Cell Danger Response Through the Lens of Chinese Medicine

Discover how the Traditional Chinese Medicine concept of Qi parallels modern ideas about cellular bioenergetics, mitochondrial function, and ATP production, helping explain why chronic illness can leave you profoundly depleted.
Understand why the body’s protective Wei Qi response can become stuck on high alert after infection, toxins, trauma, or prolonged stress, contributing to chronic inflammation, fatigue, poor sleep, pain, and nervous system dysregulation.
Learn why recovery may require more than continuing to fight the original threat, and how supporting mitochondrial function, digestion, nervous system regulation, nutrient status, and the body’s ability to recognize safety may help restore healthy function.

About the Expert

John Nieters, LAc, DAOM, CFMP

Dr John Nieters

Dr John Nieters has been teaching and practicing the combination of Functional Medicine paired with Traditional Chinese Medicine for several decades. He has been practicing Tai Qi, Qi Gong and meditation for 50 years.He has hosted over 500 call-in talk radio shows on "The Balancing Point." He currently lives in Alameda, CA with his wife, Jenny and son, Johnny. His wife, Jenny, is the acupuncturist for the 49ers football and St Mary's Rugby team.He has authored the book "The Sweet Spot," on how to read your blood work and plans to have two additional books published this year.Dr John's patients, staff and listeners call me the "Story-teller".

and I would have patients come in and say, hey, can you treat the vagus nerve? And I'd say hey I can't not treat a vagous nerve. Chinese medicine has been treating the Vegas nerve for 3,000 years.

And so they didn't call it the vegas nerve, they did know there was a vegus nerve they know nothing about it. But they came up with treatments to treat it anyway.

Hi and welcome to The Balancing Point. I'm Dr. John Meters and i'm here to make traditional Chinese Medicine functional medicine and integrative health simple, practical and fun so you can restore balance, boost vitality and enjoy a healthier life every single day.

Hi, thanks for joining me again. This is Dr. John. I'm doing another podcast to put on thebalancingpoint.net and obviously several other places that we have it posted up to.

And today we're going to do a podcast about cell danger response and traditional Chinese medicine integration. And just a couple words about self-danger response.

This is a theory, I'll call it, although I think it's been pretty well proven, that Dr. Robert Naviot put forth a few years ago. acknowledging that mitochondria will partially shut down after trauma or a disease process or during a trauma, or disease, process.

And Dr. Navio's contribution is that it often doesn't turn back on. That is the source of ATP production, adenosine triphosphate, which is an energizing life force molecule in the body.

And so we're going to do this in the traditional Chinese question and answer format. And Catherine is going pretend she's the yellow emperor. I'm Chibo, the advisor to the Yellow Emperor, and she is gonna ask some questions and I am gonna respond.

So Catherine? Hello, excited to be with you today and excited about this topic is one that I think a lot of people can relate to when they hear more about it.

Okay, so first question, how does the traditional Chinese medicine concept of Qi, vital function energy actually mirror what modern science measures as ATP production and cellular bioenergetics in this CDR framework.

Okay, the CDR framework being Cell Danger Response Framework. And I think I want to start out by letting my audience know that in our practice here in Alameda, at Alameida Acupuncture, it's somewhat bifurcated.

I mean, there's an overlap. Many of us see the same patients for different conditions, but we have a sports medicine and orthopedics department headed by my wife, Jennifer Needers, who's the acupuncturist for the 49ers and many other professional and amateur athletes.

And then my side with along with Katherine Black is really doing internal medicine and gynecology. At least half of our patients, maybe more, at least have of patients I will have this discussion about cell danger response.

Why is it so hard? They have long COVID, they have Lyme disease, et cetera. Why is it so hard to get their energy back? And so for me, this is one of the most striking parallels I've really encountered, and I encountered many.

And it suggests that these ancient Chinese physicians, I mean really mind-blowing stuff they came up with, working without microscopes, without biochemistry, or without chemistry mostly, were observing and categorizing the same fundamental biological phenomenon that Dr.

Robert Naviot is now measuring with metabolomics, he calls it, and molecular biology. And there's so many areas in Chinese medicine that you see this, hormone relationships, they actually Nailed female hormones 2000 years ago and still some of their ideas are better More accurate in the clinic than things that we see from a Western biomedical standpoint so in in traditional Chinese medicine and I'll probably call that TCM going forward, the term Qi, Q-I, is often mistranslated in the West as life force or energy or vital energy, which sounds mystical and vague, but if you really read classical TCm texts carefully, and this is not something that's done very often anymore.

I did a doctoral program for two years that was just about reading classical Chinese medical texts from the ancients. But if you read them carefully, Qi is described with remarkable specificity.

