Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Nervous Herbalist, a podcast for Chinese medicine practitioners who like herbs and want to learn more about their function, their history and treatment strategies to use in the clinic.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Let's get into it.
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Nervous Herbalist. With me, one of your hosts, Travis Kern.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: And I'm Travis Cunningham.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: And we're here to talk to you guys today a little bit about sleep and sleep problems and figuring out common causes of sleep problems and what you can do about it in the clinical practice. So, t, we've been treating sleep for a while. I mean, I think we've probably been treating sleep as long as we've been open.
A lot of people have difficulty sleeping, and there are a lot of things that seem to cause it. Right. So maybe why don't you give us a little bit of the. Some early highlights of some of the stuff that we've seen as being causes of insomnia. Yep.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: So I'd say one of the most common causes of insomnia is that somebody's actually in pain. Right. So most of us, as acupuncturists have treated people in pain.
And a lot of those people have trouble sleeping because.
Well, for multiple reasons, but just by the nature of attention moving inside at night, you tend to pay attention to your body as you're falling asleep more than you might during the day.
And if you're in pain, you're going to feel it more if you put your mind there. Also, circulation goes down at night, our heart rate goes down, blood circulation goes down. So if there's a problem that's being caused by a problem with circulation. Right. A blood stagnation type of pattern, for us, it's going to get worse at night.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Right.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: It makes sense. So it's going to be harder for those people to sleep. So being in pain is one, like, very clear reason for insomnia. And you can also be in emotional pain as well as physical pain. So that has a little bit of a different ramification from a pattern point of view.
[00:02:16] Speaker A: So pain, I mean, obviously it goes without saying that, like, if people are hurting, it's going to be hard to get comfortable. It's going to be hard to sleep. Right. And so do you think of somebody who has a pain cause for insomnia as having insomnia or as having a pain problem?
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Could be both. Right. But they may very significantly not be able to sleep. Like, that may be part of the pattern that they're coming in for. Like, they may say, I really can't sleep at all. And I'm. And then when you ask them, yeah, I'm just tossing and turning. I'm having a hard time sleeping because I'm in pain. So the reason that I bring it up is because the sleep can be one of the reasons that they're coming to see you. Right. They may report that as a chief complaint, but the complaint could really just be about being in pain.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: So especially because some people have types of chronic pain that they don't believe can be corrected.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: Right, exactly right.
[00:03:13] Speaker A: So if that's the case, if they have a type of chronic pain that they don't think can be corrected, they might not even lead with it.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: Right?
[00:03:19] Speaker A: Yeah. They just say to you, like, sorry, I can't sleep.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: Right.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: Oh, why not? Well, I have this chronic low back pain and, you know, I need help sleeping.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: A lot of people, too, that have chronic pain learn to put their mind outside, or they learn to keep their mind focused on specific things during the day. So when they lay down at night, they're more aware of their body. And that makes it significantly different. The pain that they may not notice so much during the day, they really notice at night. So that can be another factor.
[00:03:55] Speaker A: So, okay, in addition to pain conditions, what else do we see as probably the primary or more common cause of sleep problems?
[00:04:05] Speaker B: So there's basically, there's unresolved stuff, an unresolved physiologic burden that, from our perspective, can come as a sequela of an external contraction.
So they may not be acutely ill when they come to see you, but their body is still damaged from a previous situation where their functional physiology isn't working as well as it could. So in a way, they still have an external contraction for. From our perspective, because the damage from an acute process from before is still active in that way. So a lot of the cases that we see come in like that, honestly.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: So these are the sequela to what kind of previous problems?
[00:04:56] Speaker B: Yeah, it could be. So. So an external contraction is any type of problem that comes from a temperature change in our body as a response. So it could be.
It could be something like a cold or an infection, but it could also just be, I walked into the building and I was in. I was sitting in a super cold, dry building all day and I didn't bring the right clothing, and now I've got a chill. Right. And then my body has ramifications as a result of that. Or I got stuck outside during a downpour, my clothes got soaked, and I never actually got sick. But I've been having heart palpitations ever since. Right, right.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: So they don't. A lot of people don't put that together because they didn't actually get sick.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: Right.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: Like, it's not like, oh, I had Covid or I had an infection, and now I have this problem.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: Right.
[00:05:48] Speaker A: So I'm guessing that a lot of people aren't self reporting that. Cause that's coming out through questioning.
[00:05:54] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, so what about the stuff that. So I hear a lot when I talk to people about insomnia, about racing thoughts, about stress and anxiety, about the endless checklist that people are going over as they're trying to fall asleep. Maybe talk a little bit about the mental emotional piece.
[00:06:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So the mental emotional piece for us is not unrelated to the rest of what's taking place in the body. So what's the status of the zongfu? What's the status of these basic resources that the body's using to try to resolve a conflict or a problem or an adaptation process would be another way to think of it. So the racing thoughts, the patterns of that, the difficulty falling asleep or difficulty staying asleep, these are things that can coincide with different patterns.
And it's easier, actually to look at the other characteristics of what's taking place to understand the source of it. So, for example, you can have a difficulty with the Qi moving in the body, which causes a buildup of heat. That heat catches fire, as we say, and flares. And that can cause, as the classics would say, vexation. Right, Your favorite term.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: Yeah, very descriptive.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: Yeah, very descriptive. Vexation. You can feel vexed, and that can translate to racing thoughts, anxiety, feeling of tension inside.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:28] Speaker B: You know, a feeling of dis. Ease.
And that can make it difficult to fall asleep all by itself.
And then there's other patterns, of course, that can be underlying for those presentations. A person can have very weak blood, or we can have a version of yin and Yang separating from the blood where the Yang is deficient and it's floating. And then we need an anchoring approach to help with that type of patient. And they can actually have the same symptoms. They can have racing thoughts, they can have difficulty falling asleep. You know, and then there's a tendency to see some other things in that case. But it's actually easier, I think, to see the whole picture, to diagnose, rather than to look at specific symptoms, because those things can kind of come from a number of different patterns.
