Too much heat

Back in March, I decided to investigate some alternative therapies, and was referred to a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practitioner. He was quite a character - a gentleman in his early 60s - who spoke in Australian vernacular, but with a Chinese accent. His appointments ran about a month in advance, which seemed to bode well for his reputation. After feeling my pulse, looking at my tongue and my eyes, he pronouned his assessment: "you got too much heat; you need to bloody-well slow down". Yes, I work long hours (well, not as long as I used to). Yes, there is a lot of stress in my life. Yes, my mind races in overdrive all the time. Yes, I eat spicy food.

As someone brought up on western medicine, I asked the obvious question: what is the link between the diagnosis and my symptoms? No ... it doesn't work that way. The diagnosis is that I have too much heat. How that manifests itself may differ from one person to another. Fix the underlying problem, and my balance is restored, and this should result in the symptoms going away. It's a totally different approach - treat the person, not the illness - and difficult for me to get my head around.

Yet, he was a no-nonsense sort of guy. He put it quite simply: start with three treatments, and if you don't notice an improvement, then this probably won't work for you. So he went at me with needles, cupping, and a handful of other things. I cut out spicy and deep-fried foods.

Three weeks later, there was a small improvement to my "heat", but there wasn't much noticeable change, so we decided to quit there.

I was a little disappointed - I was hoping there would be an alternative therapy answer, especially after coming back from the Mayo with little encouragement. But I also needed to take a measured approach to dealing with this, and not just throw s**t at the wall hoping something will stick. Although in hindsight, it was a particularly stressful time of my life, so I thought it might be worth revisiting at some point in the future.

So a couple of weeks ago, I put out feelers in the "network" for some good TCM practitioners, identified someone, and made an appointment (didn't take a month this time), and she examined me in the usual way in our initial consultation. Her diagnosis: too much heat ...

No diagnosis, but successful treatment

Usually, when something is wrong with you, you get a diagnosis, and that leads to a course of treatment to fix what is wrong. So what happens when no-one can work out what is wrong with you?

The neurologist at first thought my sore bicep was unrelated to multifocal, but saw what he thought was a lump. After ultrasound revealed the muscle was normal, he was stumped. He suggested anti-inflammatories, but they didn't help, and there was no evidence of inflammation in any case. My pilates instructor (who is also a physiotherapist) didn't see any indication of muscle damage, and there was no trauma event that triggered this.

The only person to provide any explanation was a massuese, who said the muscle felt matted and dehydrated, which might have been because I was getting my infusions in the same arm all the time, and the "juice" flowed through the big bicep muscle. Both the nurse who administers the infusions, and my neurologist said this was nonsense from a medical perspective. Although I did get the most recent juicing in my left arm. Unfortunately, my veins aren't as prominent in that arm, so all I had to show were some nasty bruises.

After all that, the bicep pain continued, so I thought I'd try some physio - massage and ultrasound - and that is working. The physiotherapist still has no idea what the problem was, but if the shoe fits, then ...