Let us revisit allergies from an Oriental Medical viewpoint.

Generally speaking, allergies are a reaction that does not start overnight.  The response of the body to foreign particles can look like watery eyes, sneezing, headache, vomiting, body ache, asthma, difficulty breathing, and runny nose.  Depending on your weakness in the body, determines what symptoms you have.

Since allergies begin gradually, let us start at the beginning of our life.  We all begin young and get older.  There is a saying:  “The girl is mother to the woman.  The boy is father to the man.”  Relating to our bodies, the problems we have in our childhood, if not resolved, will follow us into our older years.

Most problems that occur when we are young ones can be attributed to two sources, digestive issues and traumatic injury.  Allergies are associated with digestive issues.

After childbirth, the body of a baby is still developing the different organ systems of the body: lungs, kidneys, digestion, etc.  Since the digestive system is not fully mature at the time of birth, a baby begins with breast milk, or some variation because it has the nutrients, the water and is easy to digest in the underdeveloped digestive system.  Milk supports the growth and development of the body.  Only when the baby can grab food from the parent’s plate, should solid foods be introduced.  This physical coordination of grasping also corresponds to the first teething.

Introducing food to the baby is occurs in small steps.  Start with one new food item per week.  Remember, she has had only milk for months.  She will not get bored with the lack of variety to her meals.  By introducing only one new food per week, you will be able to observe if she develops any sensitivity to that food.  If she does, stop that food immediately.  It may be that the digestive system needs to develop a little more before it can handle that food.  Reintroduce that food a month later and see if she can handle it.  If not, put that food on a list to be reintroduced after she is 1 years old.

Frequency of eating also causes problems.  Regulate the baby’s feeding, every 2-4 hours.  Feeding her whenever she cries overloads the digestive system.  Overfeeding can result in vomiting, constipation, runny nose, a cough, or maybe even a fever.

Typically, these days, children are sick 10-16 times a year.  That means your child is sick every three weeks.  Though it may seem like an odd statement but it is true:  It really is not normal to be sick.  Think of all the moments that are wasted by being in bed or going to the doctors.  Childhood should be spent learning and doing and interacting; not seeing doctors and healers and the ceiling of her bedroom.

Frequent use of antibiotics and over-the-counter cold and flu medicines weaken a child’s digestive system; which means that the cure can be the cause for allergies.

The typical baby diet these days is filled with fruits and juices and sugary foods.  French fries, deep fried foods rate high on a child’s diet.

A diet based on sugary and fried foods, along with overeating, causes the body to develop Dampness and Heat which then allows yeast and fungi to grow unchecked.  When the food arrives in the intestines, the Dampness weakens the walls of the intestine allowing the yeast, fungi and food to leak into the rest of the body.  The body responds to these foreign particles by attacking them.  The immune system goes to full alert.  If this full alert stage is continued over a period of weeks and months the body begins to attack non-allergic substances.  This response is labeled allergies.

The first step to alleviating allergies is to simplify.  Lose the sodas and strong coffee.  Drink a gallon of water, maybe flavored with lemon. Remove the processed foods:   if it is not found on a farm, do not eat it.  Overall, reduce the amount of food you are eating daily.  This could be done by fewer meals or smaller meals, whichever work for you.

Now it is time to get rest.  Make an effort to sleep for 10 hours, 3 nights in a row.  How do you feel?  The immune system will produce various illnesses if the body is deprived of sleep.

If these approaches have not eliminated your symptoms of allergies, homeopathy and Oriental Medicine, as well as other remedies are a good next step for you to rebuild your health.  Find the answer that removes allergies from your life.

The basic ingredients of the cracker are:

1 part raw almonds, soaked for 8 hours, then rinsed

½ part raw pumpkin seeds, soaked for 8 hours, then rinsed,

¼ part dried tomatoes, soaked for 4 hours, keep juice

¾ teaspoon salt for every 3 cups of nuts or ¾ pounds of nuts

Water as needed to make mixture smooth.

Using a Cuisinart Food Processor with the metal blade attachment, add all ingredients and process until smooth.  Wipe down the bowl occasionally processing.  Allow 5 minutes of processing time to get the mixture smooth.