[00:08:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, this is the core gem of really thinking about things in a pattern point of view. Right. Because if you ask someone, like, you know, one of my classic questioning processes for sleep and just trying to understand anybody's sleep, even if it's not a sleep case, but just like, what's your sleep like? And someone says, yeah, you know, my sleep's not great. And so then I'll say, so, difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, like, what, what does it look like? You know, and you know, someone tells me like, yeah, I have difficulty falling asleep. I lay down to sleep and then I'm just, you know, my mind's going a mile a minute, a million miles a minute. And I just, you know, I can never seem to calm down. And so a lot of times I'll just stay up till 1, 2 in the morning until I'm just completely exhausted because otherwise I'm just going to be staring at the ceiling thinking about work, you know, anyway. And so if you were to take that down and say, like, oh, patient's got racing thoughts. Right. That's just a symptom. It's not, I mean it's, it's, it's part of the questioning that you're going to do to try and build out the picture. But just because the patient has racing thoughts doesn't mean they have an unanchored young. Right, right. Or it doesn't mean that they're blood deficient.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Right.
[00:09:21] Speaker A: It could certainly could mean both of those things.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Right. But you've got to like do a little bit more digging to figure out what you're going to do with it.
[00:09:29] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yep.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: Okay, so we've got pain related causes for discomfort. We have sequela from external. External contraction.
[00:09:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:40] Speaker A: We have some mental emotional cause though of course, the root patterns of that could be various. Anything else on our, on our basic menu of options?
[00:09:52] Speaker B: Yeah, so there's basically lifestyle related damage. So this would in the, in the Najing's three reasons for getting sick or having disease. Right. Internal, external or neither internal nor external. The lifestyle factor would fall into the neither internal nor external condition. So that would be like deficiency taxation. I'm overworking shoe Lao. Yeah, exactly. Long period of time, I'm overworking or I'm undernourishing. In our case, a lot of people have deficiencies related to excess as we've talked about before.
Or the other issue would be eating too late, drinking alcohol too late. Those are also going to contribute and be in some case causative of insomnia.
[00:10:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:44] Speaker B: So those are other factors that we have to think about if we're treating somebody that has insomnia that comes in for that kind of thing.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: I think it's probably worth taking some time, interestingly, to start there, because lifestyle factors are often part of the problem, no matter what the pattern causes. True. I mean, not always, but often. And I think these days, particularly with phones and TVs and devices and busy schedules and all kinds of stuff, that there are a lot of things that contribute to people's poor sleep outcomes. Right. And one of the things that stands out for me, like, you know, if I have a patient who comes in who's got back pain. Right?
Absolutely. One of the things we're going to verify while we're talking about back pain is what is the nature of your bed, right? Is it firm enough? Is it new enough? Is there a weird valley that you sleep in? What's the pillow that you've got? Because, you know, changing a mattress or changing a pillow is not going to, like, fix your back pain just all by itself. But I don't want the lifestyle circumstances to be pushing against whatever it is that we're doing. So we just need to, like, check all the boxes to say, like, okay, no, the bed is good, the pillow's good. Right. That's the same here for me. And insomnia, right. Like, I talk so much to patients now about sleep hygiene, right. And just sort of like, what is the rhythm around sleep? And let's tell me if you heard this before. So, you know, you're talking to the patient about what their routine is like, and they say, well, you know, I usually lay down to sleep around 11:30 midnight. And, you know, it might take me an hour or so to fall asleep. And so I'm, you know, I'm there, and so maybe I fell asleep, sleep through the night. And I say, okay, well, what. What's it, you know, what's your routine like before bed? Well, you know, I just usually watch in a show and then just, you know, go lay down. It's okay. What's your room like? Is it cold? Is it dark? Yeah, I mean, sometimes. But, you know, sometimes might be watching a show or reading on my phone. And I know I'm not supposed to read on my phone, you know, because screen time, like, people. People have internalized these things. But, yeah, it doesn't really seem to matter all that much. Like, people just, you know, everybody's in this mode, right? You watch dinner, you sit down, you watch a show on Netflix or whatever, and then it's bedtime. And so you finish your episode or maybe you actually watch a second episode. Even though, you know you should go to bed and then you brush your teeth, wash your face and go lay down, right?
[00:13:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: And the expectation is that in doing that by moving from the couch to brush your teeth, to wash your face, to lay down, that you'd be asleep in, like, the next 15 minutes.
[00:13:22] Speaker B: Right.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: Even though 15 minutes ago you were literally just watching someone, like Vikings beating the crap out of each other, someone getting beheaded on the fields of Mordor. You know what I mean? Like, pretty stimulating, pretty intense.
And you might be thinking, like, well, I'm not really. I'm not a person who's, like, emotionally affected by this stuff. And like, yeah, that's totally fine. But nonetheless, your physiology was engaged with material 15 minutes ago, right. You were visually processing, auditorily processing. You were invested in the story, presumably, that's why you were watching it. And you were being stimulated by the light and the movements of it.
One of the biggest problems I see on the lifestyle side is that we don't give enough space between being awake and active and being still and restorative in sleep.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:14:12] Speaker A: So what I always try to tell people is, like, look, when we talk about sleep hygiene, we do care a lot about the screens and, like, whatever, but it's more than just the nature of a screen, right? It's like, what are you doing? So I tell folks, look, in a perfect world, you're asleep by 11, right? Like, you're actually unconscious and on your way to sleep by 11.
And the reason that that's the number that we pick is because we know about the organ clock. We know about the movement of chi through the day. And. And what we also know, irrespective of Chinese medicine, is that while pretty much everybody in the Western world knows that quote unquote, eight hours is the right number of sleep hours, right? What fewer people know, though there's plenty of evidence to suggest, is that when those hours happen also matters very much so, right? I mean, if you were working graveyard shift and you sleep from five in the morning until three in the afternoon or something, right? You're getting plenty of sleep, theoretically, hours and hours of sleep. And yet over time, somehow that sleep is not as restorative to you as it ought to be. We see digestive problems, we see aches and pains, we see lack of mental focus, like all kinds of downstream effects. And for some people, depending on their constitution, that happens in a couple of months. For other people, it takes a couple of years. But no matter what, what I know for sure, based on what I see in the clinic is that when people sleep, the time in the day when it occurs matters as much or more than the total number of hours.
[00:15:42] Speaker B: Yeah, it's really important.
[00:15:44] Speaker A: Yeah. So that's why we pick 11, right? So we say, okay, patient, we want you to get in sleep by 11.
