Get In?

There's at least one point every year where patients start coming in telling me that they ate a [insert here the last thing they ate before getting sick] and got food poisoning.  Everyone is listing a different innocuous food because in fact it is a stomach flu circulating through the community.  Traditional medicine has many ways to avoid the bug getting into your digestive system or to make it unwelcome if it is already there.  Firstly, stay warm.  Keep your feet warm, your belly warm, your back warm.  Keeping your belly warm can look like drinking ginger tea, eating cooked vegetables over raw vegetables, or sitting on the sofa under the covers with a heating pad or hot water belly on your stomach.  Avoid iced beverages (including your coffees and lattes and waters) except in the hottest hours of the hottest days in order to keep your digestive cooking pot (your belly) appropriately warm.  This helps food to go down at the right speed and come out at the right speed.

A hand is holding the base of an orange butternut squash cut in half. The seeds inside are sprouting. This squash was used to make a medicinal congee.

To prevent or recover from a stomach bug, make a pot of congee with short grained rice.  Instead of the typical 2:1 water:rice ratio, add 8 to 10 times as much water to the rice.  If you have butternut squash or any other sort of orange pumpkin, add some peeled cubes to the mix, along with grated ginger and bay leaf.  The orange root vegetable will help to tonify your digestive system, ginger will warm your digestive fire, and the bay leaf is anti-diarrheal.  The thick rice water that is generated is absorptive, and will help redistribute fluids in your digestive system to where they should go.  Serve with a drizzle of sesame oil and soy sauce to taste; if someone is already feeling queasy they may prefer it without condiments.

Butternut ginger congee, drizzled with sesame oil and soy sauce. A medicinal and delicious porridge that strengthens the digestive system.

Another handy tool for your household's medicine cabinet is the Chinese medical formula 'huo xiang zheng qi san".  It is for "sudden turmoil disorder".  Sudden turmoil is when you are suddenly vomiting or diarrhea-ing or both at the same time.  You can use it at the onset of disease, or use it prophylactically if others in your household or in your community are sick.  While there are other formulas that very effectively treat sudden turmoil disease, this is a kind of generic formula that can be applied easily without need of diagnosis by a practitioner.  We were recently travelling abroad and I brought some.  We only used it once, after finding out friends that we had spent the week with were severely ill with a stomach bug.  It is excellent for foreign travel, when it can sometimes take longer to navigate a different health care system in a different language.  If you want to pick some up from the clinic to have at home or for travel, feel free to get in touch and let me know when you can stop by to pick it up.

Another very effective folk medicine technique comes to me via my Argentinian mother-in-law, and is practiced by women throughout Central and South America.  El empacho means blockage and can refer to just about any digestive upset.  Tirar el empacho is a technique of pulling quickly and sharply on the skin of the low back with the aim of producing a cracking sound.  I have learned it this way:  first apply talcum powder or corn starch to the low back to make it easier to grip.  Beginning just above the sacrum, and just on either side of the spine, grasp a roll of skin and tug upward quickly and firmly.  Repeat, going up the rest of the low back.  The more cracking sounds and the louder they are, the more needed the technique was and the more effective it will be.  Repeat 3 days in a row (although I confess to forgetting to repeat and the technique has still been very effective).  My mother-in-law used this recently on our daughter when she was home sick with no appetite.  Within an hour she announced she was hungry and wanted to eat.  Another example:  an elderly family member had diarrhea for one month, which was attributed to having eaten a chocolate (despite having eaten chocolates her entire life).  She visited her doctors several times but nothing could stop this diarrhea.  Long term diarrhea is quite serious in anyone, but especially in the elderly and in babies.  It wasn't until her caretaker, who grew up in Mexico and is also familiar with the technique, thought to "tirarle el empacho", that it stopped.

I hope that these techniques and remedies help your household stay healthy and free of acute digestive disorders.  If your digestion issues are long standing, East Asian medicine can also help.  If you have trouble going to the bathroom, or go to much, or have pain with digestion, these are all signs that you could benefit from a more personalized treatment. Always feel free to reach out with any questions, or book an appointment with the booking button below.