Spread the mixture onto the solid non-stick sheets for the Excalibur Food Dehydrator.  Mixture should be about 3/8inch thick.  Score the mixture using the edge of the knife into the desired cracker size.  Put the sheet onto a rack and place in the dehydrator.  Turn the temperature to 145 degrees for 2 hours; then decrease the heat to 115 degrees and set for 16 – 22 hours.  When the tops of the crackers are dry, after about 6-8 hours, turn over crackers and remove non-stick sheet.  Continue to drying until the crackers are stiff.

Once completely dry, break the crackers along score lines and store in a sealed container on the counter.  Crackers will remain fresh for 3 weeks.  If the crackers become soft, you can dry them again in the dehydrator for a few hours.  It restores the crispness.

If you do not have a dehydrator you can use an oven.  Set the temperature to the lowest setting, either 150 or 200 degrees.  Bake them for 4 hours, then turn the cracker over when the top is dry to the touch. Continue baking until the cracker is completely dry, about 6-8 hours.

The crackers can be eaten with cheese, nut butter, avocado, veggie dips or anything you can think of that you would put on a cracker or a piece of bread.

The flavor of the crackers can be varied by using a different vegetable or no vegetable at all, for example, olives or bell peppers.  Fresh vegetables, as opposed to dried, will require a long drying time.

The Almond Tomato Cracker can also be varied depending on the seed available.  Always use the almond but you can use sunflower seeds instead of pumpkin seeds.Enjoy the versatility and flavor of the Almond Tomato Cracker.

Water retention, or edema, comes in the form of bloating.  This bloating can be in your hands, your feet, your belly, your chest, and or your head.  Wherever you have skin and muscle, you can have water retention.

From an Oriental Medical standpoint, water retention is due to an obstruction of the movement of water in the body.  Sometimes the obstruction is due to an accumulation of Heat and sometimes it is due to an accumulation of a lack of energy.

Heat can be accumulated from either the outside coming in as a hot day or spending too long in the Jacuzzi.  The heat enters the body through the pores and travels through the channels and collaterals of the body.  If the heat is not released back through the skin, it travels deeper to the interior of the body.  When the heat is in the interior, it can get lodged in the Urinary Bladder.  Heat in the Urinary Bladder will obstruct the flow of urine from the body.  If urine is not completely released from the body, the backlog of water will seep into the surrounding tissues.  The can show as swollen legs with difficulty to urinate.

A second kind of heat which comes from the inside of the body is brought into the body via the mouth.  It is the food you eat.  Too much cold or raw food makes the body work too hard to get it to the right temperature of the body.

Did you know that the body works harder to warm up the cold drink you drank because you were feeling hot, then if you would have had a room temperature drink?  Next time you are hot, drink you beverage at 70 degrees or warmer and see if you do not feel cooler overall in 5 minutes than if you drank an ice cold drink.

Other foods that create heat in the body are oily, greasy foods and sugary foods like dessert and alcohol.  Both of these create heat during digestion which prevents the digestive track from transporting the fluids to other places in the body.  Usually you will feel wider around the middle.  This is the time you reach for the next size up pants or skirt.

The internal heat brought on by your diet was probably started during a binge.  It could have been a forced situation like the mandatory family or office party.  It could have also been the accumulation of feeling stress from one thing or all of them put together.  So you start with one glass of wine and the next thing you know, you have it finished in a night.  The same thing happened the night before.  So you wake up in the morning and scare yourself half to death as you look at your face in the mirror.  The bags under the eyes tell you that you need help, quickly.  Your clothes shrunk overnight.  Your ring is a size too small.  And you must have picked up someone else’s shoes before they definitely are not your size.

A second cause for edema is too much emptiness in the body.  You have tuckered yourself out from overworking, over thinking, and or oversexed (even if it is only in your dreams).  With this lack of energy, the water cannot be transported from the digestive system or dispersed by the Lung system or removed via the Kidney system, or all the above.

So now what?  What is your first aid for edema?

If your situation is due to Heat from the atmosphere or from your diet, decide that today is all about cucumbers.  Peel them and remove the seeds if necessary.  After that, get creative and have them for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Raw, cooked, juiced, any method is a good method.

Cucumbers help the body to flush out extra fluid.  And today, you need to reduce the stress on the body from the extra fluid in the system.  Continue eating cucumbers for a few days, at least until the swelling reduces and your clothes feel better.

If you regularly have edema, it is time to weed out the offenders in your diet.  Make some changes: warmer drinks, less sugar/fruit/alcohol, leave the fried foods for someone else.

If your problem stems more from your lifestyle, your attitude, a good place to start is at your local acupuncturist.  Find out what has become deficient.