You probably need to begin your evening routine, your process of sleeping around 9, 30, 10 o'clock.
[00:15:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: Right. Take a shower. If you bathe at night, wash your face, whatever, brush your teeth, do your whatever hair regimen, face regimen, and then crawl into bed with an analog activity. What I mean by that is like, not a video game, not television.
For most people, it's reading, Right. Though some people don't read. So I actually have a patient who sketches a little bit interestingly. You could maybe even journal if you wanted to do that. But I think for most people, it's reading and you just read.
And in the beginning, if you've had a hard time falling asleep, I tell patients, look, don't put any pressure on when you need to stop reading. Just get into bed with a book light in a cool, dark room and read. And when your eyes get heavy, you read another couple of sentences and then you put the book down and you go to sleep. And that might be 30 minutes after you started reading. It might be an hour and a half after you started reading, which if you're doing the math out there, it puts you past 11. But you know what? It's okay. I care more about you having this analog transition between a hyperactive, engaged mind in the sleeping space, you know? But some people push back, right? They say, well, you know, I love reading. My books are very exciting, or page turners. And I say, well, if that's the case, don't pick the next Dan Brown novel. Right? Like, read something else there. There's a million things you can read. Read the New Yorker, read nonfiction, read something that's a little bit less stimulating. Right. But even still, even if you're reading Dan Brown novel, it is different than if you were watching the show version.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: It is. Yeah, Right. It's different.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: It affects the way your mind engages with it differently. And so the goal, if it's reading a book or sketching or journaling or whatever, is to create this space between awake and conscious and doing and unconscious and sleeping. Right. And to hold that space as sacred.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:17:55] Speaker A: Right. To, like, really protect it and say, this is what I do before I go to bed. And when you build that ritual and you build that time in, it is amazing how effective it is in correcting a sleep pattern, a hard to fall asleep sleep pattern. Even with the underlying things we're going to talk about.
[00:18:14] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:18:14] Speaker A: Like even with a blood deficiency pattern, even with a heart fire pattern, even with a young floating pattern, those things need to be addressed. But if the sleep hygiene habit isn't in place, it won't stick.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: In my opinion at least.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: Yeah, it won't stick. I completely agree. And the other component to the habitual piece of that is eating. Right. Eating too late or eat too late. Yeah, don't eat too late. Give yourself, I mean if you can manage it, two or three hours between your last meal, like the last thing to eat and when you're going to sleep. Gosh, yeah, at least, at least.
[00:18:56] Speaker A: I mean ideally people out there, some people eat late, are going to just roll over at this. But 6, 6:30 is a good dinner time.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: Right.
[00:19:04] Speaker A: Like lots of time before bed.
And it's okay if you want to go get the senior Citizen Special at 5:15. You want to eat dinner at 5:15.
I will tell you though, if you have a habit of eating late and you start eating early, but you stay up late, you're going to also be in a bind because if you ate dinner at six and you stay up till midnight, it's been six hours since you've eaten and you're going to get snacky and you're going to eat something late and then that's going to affect your sleep. You're also not going to metabolize it very well because your digestive fire is really weak. It's a great way to end up with metabolic problems by eating things super late. Right. So all of this stuff dovetails together. You eat earlier, you go to bed earlier, you give yourself the time to fully engage with the restorative process of sleep. Fun fact, if any of you people out there are intermittent fasters, everybody loves intermittent fasting these days.
Everybody intermittent fasts every day right. Between when you ate last and when you woke up in the morning. It happens every day. And you can maximize your intermittent fasting if that's the thing that you really want to get into. By eating dinner around 5:30 or 6 and being asleep by 11 and you're not going to eat again until 6 or 7 the next day, you will have had almost a 12 hour fast.
[00:20:21] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: Good for you. That's great. So that's worked in here too. You can do two birds with one stone. If you're into intermittent fasting, eating early, going to bed early, these are the things that will Be helpful.
[00:20:33] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:20:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:34] Speaker B: So one of the key patterns, if we maybe move the discussion into pattern differentiation, one of the most common patterns that I see for insomnia is fullness in the stomach, some level of fullness in the stomach. And a lot of the time that's attached to a behavioral pattern of eating too late. Not always. You know, not always. Or drinking alcohol too late. That's another portion of things. Or this person can fluctuate rapidly in their dietary patterns. So this is the type of person who does a four day raw vegan cleanse and then when they get done with that, has a burger in their first meal. You know, it's like from one extreme to the other, will often have this type of pattern where they'll get full, it'll be too much mixed stuff and their stomach will get full. Which is a direct block for heart and kidney communication. Right. This, this language of fire and water communicating, which has to happen for a person to be able to fall asleep.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:42] Speaker B: Right. So the key formula to treat that pattern is that I use is Gan Sao Xie Tsiantang. Yeah, for sure. There's also a simpler formula that's used. I don't know who created this. This is, I think it's a more modern formula, but it's called Jiao Taiwan. And it's just two herbs. It's Huanglian and Rougue. Super simple formula. But the idea is the stomach is full. Right. So you need the bitter flavor of the Huanglian to push through the blockage of the chi in the middle. And then the rogue way just helps entice the yang back into the lower burner. And it's usually at a very small dosage. It's like 3 grams Huanglian, 1 gram Roque or sometimes even 0.5 grams Rogue. Very small.
[00:22:30] Speaker A: And originally a wan.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: Originally a wan, Yep.
[00:22:34] Speaker A: Something you could take if you found yourself in a kind of food stagnation Y pattern.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: Yeah. And it works? Yeah, definitely works. Interesting things.
[00:22:44] Speaker A: I mean, Gansao Sha Shintang is for sure. Like, it's obvious to me that a Shash Intong formula would be the greatest move for some kind of stomach stagnation, causing the problem.
[00:22:55] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:22:56] Speaker A: You know, I see a lot of folks with racing thought patterns that are rooted in some kind of Qi stagnation issue. Right. That's. You know, a lot of my patients these days are high powered professionals. They work a lot, they're very successful, high executive function. They have a lot of lists, they have family, they got mortgage, they got all kinds of stuff. They got to deal with.
