Talking to patients about coffee is a challenge. Sometimes it seems to me that most people drink it. Last week I stayed with dear friends, one coffeed and one uncoffeed and I was stunned by the high voltage change in temperament after the first morning hit. This has become a cultural norm. Even Andrew, who is uncoffeed, insists that there be coffee beans in the freezer and a grinder in the cupboard for coffee addicts who stay the night. But sometimes I look at the beans, think of my kids getting to them, and I take the beans for a walk to the garbage can down the driveway, just to be a better parent. The next visitors who come sometimes get into their cars bleary eyed to drive five and a half miles to get some ready-made in a cup and stagger back up the stairs. That’s fine, no worries. This isn’t about house rules like saying “no smoking in the house“—it’s simply that I can’t bring myself to participate in the deepening of illness by providing something that I know is damaging. In my home when people come over, I’m never in teaching mode. Unless asked. To lecture on any subject when gathered with friends is not a good idea if you quite like having friends.
When people come into the office, though, it’s a completely different story. They have an advanced cancer, or an autoimmune condition, or a different chronic degenerative disease, and they are looking for help. We are not there to be friends. The position of the acupuncturist or channel practitioner is entirely different. The job in the office involves effective treatment and that requires the provision of enough information for the patients to be able to understand how they play their role in allowing the treatment to take hold.
A treatment for any chronic degenerative disease, or really any illness at all, falls short of competent care if it lacks information about hydration and dehydration, or lacks inquiry about what a patient is doing that might be affecting hydration. Dehydrated patients cannot move what needs to move, they cannot fully eliminate and become autointoxicated, and they cannot perform the lifesaving divergent channel action of putting into latency pathogenic factors that cannot be handled.
It’s not about lecturing. And it’s not about pointing the finger at the patient and telling them what to do. A practitioner who has a hope of compliance is not saying, “you mustn’t do this; you must stop doing that; you must always do that, you have to do this…”. Effective communication about habits that need discussion requires a calm, simple delivery of information, laced with a hint of lightness.
For example, if you were to pretend that you were teaching a group of young coffee drinkers interested in hearing why it might not be a cool thing to do, you might adopt a certain tone with an exclamation mark or two, because to you it really is fascinating:
“In Chinese medicine we understand that hydration is the cornerstone of health! Without hydration we can’t do all the things our body needs to do to get pathogenic factors out: sneeze, sweat, cough, vomit, urinate, defecate! When we hear the word hydration, we think of water, and while plain flat water is extremely important as a vehicle for elimination from the body, it is not a deep hydrator! For that we think of soups, broths, stews, and porridges! But what also lowers systemic hydration are the systemic DEhydrators, and one of the most common of those in our culture, is coffee! Coffee is a concentrated, bitter fruit and when you put that data through the lens of this medicine, you find that it is a triple dehydrator! It’s a concentrate; you need a lot of those beans to make a cup! But the body is not geared to digest concentrates! It reads them as toxins, since nearly all toxins in nature are highly concentrated, and it knows it must respond by purging! Second, it’s very bitter! Nearly all toxins are very bitter and so again, a purge is stimulated! Third, it’s a fruit! Fruits act as defensive qi stimulants, which means they clear accumulations from the body! When you put these three factors—concentrated, bitter, fruit—on your tongue at the same time, the brain receives a focussed message to purge and to do it fast! It goes to work, first at the liver whose job it is to process toxins or store them if it can’t keep up with them! The liver releases some of its toxic load to the kidneys to make room for the incoming threat! The kidneys read that event as an emergency and engage the adrenals to speed up the process! This is the super famous coffee high! And what follows is the purge itself—urination and defecation! The purge comes at a price because the body uses its fluids to create the purge and so the net effect of coffee is dehydration! But that’s not all! No! The heat that is generated in the process, which we call wei qi—a subset of yang qi—is hot, and so there is inflammation now in play! And ironically that heat consumes fluids and so the person enters a spiraling dehydrating situation! Then the body has to accumulate dampness—swellings made by waste fluids in the gut—in order to buffer the tissues and the organs from that heat! Over time, the heat and dampness combine and the body tries to hide it in various places including the belt channel and the joints, and when it can’t be contained there any longer, the heat leaks out and consumes the flesh and threatens the organs, forcing the body to create what’s known as substantial dampness—nodules and tumors, in its ingenious quest to defend the organs against decimation through inflammation! Meanwhile, the body is so exhausted from having the adrenal glands artificially stimulated that it chooses to stop releasing the daily magical puff of adrenal that it is supposed to release upon waking, which is nature’s way of making us excited about life, and so we get depressed and drink more coffee! Every day, the thrashing of the adrenal glands chips away at our ability to generate immune responses to pathogens and cold and we become ill, tired, weak and depressed over time! It’s all reversible! Body, mind and spirit thrive with hydrators!”
Explaining or teaching, rather than dictating instructions, allows patients to hear the information you want them to have because it comes without shaming, comparison, or judgment against them. When they reach for the coffee, they don’t feel as though they’re rebelling, and they don’t wonder why it’s not a good idea; instead, because they have been gently informed, they can take the opportunity to be completely onboard with their healing. This is my experience as a practitioner and nearly always, they will give it up.
Then your practice becomes exciting. You get compliance and therefore you see results. The treatments land because the patient is not innocently sabotaging them.
In just days of complete adherence, the classic markers of inflamers in the diet can shift. You’ll see the kidney pulses beginning to anchor back down instead of drifting upward due to lack of hydration at the deepest level; the liver and spleen pulses will be less rapid. If the kidneys had been thoroughly whipped by years of stimulants, the right kidney pulse might have been absent through exhaustion masked by coffee, and you’ll see the beginning of that pulse’s return. The progressive narrowing of the rear of the tongue will cease. The deep midline tongue crack will show the first signs of closing up. The wei qi level pulses will settle down meaning that insomnia, headaches, thirst, dryness, hair loss, hormone imbalances, and the rising yang that measures in western medicine as high blood pressure will all begin to recede. Add acupuncture to that, and you can see staggering and steady improvement in health.
There’s always a way through chronic degenerative diseases, and it doesn’t take a seismic shift to get there.
May every day be luscious.
Ann