With the help of the acupuncturist and changes to your lifestyle, you will be able to say good-bye to the two different sized clothes.  Edema is your body saying that something is not working right or cannot work right.  The water retention is the effect, get help finding the cause and work to eliminate the cause.  Above all, be patient with yourself so eventually fluid retention will be a thing of the past for you.

There are actually three different responses you can have to any treatment.  Responses can vary due to the type of symptom or the duration of the symptom.  Also, your usual way of responding may vary slightly within that type of response.

The first response is no response.  You can have no response to treatment if you do not believe in the curative nature of the treatment given.  I, personally, will not treat anyone who is being coerced to come to me.  For example, in the past, I have had appointments with two different people who did not want to see me, a husband and a young daughter.  I stopped the consultation when it was clear that they did not want my help.   My recommendation is simple:  Do only what you believe in.  If you do not buy into the type of treatment, whether it is Western Medicine or Oriental Medicine, laying on of hands or crystal therapy, do not proceed with the treatment.  It is a waste of your money and the practitioner’s time.

If you believe in the treatment but still have no results, it could be that you have told your body at some time, for some reason and in some fashion that if you are not dead, everything is fine.  This message to the body, tells the body not to complain about anything.  If this guideline for the body persists, the little workers in your body go on vacation.  Damages and disease are allowed to continue without being checked and resolved.  To break this cycle, start with this simple act:  Look at yourself in the mirror and say something like this:  “Body, if I am not perfectly well give me a sign.” This wakes up your body.  This gets your body thinking about house cleaning.  Then when you introduce acupuncture or herbs or a lifestyle change of some sort, your body is ready and eager to use these materials to rebuild itself.  David Hawkins, MD, Healing and Recovery, wrote an excellent book filled with tools to redirect your body and start the healing process.

The second response is the miracle response.  One treatment makes a world of difference:  your pain drops to a slight ache or your cough calms down to almost nothing within the first couple treatments.  You will only need 3-6 treatments or 1-3 months of herbs/homeopathic remedies to resolve the symptoms and restore you back to the land of the living. This response happens often with recent symptoms like a whiplash from a car accident in the last 24 hours or a headache that just started this morning.  The response will be noticeable and immediate, however, sometimes a follow up appointment is needed 2-4 months later.

The third response is the methodical response.  After the first treatment, you feel different but you cannot say you feel better.  You may even experience a reduction in symptoms for an hour after the treatment that could continue for a couple of days.  But after that short period of time, the symptoms return.  In this case, you need treatments on a regular basis for weeks if not months.  Depending on the symptom, you may need 6 to 20 treatments to show some significant improvement.

The reason for this is that with each treatment you receive, your body is rebuilding its reserves.

Somewhere along the line your body got depleted.  It could have been because you overworked or overplayed or overate all the wrong foods, or maybe even all the right foods.  The stress of managing the operations of your body began to deplete your reserves.  You notice your mental clarity has suffered; your desire to do things is gone.  You find yourself doing the least possible because that is the most you can do.

In order to start healing, your body will use the healing energy it gets to first rebuild its reserve energy.  As your reserves are filled, you will notice improvement of your health happening more rapidly than when you first started treatment.  It is a momentum that builds over the course of treatments.  Once the body gets the energy, all the workers of your body start making changes, and these changes stay.  Little by little you lose the pain and heaviness of your illness and regain your health.

To succeed with this response to healing you need to be patient.  Each treatment makes a difference even though it can be too subtle for you to notice.  If you find your patience growing thin, ask someone who you associate with often if they notice any change in you.  The change can be something so simple as you do not complain about the symptoms as often.  Understand that that means you are making progress.  Keep your eye on the little changes to keep you excited about your progress.

Now that you know the 3 responses to healing, you can be a more active participant in your healing.

First of all let’s start with what a winter squash looks like.  It has many shapes and colors but the best way to determine if you have a winter squash is the hardness of the outside.  The soft texture of a zucchini makes it a summer squash.

Summer squashes, like the zucchini and yellow crook neck squash, are planted in early March and are ready to eat in June/ July time frame.  Winter squash are also planted in March and are ready to eat around September

Because of the long growing cycle, the winter squash absorbs many nutrients from the soil.  It also has lots of fiber that cleanse the digestive track as it moves through the system.

I recommend using winter squash as a dense vegetable in your meal.  Its density helps you to feel full during a meal.