And they're always thinking about it. They're always thinking about it all the time. And so eventually, what is going to be diagnosed as Shoe Lao in another year from this person reporting to me, they are starting to show signs of that deficiency taxation, that overwork where they've just been burning the candle at both ends and they're just using up their resources, you know what I mean? So by the time they lay down to go to sleep, the normal sedative effect of rhythmic transformation and expansion of yin. Right. And surrounding that Yang, holding it deeply for sleep, it's just not happening. Right. And it's not happening because largely the yin has been exhausted and the Yang is hyper stimulated. And so these things are just floating apart from each other, not engaging. And so when I think about that pattern, I think, okay, well, what kind of herbs can help to restore the balance that's there? And of course, there's a lot of formulas that people can use, but in this case, I often end up using some kind of Chihu formula to help manage what is at its core a cheese stag problem. That Chihu formulas always harmonize the best. So reaching into that, when you see patterns like that, what kinds of formulas make sense for you when you've got that kind of, you know, post Shoe Lao presentation?
[00:24:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I think of. So the Qi stagnation, I totally, I see that a lot. I don't know that by itself. Like, if it's only Qi stagnation, people generally manifest with insomnia.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: No, that's true. Yeah.
[00:24:56] Speaker B: They might, they might have a little bit of like, it's a little tough to fall asleep, but they don't generally come in with the chief complaint of insomnia if that's all it is.
[00:25:04] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:25:05] Speaker B: But so often that's where it starts and then it goes somewhere else. And so you actually need to treat the chi, but you also need to treat something else.
[00:25:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:15] Speaker B: So I think that Xiaochai Hu Tong is a really good place to start for a lot of those patterns with Qi stagnation for myself. But I often end up adding something in there to root the Yang back into the blood because I see that Yang floating out of the blood pattern. And so the addition that I'll use a lot is Guizhou, Gan, Sao, Longumuli, Tang. So just add those two things together. And that's a pretty good formula for a lot of people that have basic insomnia that I see.
[00:25:49] Speaker A: You know, it's interesting about the transition too. I will come across patients who by the time they come to me to report an insomnia pattern, when we're questioning it out, they'll say that, you know, they. Historically, they would work out at night, right? They get home from work and they'd go for a workout. And if they went for a workout, they'd sleep better.
[00:26:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:07] Speaker A: And most people think about that. It's like, well, I was tired, you know, from the workout, so I was able to sleep better. Of course, I look at that and I say, oh, you helped your chi stagnation, Right. Because you went and moved your body, and so the cheese stagnation was less, and so that would work for them for a while, and now it doesn't work anymore. Right. And why doesn't it work anymore? It's because it's now more than a cheesesteak problem. Right. So those people never thought of themselves as insomniacs until it was something more than cheesesteak because they had figured out a way to manage it.
[00:26:35] Speaker B: Right.
[00:26:35] Speaker A: They could go for a walk, go for a run, hit the gym hard, and then, boom, they'd sleep so well. Right. Also, similarly, a lot of people will manage basic G stagnation issues with cannabis a lot of times these days.
[00:26:47] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:26:48] Speaker A: So cannabis gummies, CBD or THC gummies, some combination. We see that a lot.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: Melatonin is the other one.
[00:26:55] Speaker A: Melatonin. Yeah. And so all. All of these are tools to manage a Qi stagnation sleep problem.
That will work for a while, but probably whatever is calling the chi causing the chi stagnation is going to continue to cause that and erode whatever other resources are going to be at play. And so usually that then starts to mess with blood.
[00:27:16] Speaker B: Right.
[00:27:16] Speaker A: So we start to see a blood. A blood shift, and then depending on how long that's gone on, we can see effects on larger systems. Right. So then you end up with a real nasty pattern of like a middle jow weakness, Qi deficiency, maybe even Yang deficiency. And so now the person can't convert food, like food chi into actual nutrition for themselves, and the blood gets even weaker.
[00:27:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:27:40] Speaker A: And then we end up with a really gnarly sleep pattern where people will just not sleep. They'll stay up 4, 5, 6 hours till 5 in the morning, sleep for 20 minutes, and then try and get up for their day.
[00:27:52] Speaker B: Right. You know, so then for you, with that same scenario where you have a Qi stagnation component to the picture, and then there's some kind of insomnia, what do you like to do for that type of picture? Yeah.
[00:28:06] Speaker A: So if it's gotten to the point where they're actually reporting insomnia and I think there is a blood piece. Right.
I use it. It depends on a lot of factors, I guess, but Shayasan is something that's useful if the middle jaw is getting involved. So we can just support middle jaw a little bit, harmonize that piece, move the chi. Right. Useful if it's progressed a fair amount. I've actually had a lot of success with Guipitang, which is a sort of classic sleep formula, I think in a lot of ways. Thing about guipitang is it's a little bit sticky.
[00:28:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:34] Speaker A: So when people's middle jowl gets too weak, you got to be careful because squaby tongue will give people loose stools or sticky stool or both. And so that, that can be a little bit problematic. But if you have someone whose middle jiao can absorb guipitang, it's a remarkable formula for a combined like middle jiao weakness and blood deficiency pattern. Right. So I really like that if I just have a little bit of weakness in the blood, it's just beginning. But it's still mostly a cheese stag problem. I like Swanziren tongue because Swanziren's not really like a blood tonic. Right. But if you look at Swanziren, the seed, it's blood colored, it's a little oily. Right. It's small, it looks like a red blood cell, which is also kind of interesting. Right. It's not a tonic though.
[00:29:22] Speaker B: Right.
[00:29:22] Speaker A: In a classic way. But does it assist blood? Yeah, definitely, for sure. And so I like the Swanzo Renz effect. It's sour. It has a little bit of a holding quality to it. It's not astringent exactly, but it's holding something tight with that sour flavor. And then the rest of the formula is moist and supportive. And so I think that that's a good reach as well. Swanza rintang is better tolerated for people with weaker digestion, but it is also a little wet and has seeds in it. So you gotta be mindful there too. But yeah, those are formulas that I like. When you have that piece, Suanza Rintang doesn't do as much for the chi. Right?
[00:29:59] Speaker B: Right.
