TCM Works For Endometriosis!

I nearly forgot that today was Ass-Throb Day!

Today, CD10, is the day that my endo habitually and passionately tortures my butt by making it throb like hell - more specifically, my whole rectum tract. But today my ass didn't feel anything like a nuclear reactor waiting to explode. Infact it was rather zen in there! Which made me forget all about Ass-Throb Day!

This could only mean that my endo is losing its clutch on me and that I am truly getting better!

After months and months of acupuncture, herbal medicine and several sessions of moxa, I can finally draw the conclusion that Traditional Chinese Medicine is working for endometriosis. My symptoms of pain have decreased significantly and my periods are getting more normal. All you endo gals out there, pay attention! There is hope in TCM!

My endo has begun to heal without me taking a single dose of Lupron, birth control pill, or going under the knife. The prognosis for TCM as a cure for endo has always fundamentally sounded better to me than Western Medicine. What Western Medicine offered was ridiculous. Having no solution, nor any idea what causes it, it experiments by offering victims drugs to stop your body from functioning normally. They butcher you up, cutting parts of your body away and then cross their fingers, and hope that the endo won't come back, even though they know it likely will. These surgeries expose you to the risk of death, eg: from having a bad reaction to anesthesia, or from overdose due to a miscalculation of dosage, to the possibility of infection. In many cases, the pain continues and repeated surgeries are even normal. And for women desperately trying for a child, all the drugs and multiple surgeries just leave your body even more hostile to pregnancy. And to counter the increased infertility, they put you on more drugs and hormones and force the conception to happen outside the body (IVF), and put it back into your body knowing that your body hasn't been fixed in the first place. Yet women subject themselves to all this craziness and risk because Western Medicine tells them that there is no cure and that there is no other way.

Well, there is it seems! TCM is certainly uncommon in the western world, but it has been used to treat the largest nation in the world for thousands of years. Western Medicine is only now slowly discovering the wonders and knowledge of this ancient form of medicine. But specifically in endometriosis, I have personally seen how effective it is for me. So given time, I believe it really works.

And how does TCM work for endometriosis? I had to ask my TCM doc again today. I know that it reduces the symptoms, but with all their medical terms like yin, yang, wind, heatiness, dampness, deficiency, and stasis, it's really hard for me to understand how it works. I mean, it's hardly scientific! After his explanation, this is my conclusion: Endometriosis is a condition caused by "stagnant" blood or poor circulation in the body. Acupuncture and herbs work by dissolving these stagnant blood and improving its circulation. The adhesions will disappear because the TCM treatment works by regenerating the cells in your body, like in stem cells, repairing dead or damaged cells of the scar tissue (adhesions). At least this is how my medically primitive mind understands it. I don't really care how it works exactly, as long as it works and I am not experiencing any bad side effects from it.

How my body is behaving today is another testament to its healing effects. It's raining and chilly outside but my usually cold body is unaffected. After all, it is Ass-Throb Day! I used to think that my ass is able to predict rain, as it always rains when my ass pulsates with pain. I believed they were related. I have developed a highly sophisticated formula for this event:

Endo + Rain = Ass Pain or

Endo + Ass Pain = Rain

Well, there's no ass pain, so something else is missing from the formula and it's definitely not the rain. By logical deduction, it appears to be the endo. And that's my highly scientific conclusion.

With the results I am getting I will definitely stay on the path of TCM now. My TCM doc is currently prescribing intensive moxa for me. (I just want to clarify to anyone reading this out there that moxa is not a fix-all method for all conditions. It is appropriate for people who are suffering from cold conditions like me) I am very focused on healing my endo right now because I believe that it is affecting my fertility. So once it is resolved, I truly believe I should be able to conceive naturally. This notion is not too far-fetched because I conceived once before with the help of TCM.

I had my 2nd moxibustion session for this cycle today. It went really well, although the guessing-the-right-twin didn't go so well for me! I could've sworn that after having had a long look at the twin who did the moxa for me yesterday, I would've been able to distinguish the two. I thought I had the same girl today, but nope-I was wrong - AGAIN! It was the other twin today! So now I have an interesting guessing game to add to the smokin' fun of moxa now! Wish me luck for tomorrow!

Finding An Alternative Cure

For the first 6 years we were married, we were meticulous about using contraception because we were afraid we would get pregnant. Ha Ha Ha! Yeah right.....A few months before I hit 35, my biological clock began to tick very loudly. I went to see my gynae for a check-up before trying to conceive. I clearly remembered him telling me that I was almost 35 and that my time was almost up! Oh! How encouraging! From the viewpoint of western medicine, that's the age when a woman's fertility starts to head downhill - without any brakes! He told us to try for 6 months and see how we go. Six months went by. Nothing. Then the months turned into years. Deep down inside, I knew that my endo was a factor in our failure to conceive, but I never accepted the idea that I was infertile. That to me was an ugly word that meant impossibility. I didn't believe I was infertile because I was still having my periods regularly, painful as they were. My body was still preparing a home for a baby every month! Heck! I often joked to myself that a baby had better be worth all that suffering. But I knew the doctors couldn't fix my endometriosis, and therefore my "infertility". I was at a loss.

So one day, I decided to go the bookstore to read up more about getting pregnant. It wasn't like a military precision-planned, goal-oriented mission, but rather more like a "Hmm... I'm bored. Let's just snoop around the pregnancy books and see what it's all about" kind of a thing. I headed to the pregnancy section and there at my eye-level, the first book I saw was about - Infertility! It was called "The Infertility Cure - the ancient chinese wellness program for getting pregnant and having healthy babies" by Randine Lewis. Why they put infertility books together with pregnancy and baby books is beyond me - A tad insensitive if you ask me! Anyway, "infertility" and "cure" and "healthy babies" all in the same sentence? I was hooked! And it had a whole section dedicated to endometriosis! That book changed my life! That book is the reason why I am seeking treatment in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) today.

Having been pro-western medicine for all of my life, understanding and appreciating TCM was very difficult for me because chinese concepts like "wind", "heatiness", "stagnation", "ying & yang","pressure points" and "qi" were so abstract, intangible and unquantifiable. I preferred scientific explanations in terms of chemical/biological analysis. But what the author did for me was to bridge the gap between western and chinese medicine and explained TCM in scientific terms that made sense to me. And she was able to do that because she had been trained in both western and eastern medicine. And I liked the fact that it was her own infertility that spurred her onto TCM when she herself found western medicine lacking in areas of infertility. She came from a place of empathy, compassion and determination.

TCM, as explained by her, made a lot of sense to me. TCM treats your body as an ecosystem, and addresses the imbalances that are the root cause of our fertility problems. Its holistic approach makes sure that everything in our body functions as it should so that our conceptions and pregnancies have everything in place for them to be successful. To illustrate this point, take a woman who is not ovulating as an example. A typical treatment in western medicine would be to administer clomid, which chemically forces her to release eggs, usually many at one time, with unfortunately, some possible undesirable side effects. It treats symptoms but does not resolve her hormonal issues that caused annovulation in the first place. TCM however will go to the root of the problem and resolve why she wasn't ovulating in the first place so she could ovulate naturally. TCM infact sounded more logical, and much safer. The treatments usually involved natural herbs, not synthetic man-made chemicals. The more I read her book, the more I liked the TCM approach to resolving infertility. And best of all, it seemed that infertility in all its forms were treatable. WOW! It was like the dark clouds had parted and a ray of hope had shone down directly onto me! From then on, I knew that TCM was the path for me. I finally found a reason to be hopeful and I was determined to beat my endo and infertility, and have a baby - naturally.