Though winter squash is a vegetable, it is sweet.  It can be used to substitute the usual breakfast foods.  You can eat it with butter, oil and salt, or even cinnamon, depending on the flavor you desire.

The simple approach to baking winter squash is:

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Wash squash and cut in half.
3. Remove seeds.
4. Place squash cut sides down on a pan.
5. Place in oven
6. Bake until tender, 45-90 minutes.
7. Scoop pulp from the skins.
8. Flavor as desired.

Winter squash can be cooking in the oven in the morning while you are getting ready to go to work.  Or you can cook it on your off day and have it ready to eat for the next four days.

By adding winter squash to your diet, you will have a more balanced sense of well-being throughout the day.

I would be its human guinea pig.  I was very interested in reducing the effects of aging.  Starting young would allow me to see my aging process in relation to my siblings.
The program consisted of a 10 week process of beginning with 3 repetitions and adding 2 until I reach the full set of 21.  Before I left Japan, I was doing the full set.  A full set only takes 10 minutes to complete.

The instructions stated to do these exercise whether you were sick or well.  It also stated in my copy, that if one did these exercises every day, one would not need to do any other exercise.  I was excited about that.  I liked the idea of addressing youth while staying fit.  Over the years, I estimate I have missed 60 days of doing the exercises due to shoulder injuries and severe fatigue related to being sick.  I firmly believe that the exercises helped me keep my physical strength when I was in acupuncture college doing nothing more than studying.  I could lift objects that the rest of the women in the group could not.  Many years later, I attended a shopping convention in which one of the booths was selling a piece of exercise equipment.  To determine what your individual workout program would be, the sales person had the group of us take a fitness test.  Where my friends ranked around 5 out of a possible 10, I ranked 9 out of 10.  Not bad for someone who only did the Fountain of Youth exercises daily.
The first year of my acupuncture practice, I held a 10 week program on the Fountain of Youth movements.  On day 1, I asked everyone to write down how they felt physically, emotionally and mentally.  I collected the letters and stored them away for the last day of the program so they could compare their results.
Ten weeks later, six participants completed the program.  The age range went from 35 years to 85 years of age.   This was some of the results from the group:

* The 85 year old woman had more energy.  She was even more spunkier than when she started.  When she started, she carried herself like an old woman. When she left, she stood a little taller and had a stronger presence.
* The 60+ year old man came to the class with a cane and instability in his walk and stiffness in his movements.  At the end of the program, he was more stable on his legs and he ceased to appear like the Tin man from the Wizard of Oz.  Both his wife and him were very happy about the changes.
* The 50+ year old woman believed nothing had changed.  What she did not observe that the staff observed was that her extreme pessimism had become more optimistic.  She was smiling more and her tone of voice had softened.
What about you?

These exercises, also known as the “Tibetan Rites” or “Five Rituals” take only 10 minutes of your time a day.  They work by allowing the energy in your body to move in the proper direction and speed to keep you healthy and maintain vitality your body.  Remember, it only takes 10 minutes a day.
Give yourself a challenge.  Get the Fountain of Youth and start your own experiment.  Log how you feel at this moment in time – physically, mentally, and emotionally.  Add in how you feel about your job, your family, your body.  Put as much as you want about your opinion of yourself.  Then file it in a drawer and get busy with the Tibetan Rites.
I recommend that you start your day with the Tibetan Rites.  Jump out of bed and do them.  If you wait until after you have showered and had a cup of coffee, you probably will find something better to do.  The point is not to give yourself an excuse to not do them. Then go on with the rest of your morning and enjoy your day knowing that you have done something to keep your body strong, limber and youthful.
When I have been compelled out of bed by an emergency long before my usual wake-up time, I would throw on some clothes and get on my way.  When the task was completed and I found myself home later that morning, I would start my day as if I had just gotten up:  begin with the Tibetan Rites, shower and dress.  I would feel like a new woman.  At one time, I thought it was the shower that made me feel so energized but during one of those made dashes, I only had time to get home, do the Rites and fly out of the house again.  I realized then that it was the Rites that made me feel alive, not the shower.
I recommend that you do the Tibetan Rites early in the day because of the revitalizing affect they have on the body; some of my patients noticed sleep issues when they did it before bedtime.
Some of you may say that you do not have enough time in the morning.  I say, just get up 10 minutes earlier.  The Tibetan Rites will change your day. Let your body feel beautiful again.