[00:29:59] Speaker A: It's. It's not as chi and frank, frankly. For that matter, neither is Guipitan on some level. By the time we've reached that point, the deficiency is presenting in such a way that just dealing with the Qi is not going to be sufficient to solve the problem. So I'm going to reach to Nourish and build that blood deficiency piece. Once that's a little bit better, sometimes it's self correcting because a lot of people's habits, going for the gym or whatever will help with the cheese tag. And we will have spent a fair amount of time talking about the lifestyle piece, which I think also contributes. So, like so many of the things that we do, you've got all these moving parts, right. That you're considering. But for me, when I see a cheese stag with a middle jiao piece, Shio San, first more progressed version of that, where the cheese stag is now still a primary causer, but really the thing that's causing the bigger issue now is this increasing blood damage and blood breakdown. I'm looking at Swanza Rintang Guipitang.
[00:30:55] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, actually.
[00:30:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:57] Speaker B: So for me, the moving from Qi into blood, the key formula for treating blood deficiency and pathology relative to sleeping issues I think is guizhirtong. And Guizhirtong by itself maybe isn't the best formula for treating insomnia, but the modifications of guizhirtong certainly are fantastic.
[00:31:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:31:22] Speaker B: So along that line, you can have guizhia guitang, where you add the dose, you pick up the dose of guizhi and that treats running piglet disease, where there's a rushing up feeling. So one of the ways to interpret an overactive mind, anxiety, inability to calm down at night is running piglet. Right. Or Benton in the Chinese language.
So that formula can actually be useful. You can also have guizhia Longu mulitang, which is in the Xu Lao chapter of the Jingwei. You also have, on the, on the more yin side of the equation, Xiao jianzhong tang, which is greater tongue, double the Baixao plus Yitang. Right. Which is so sweet, which is so sweet. So that's a lot like guipitang. Actually. It's like a very similar situation that you're. And it can be sticky and too much for people that have too, too, too much sticky, damp stuff in there.
[00:32:22] Speaker A: But you know, I think it's easier to modulate the stickiness of xianzhong tongue than it is with.
Yeah, maybe because Kuybitang has a lot of sticky stuff.
[00:32:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:32] Speaker A: And like longyan ro, it doesn't really matter. Like you can put like 1 gram of longyan rou in there and it's just making people have liquid. Liquid poops. Right.
[00:32:41] Speaker B: So sweet.
[00:32:41] Speaker A: But with the guizha mods, like going in and, and playing around with the etong piece itself, as its own ingredient, etong is maltose. Right. So if you guys are not familiar with that herb. So maltose is a sugar that's extracted from wheat, and it's sweet, but in a way that, like, malted milk balls are sweet. Right. They're not. It's not sugar sweet, but it is. Yeah, it's just a different. It doesn't taste like cane sugar, but it's sweet. And so when you add it into a formula, it very rapidly increases the sweet flavor of what is essentially the just guizh tongue that it's in.
And so but you can moderate that where it's like, okay, you've got the other mods to the guizhong and then just a little bit yitong. Oh, we can nourish without completely pushing somebody over the edge. So if you have someone who has this weak blood pattern, cheese stag pattern, but their guts are weak, using that guijer mod, I think is probably better.
[00:33:36] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good. It's a good way to go. And the two formulas there, Guizhia Longu Mulitang, which is just guizhitang plus longu and muli and Xiao Zhen Zhong Tang, are a really good compositional difference. They're both in the deficiency taxation chapter of the Jingwei. Xiao Zhen Zhongtong is in the Shanghai as well. So technically can be used for like an acute, like an external contraction or abdominal pain, something like that.
[00:34:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:04] Speaker B: But Shao Zhenzhong Tong is interesting because it's the more yin tonifying mod of guizhitong because you up the sour. Right. But you double baisha, double the sour, and then you add more sweet.
[00:34:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:17] Speaker B: So guizhitong originally is like 2 parts yang tonifying, 1 part yin tonifying. Right. Because you have warm acrid Guizhi xiang zhang, and then sweet neutral or sweet warm jargon, sao and dadzao, and then you have cool sour baisha. So it's like one part yin tonifying to two parts yang tonifying. But if you add more baixao and you add more sweet, now you're really tonifying more yin. So the presentation of Xiao Zhen zhongtang has more yin deficiencies symptoms. You can have five palm heat, you can have thirst, you can have palpitations, you have heat in the upper burner that's showing up at night often. And then significantly, you have cold symptoms in the lower burner. So yin and yang are starting to separate from the middle. So, like, men can have seminal emissions, or I think it says women can have dreams of intercourse, something like that. So there's this activation of heat in the upper burner and then cold in the lower burner. So separation of yin and yang. But most importantly, there's the need to tonify both yin and blood, both qi and yang, at the same time.
[00:35:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:33] Speaker B: So, yeah. Whereas the Guizhi longitang pattern is less sweet, less sticky, but it's more anchoring, it's more recalling to the Yang.
So you can also have yin and yang separating with the Guizhou longitong pattern. But in that pattern, we're really looking at some other symptoms, like vivid dreams, night sweating. These are the kinds of things that are happening there. So there's really more unanchored yang. The shen is more disturbed in the Guizhou jia long pattern.
[00:36:10] Speaker A: And the use of the minerals there is more, shall we say, aggressive.
[00:36:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:16] Speaker A: In its relationship to the. It's not an aggressive formula.
[00:36:18] Speaker B: Right.
[00:36:18] Speaker A: I don't mean to suggest like an angry formula, but just like, if you're comparing the two, like, yes, the sweet and sour nature of Xiao Jianzhong Tong is coaxing the Yang. Right. It's expanding this yin. Yin can envelop the Yang, hold it tight for sleep. It's a. It's a more subtle approach. Yeah, right. More expansive approach. And then the Jialongo mulitang is saying, like, no, no, this is out of control. We got to hold it.
[00:36:43] Speaker B: Yeah, Right.
[00:36:44] Speaker A: We got to tamp it. We're going to use the minerals to do that.
[00:36:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:47] Speaker A: So that's a, I think, a really interesting distinction. And I always. I love. One of the things I love about thinking about Xiao Jianzhong Tong for this kind of sleep pattern and then also guipitang for a very similar sleep pattern is like, if you just put those formulas down on paper, you'd be like, those formulas are not all the same.