There is a move to bring the population to a higher standard of youth and beauty.

Society as a whole is living longer.  I hear fifty is the new forty.  So what does that mean?  We want to look forty at fifty.  Heck, we want to look twenty at forty.  I vote for that one.  Is it unrealistic?  I do not think so.  With the longer life span, there has to be a change in the aging of the body.  Having a decrepit body at ninety when you still have another thirty years does not make sense.  There is an answer out there – more than one.

With a longer life, there are certain expectations and desires that go with it.  What is the point of living longer if you cannot have fun?  And if all your friends are dying off, you have to make new ones.  The only way to make new friends is to be able to get out of the house and be public.  That means you need to be able to move and look good doing it.

Right now, you look at the older generation and say, “No way do I want to look that old.  No way do I want to be housebound when the world is moving all around me.  If I am going to live longer, I want to have enjoyment in my days.”  With enjoyment is the unspoken desire to retain your beauty.

Getting older is fine.  Being old is not so fine.  As our lifespan increases, beauty becomes a necessity.  By being beautiful and staying beautiful, the world pays attention to you.  You have a secret that everyone else craves.  You become someone special.

Beyond being special, beauty allows you to stay connected to the younger generation.

Sometimes the extra wrinkles set you apart from the younger generation.  The lines on your face create an age gap which translates into a gap in understanding.  You are looked upon as being different, set in your ways. The teenager says to herself, “How can someone that old really understand what I am going through?”

By looking younger, or not so old, you may have an easier time convincing the teenager that you really do understand.

It is good to have many years over your head, just not written on your face.

What are a couple of options for getting rid of the wrinkles?

One way is through a surgical facelift.   It is a short procedure, including the recovery time.  The excess skin is removed and viola, you are young and beautiful.  Then the months pass, maybe even years, and your face begins to wrinkle, and with the wrinkles comes the dreaded sagging.  What do you do?  Have another surgical facelift?  Hmm.  Your skin has lost its elasticity and your face looks stretched and unreal.  Even though you can cut away the wrinkles, you know, given a certain amount of time the procedure will wear-off again and you will look wrinkled and aged.

There has to be a better way to beauty that will smooth the wrinkles, lift the skin and keep the elasticity so that the face stays younger looking, longer.

Let’s take a look at skin in general.

The skin is the largest organ in the body.  It protects the body from the world outside and it maintains proper temperature through the opening and closing of its pores.

When other organs do not function properly, for instance, when digestion gets stopped up and you have constipation or when the blood is not being filtered by the liver or kidneys due to an accumulation of chemicals in the system, the skin helps out by removing the waste and toxins in the form of odor, perspiration, sores, ulcers, rashes and pimples.

The face, in Oriental Medicine, tells the story of the whole body in its coloration, blemishes and lines.  When you are tired, you get bags under your eyes.  When you have a fever, your face turns a shade of red.  When you have allergies, the eye lids become red and swollen. When you are under stress, pimples break out on your neck and chin.

If the face looks old because the body is having problems, why not fix the body then the face will look younger, less haggard? You are probably thinking that fixing the body is great but that might take a long time.  I have tons of things wrong with me.  I want to look younger now.

So, how do you get the face looking better in a short amount of time?  One way is to work on the face directly which in turn helps the rest of the body.  Acupuncture facial rejuvenation, also known as, acupuncture facelift does just that.

Facial Rejuvenation achieves both a more youthful appearance and a healthier body and mind.

Rejuvenating the face rejuvenates the body.  When the body is filled with vitality, it reflects on your face.

During cosmetic acupuncture, each wrinkle and furrow is viewed in relation to the whole body.  The points located near the wrinkles and furrows correspond to a specific organ system.  By needling these points, the skin becomes smoother and the organ system related to each area gets a treatment also.  The more treatments the face receives, the more healing the organ system receives.

You will find that as you continue regular facial acupuncture treatments, your back aches, your indigestion, your bloating reduces in severity to such a point that you stop having the symptoms.  In this way, you heal the body by retaining the beauty in the face.

Beauty is not skin deep.  It is the reflection of the health in your body.  Your vanity is simply your body asking for help.  Listen to its whisperings.  Give it what it craves, what you crave.  Give it its vitality, its smooth operation, its ability to be and do for you what you want to be and do.  It lives for you.  Choose beauty through health and you will find your body thanking you in vitality, strength and calmness.