[00:37:05] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:37:06] Speaker A: Like, okay, maybe they treat the same pattern, but, like, they're not the same. They don't have the same composition of things. But actually when you start to pull them apart and you kind of look at the flavors. Look at the flavors. You look at the individual composition of what you're actually trying to achieve, and it. It highlights yet again that, like, you can get at things seemingly from different sides, but actually you're working the same side. It's different herbs, but you're working the same flavor mechanisms absolutely in place. Which is why it's. It's important to learn, I think, from these long, like, classical formulas, like shanghan formulas, jing fung formulas, even ones that are Newer, not part of those classics, but still by Chinese medicine standards, you know, 500 years old, thousand years old, like, still pretty old stuff, you know, and know that those have value and how to, how to deploy them, but I think that what I love the most is extrapolating from them to see, like, okay, how are they composed?
[00:37:59] Speaker B: Right.
[00:38:00] Speaker A: Like, what were the flavors that were implemented here to. To get that result?
[00:38:03] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:38:04] Speaker A: It was pretty cool. Yeah. Okay, so what about formula for. Let's. Let's kind of go back a little bit. So we talked about the sleep hygiene piece. We're talking about this blood piece, talked a little bit about the chi piece.
I don't want to neglect the pain pattern piece.
[00:38:22] Speaker B: Right.
[00:38:22] Speaker A: Because pain pattern is something we see a lot.
What. When you think about designing a. Just a sort of prototypical formula for a pain pattern, obviously there can be a lot of different pain patterns, but what do you. Where does your mind go when you think about formulas for that piece of the sleep problem?
[00:38:37] Speaker B: Yeah. So a lot of the time, like the way that I kind of think about this, I. I almost move into a different mode if my, my target is the pain, if I'm going to. So, like, if I'm going to treat somebody and I'm really treating their pain with herbs in particular, I go into a bit of a different mode. You don't necessarily have to do that. You can still look at the internals and you can try to treat the whole body and then sort of modify the formula or pick a formula that treats that pattern that also treats pain.
[00:39:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: But you can also kind of just ignore it and then just try to treat the pain if. As it presents. So I think your basic chi and blood stagnation formulas are really good if, if that's what you want to try to do. The Jiyutans always come to mind for Qi and blood stagnation formulas.
[00:39:30] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:39:31] Speaker B: I think they work very well for this kind of stuff. Probably my two favorites of those are Shenton Jiyutang for limb pain, and for anything more central Shui Fu, Jiu Tang is my favorite. Yeah, yeah.
[00:39:46] Speaker A: If you go read the Bensky about Shu Fu, there's so much discussion about what's happening in a chest. Right?
[00:39:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Right.
[00:39:51] Speaker A: And it is that. But also just like if it's more trunk.
[00:39:54] Speaker B: Right.
[00:39:55] Speaker A: Shuffle.
[00:39:55] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And head trauma. Don't forget about, like, let's say, like there's an mva. You know, person comes in, boom, head trauma, having trouble sleeping, fuzzy head. And you really want to treat the pain. You want to Move the blood like right away, you know?
[00:40:12] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. And shintong, if you've got stuff out in the extremities. Right. Like it's a great formula. Okay, so Jiu tongs for pain pattern.
What about if, okay, so if a problem started with Qi but then eventually becomes a blood problem.
[00:40:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:29] Speaker A: And then that goes unresolved for a while, we start to have the kind of disharmonies that you were talking about, the sort of separation of Yin and Yang. We might have a fire water communication issue that builds up. And so then we can often see water problems emerging in the pattern. Talk a little bit about what that looks like in the patient, what indicates to us that there's also a water piece to the presentation.
[00:40:54] Speaker B: So water problems can happen in two ways. You can have an abundance of water or a lack of water, just like everything, right?
[00:41:03] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:41:03] Speaker B: Excess and deficiency.
For most insomnia based water problems that I come across, the water is in existence because of Yang deficiency. The person is taxed to a certain severe degree and as a result water is accumulating in the body that's unchecked by Yang.
And we need to strongly warm the Yang but particularly warm it at the water level to push out the cold water so that the Yang can anchor correctly. So the main herb and the type of formula that's going to treat that are futza formulas, aconite formulas, and there's a couple of them that can work really well.
Any formula in that's a, that's a textbook Xiaoyin disease formula. So Sunitang Zhenw Tang, these formulas they all have as a symptom that can go along with that somnolence, which is the desire to want to sleep all the time. Like so you can have somebody who can't sleep, who wants to sleep all the time, or you can have somebody who's like, I sleep 10 hours a day, I'm still freaking exhausted. That's also somnolence. So that's a textbook symptom of Xiaoyin disease. I will say for just for the sake of full disclosure, that people can have somnolence and not be in Shao Yin disease as well. There are other patterns that can create that which we can talk about if you want. But those that symptom specifically goes with Xiaoyin disease. So you can actually treat insomnia with an unmodified Sunni Tang or Jen Wu Tang. You can also treat a more specific heart and kidney. Not communicating picture with that level of Yang deficiency. And there are several formulas that do that really well.
[00:43:00] Speaker A: So the thing that would push you to a sinetang or Jen Wu Tong is the somnolence.
[00:43:07] Speaker B: Somnolence? Yeah, the person and also the chronicity. You're not going to get into that pattern, like, because you haven't slept for like three nights. It's. It's like you haven't been able to sleep well for years and you're chronically tired and depleted. People are going to be fatigued like crazy.
[00:43:23] Speaker A: And they also would have come and likely in the questioning, they would have had some taxation presentation. Right. They've been working a lot and, you know, graveyard shift or long hours or family demands or emotional piece. So walk me through again. So somnolence is one of those words?
[00:43:40] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like, it's basically the desire to want to sleep all the time. Like, I just. I just want it to get enough sleep.
[00:43:47] Speaker A: Fatigue.
[00:43:48] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:43:48] Speaker A: Right. Like, I could just literally sleep anytime. Yeah, yeah, somnolence. I hate the way we translate that stuff. It drives me crazy.
[00:43:56] Speaker B: It's the thing. The thing is we don't have another good word for it in English. Right, Right.
[00:44:00] Speaker A: So we can say one stupid word.
[00:44:02] Speaker B: Like vexation or like a glow mess.
[00:44:05] Speaker A: Oh my God, get out of here with that. Like, it's so problematic because it doesn't mean any. Like, somnolence is not a contemporary word.
[00:44:14] Speaker B: Right.
[00:44:14] Speaker A: Like, it's not even a contemporary medical word.
[00:44:17] Speaker B: Right.
[00:44:17] Speaker A: Like, what do you mean, somnolence? Oh, I'm sleepwalking. No, that's sunambulation. Like, it was just like such a weird word Anyway, so if you're listening out there, like, when you guys read the classics or you read discussion about things and you see things, something translated as somnolence, what we're talking about here is just a deep unending fatigue. Like, people wake up tired, they go to sleep tired. They could basically take a nap at any time. And as Travis said, this is not something that happens as a byproduct of four or five days of not sleeping. Honestly, it's not even something that happens after like a couple of weeks of not sleeping.
[00:44:50] Speaker B: No, it's longer than that.
[00:44:51] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. So Cinetong Jen Wu Tong. I love Jen Wu Tong.
[00:44:57] Speaker B: Yeah, man. It's such a good formula.
[00:45:00] Speaker A: And you know, it's funny because when you read about it in the book in Bensky, it talks about. It's like framed up as a formula for old people.
[00:45:09] Speaker B: Right, Right. It's like, this is not anymore the.
[00:45:11] Speaker A: Elderly, you know, and it's like, I mean, maybe historically, but now I got plenty of 30 year olds who are taking a lot of benefit out of Jen Wutang, particularly high powered people who are really in the corporate rat race, like doing all the hard stuff to try and make ends meet. It's easy to find yourself in a Jen Wutang.
[00:45:29] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:45:30] Speaker A: Place for sure.
Okay, so in the water space, the thing that's pushing us into considering those formulas is this deep, deep fatigue and the deep chronicity.
[00:45:43] Speaker B: Right.
[00:45:43] Speaker A: Would you say it's fair to think of. And obviously this is maybe a little bit flattening of the pathodynamics dynamics that happen here. But you know, if we start with something that's at a chi problem, that then becomes a blood problem, that then becomes a water problem, or maybe the water and blood kind of happen in some ways, like concurrently.
[00:46:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:46:06] Speaker A: And that usually that progression is a function of the chronicity, like how long a person has been dealing with the issue.
[00:46:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's, that's true. You can also have different levels of involvement with water, different levels of involvement with blood sugar. Right. Like you can have a QI deficiency pattern, which would be different than a Chihu presentation.
[00:46:31] Speaker A: Right.
[00:46:31] Speaker B: But usually that isn't an inside. Like, usually insomnia isn't one of the problems that that person has. Actually.
[00:46:37] Speaker A: No. Weirdly, yeah. Maybe just that lack of like the QI deficiency. They actually are just so exhausted, they fall asleep.
[00:46:44] Speaker B: Right. They fall asleep. They don't have trouble. Usually not.
[00:46:47] Speaker A: But they may not be rested when they wake up.
[00:46:48] Speaker B: They feel heavy, they fall asleep, you know, but they're not. It's usually not insomnia with that kind of stuff.
[00:46:53] Speaker A: It's also interesting to think about the fact that like almost even people who sleep well can have cheesesteak temporary insomnia. Right. Like you get bad news, you have a fight with your partner right before bed, you.
[00:47:05] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:47:06] Speaker A: You know, or you watched a show that was violent or read something disturbing like you can have your chi knotted up. Absolutely something, and you don't sleep well tonight and maybe even tomorrow night or the night after, like it can be temporarily induced, you know what I mean? But obviously physical movement, sleep, hygiene. And the. One of the reasons that I'm going to come back to this hygiene thing because I think it's super important because actually I think it's related to a much larger broad spectrum health question, which is around developing rhythms for yourself as a human. Right. Eating around the same time every day, sleeping around the same time every day, doing movement around the same time. Every day, building rhythms. Right. The reason that rhythms are useful is not only does it help your body know when things are going to happen, so then it doesn't go into scarcity mode or starvation mode or, you know, it just. It can feel like it can use the things that you're giving it because it knows that it's going to come again at roughly the same time. The other thing that's really valuable about rhythm is it builds resiliency.
[00:48:08] Speaker B: Right?
[00:48:08] Speaker A: Right. So if you have some terrible news and you get a bad night of sleep, but you have all these rhythms worked into your habits, you will rapidly return to your regular sleep pattern.
[00:48:19] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:48:19] Speaker A: Right. But if you have irregular eating, irregular sleep habits, irregular lifestyle in general, your ability to recover from an interruption to what you think of as your healthy life is that much more difficult. And it's true across the board, not just a sleep pattern. Right. Like, if you have good rhythms, you recover from colds and flu better. Right. If you have good rhythms, you recover from weird digestion things better. Right. Like everything about your body returns back to its norm better. If it has a rhythm to lean on.
[00:48:49] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:48:50] Speaker A: Stuff is random and unpredictable. We get random and unpredictable health outcomes.
[00:48:55] Speaker B: Right.
[00:48:55] Speaker A: Too. You know, So I think it's. I think it's worth reemphasizing that so people can think about how can I build out the kind of rhythms that would be useful for me going forward.
[00:49:06] Speaker B: Right. Yeah.
[00:49:07] Speaker A: All right. Any other pieces of the sleep diagnosis that we didn't cover? Obviously, there are more details and other layers, but from the broad strokes, what do you think?
[00:49:17] Speaker B: So we should. We should also say when water. So we talked about when water is excessive, you could say, which comes in this case from Yang deficiency. So the Yang isn't strong enough to keep the water in check. So there's too much water in the system. That's like Jen Wutang Sunni Tang. Right. And you're going to see that in those patterns, primarily in the bowels. Like, you're definitely going to see that with Jen Wu Tong. You might see more edema and dizziness, lack of thirst, difficult urination. Those are going to be the distinguishing factors. You can also have a lack of water, a lack of physiologic water in the body, which we would call Yin deficiency. Right. This is where we get into yin deficiency. So the classic formula is the treat yin deficiency. We've already mentioned one of those, which is Swan Zhao Ran Tong. It's a pretty good yin deficiency insomnia formula. But the other category of formulas that treat that are the Baihe formulas. So Bai Hadi Wong Tong, all of those, you know, biography. There's going to be different ones that do that. Usually for insomnia, the ones that I've seen used the most are Baihe Di Huang Tong and Baihe J.
And those are going to be 4. True Yin deficiency pattern, like the fluids of the pericardium are drying out from some mysterious process. Right. And the Baihe chapter is in the Jingwei, which means it's weird. Disease could come from so many different reasons. It could be a direct emotional strike.
We both know somebody who had a very specific Baihe pattern whose life kind of fell apart this last year, and it was really clear that she was in this sort of Baihe pattern.
So, like, that's one possibility, but the possibilities are endless. So you can also have a deficiency of water, which we would classify as yin deficiency, and that can also lead to insomnia. What I would say about that is it's rare that that happens outside of anything else or without anything else happening. So usually there's something else that also needs to be treated with that pattern at the same time.
[00:51:38] Speaker A: Right.
[00:51:39] Speaker B: So the most common scenario that I've seen with Baihe patterns is Chai Hu patterns. So there's like Chai Huizhu Ganjang Tang has a formula in it that's in the Baihe chapter, which is the only Baihe formula that doesn't have Baihe in it.
It's the first.
[00:51:59] Speaker A: Let that sink in for a minute, listeners. You're like, wait a minute, does that have Baihe in it?
[00:52:03] Speaker B: The Baihe disease chapter, the first formula in it is Gualo mulisan, Right? So Tianhua Fen muli.
[00:52:10] Speaker A: That's it.
[00:52:10] Speaker B: So in that you have Gua lu mulisan inside of it. So there's this suggestion that if that pattern continues, it can go into this spiking and scorching of the fluids of the pericardium, which then disallow that kind of smooth feeling of ease and okay ness. Yeah, that can lead to insomnia and other emotional issues.
[00:52:39] Speaker A: Right? So, yeah, you know, it's interesting with Baihe because it's a really cool herb. Of course, it's an edible food herb as well. Like the lily bulb that we make baihe out of, you can buy at Asian grocery stores. It's usually like poached and vacuum sealed because it, you know, comes from China or Vietnam or Cambodia. But it's quite tasty.
[00:53:02] Speaker B: It is.
[00:53:03] Speaker A: It has like the texture of kind of like an artichoke heart, you know. And we have a couple of patients here who buy the dried baihe and they make a porridge with it and yi ren and rice. Right. They make a sort of yi ren heavy kanji that has the baihe leaves in it and it's just cooked together and they, you know, eat it with a little bit fresh fruit or something to kind of make it more palatable to a western Western audience. But that is an interesting kind of food level tonic, kitchen herbalism tonic to infuse that bio quality into your diet because it is moistening and nourishing, but in a way that isn't sticky, it's true. Or heavy. Right. And so you couldn't of course, dose it sufficiently in a, in a formula to create that medicinal effect, but you could also integrate it into your diet. It's not a Western food, right? So like it'll, it won't, it won't totally jive, you know, you're not gonna have like an English muffin with some baihe on it. You know what I mean? Like that's, you'd have to be a little more intentional about it. But it is something to consider as well that if you're thinking like, oh, I have this tendency, I've had a patient who has corrected, you know, we corrected the formula, but maybe they have a tendency to slip easily into it. There could be some lifestyle dietary stuff in which bai is a helpful tool to keep that pericardium like flexible and moist.
[00:54:26] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
[00:54:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
All right, well, I think we, we've given the broad coverage on the patterns. So as part of this season in, in the Nervous Herbalist, we are going to deliver disease patterns a little bit like this. Talk about what the common patterns are that we see, what a lot of the formulas are that we use for them. And then in the next episode we'll follow up with some case study material, right. And say, okay, let's take a look at this in specific. And so there'll kind of be a pair with. In this case, we'll have the sleep presentation of the disease pathology and some of the formulas. And then we'll look at case studies where those played out modifications to the formula and why. So that way you can have a little bit more tangible understanding of why we would make changes to one formula or another.
[00:55:12] Speaker B: Yep, great.
[00:55:14] Speaker A: Alrighty, my friend. Well, thanks. Thanks for joining us for another episode here. We got to chat. Yeah, yeah. This is fun.
Listeners, as you have heard before, if you have topics for us, please send them over to infootandbranchpdx.com that's info at Root and Branch. Papadeltaxray.com we would love to hear suggestions about topics and we are always interested to hear from you. If you have other questions about what we're talking about or you want to get more information, we're super happy to talk to you about it. We also wanted to let you know that here at Root and Branch, we launched a new little project that we're calling the Ji Xia Academy, Jixia Academy, which was a historical philosophical academy from the Warring States period. In fact, there's some speculation that some of the works of Mencius were actually written in the Ji Sha Academy. And some editing of early versions of the Tao Te Ching were done at the Ji Sha Academy. It's got a long and storied history. We picked it because it sounded cool and we also like the idea of it. So we're not above admitting it. It's a cool. It's a cool sounding thing and I think it's a really interesting history to try and tap into. G Shot Academy JXA for short, is an educational project that Rudin Branch has put together, that Travis and I have put together. We've been running a residency program out of our clinic for the last two years. We're launching our third year right now.
And we realized that we wanted to make that information available to more people.
And so we put together the G Shy Academy for the moment. Everything that JXA is doing is in person. So it's, you know, you gotta be in Portland, you gotta come and visit us and do things here. But our goal in the next year is to see if we can't transition some of that stuff to online learning as well. So for those of you listening who are not in our area, we'll, you know, check back in in a year if we can really make it work. We really want to turn this stuff into some digital lessons for you guys to have more accessibility to more knowledge. Everything from the kind of herbal stuff that we talk about here, all the way to small business mechanics, to patient treatment management, to insurance billing. We really want practitioners in our field to excel and we want you guys to have everything that you feel like you need to have to run your practice and build your clinical skills and to treat your patients in the way that you want to do it. And there's really no reason that that information should be hidden or siloed or difficult to come across. And so we are going to increasingly make that material available to you guys as best we can. So check it out. The website is JX Academy. So that's the letters J X Juliet Xray Academy.com. g Shy Academy. And take a look at what's there. And if you're in the Portland area, we'd love for you to sign up for a class. We'd love to meet you in person. Love to have you come on in. And as things develop, that'll be one of the resources we continue to point you guys to. So thanks for joining us. My name is Travis Curran.
[00:58:10] Speaker B: And I'm Travis Cunningham.
[00:58:11] Speaker A: And we'll catch you guys next time.
[00:58:12] Speaker B: See you next time.