It is not a fluffy concept at all. Its the capacity for transformation, the ability to move, ability warm to protect and maintain function. So in the West we would call that homeostasis.

You know, how do you stay in balance? And Qi, is remarkably specific in that way. It's what enables food to be converted into usable energy. I mean, you don't just eat something and instantly have energy, there's a massive, massive number of processes that have to occur, right?

You have get the food into your body. You'll have break it down into smaller molecular size. And you have absorb it through your intestines, into you bloodstream.

Then you'll deliver it to the cells that need it. and then you get it into the cell. So it is absolutely a miraculous process. But. So Qi is what enables food to be converted into usable energy.

It moves the blood through the vessel. it maintains the integrity of organs and boundaries and it powers metabolism. And again, this is not mystical. Now there, I'm not saying there aren't some mystical aspects to Chinese medicine because they're mystical because we really still don't understand all the detail, but this.

This is a precise description of what modern biology calls bioenergetics. the conversion of nutrients into ATP, which is identicin triphosphate, the energy currency of the cells.

I think that's really big is when people can finally understand that Qi is ATP. You know, your mitochondria. It's part of it. Yeah, that's a part the process.

And the thing with Qi is the Chinese use that one term to describe multiple, multiple processes that have to be run by energy, right? So it gets confusing when you say, well, what is Qi?

Yes, yes, it's many things. So when eat food, yourselves don't directly use the glucose or fats as energy. Instead, the mitochondria, these small, you know, thousands of them in a single cell, they're small chemical production facilities, or energy production, facilities.

They oxidize these nutrients through what, in my day, was called the Krebs cycle. Now, I think it's a trioxy, anyway, it doesn't matter. I still call it the Kreb cycle, and the electron transport chain.

Now, any student of chemistry or biochemistry has to remember the Krebs cycle and the electron transport chain, and that's what generates ATP molecules.

Every ATP molecule that is produced represents, we could call it a spark of usable energy. The capacity to build, to move, warm, protect, and maintain function.

This is Qi in our current modern biochemical language. So again, not really mystical. Now, magical perhaps, but not mystical Now here's where it becomes fascinating in traditional Chinese medical theory.

Qi is not static. It's described as flowing, circulating, transforming. When Qi flows smoothly, the body's warm, alert, and healthy. when Qi stagnates, when it become stuck or blocked, you see fatigue, poor digestion, pain, cold extremities.

When she's depleted or exhausted, you see chronic illness, weakness, and multi-system dysfunction. And this maps directly onto what happens in cell danger response.

You get multi systemic dysfunction So in a healthy cell operating normally, oxidative phosphorylation, don't worry about that term, is kind of humming along efficiently, right?

It's doing its job. It knows what to do. There's an old Latin saying, and I'll probably screw this up, it's medicus curat Naturasandat, which means the doctor treats and nature heals.

So doctors never heal anything, whether it's Chinese medicine or Western medicine, they treat. They help the body get back into balance by moving the qi.

whether it's Western or Chinese, we use different terms, but it is the same thing. And the cell is generating approximately 30 to 36 ATP molecules per glucose molecule.

Energy is abundant, flowing, available for all the work the organism needs to do, and that is chi in full flow. The person feels, as I said, energetic, warm, capable.

But when the cells enter the cell danger response state and shifts to defensive glycolysis production or breakdown of sugars, something critical changes.

The cell begins producing just two ATP molecules per glucose molecule instead of 30 plus. So that's why people are so grossly fatigued. I mean, literally they're getting one 15th the amount of energy flow.

Yeah. So suddenly, the cell is operating on an energy budget that's 15 times more restrictive. Energy production's basically collapsed. And this is not a small reduction.

This is catastrophic drop in bioenergetics. Again, 1-15. So in TCM terms, this is, amongst other things, Qi stagnation or metabolic trapping from a Western perspective.

So the Qi, the energy ATP production, isn't flowing smoothly throughout the cell and the body. It's diverted away from its normal functions. and normal functions of growth, tissue maintenance, heat production, smooth movement of the blood and the lymph, and it's locked in a defensive posture.

It's defending itself. it doesn't want to produce too much energy because you might get in more trouble with it. So the energy is still being produced.

There's enough that you can breathe and that can think partially, but it is being consumed entirely by survival mechanisms. Its maintaining the cells defensive postures It's releasing danger signals and it's keeping the nervous system on alert.

Now people feel not alert, that's because all the energy is going to their nervous that has to be on a alert because it is in so much danger. And I also see patients, they don't realize that that is their new normal and so their alert is normal for them.

They are so used to it. Absolutely. Exactly. That sense of beingness has actually been changed and transformed in a very, what I would consider, negative way.

So someone that's experienced this can describe it perfectly. They say, I have no energy. Everything I do exhausts me. I feel cold even when the weather is warm.

My digestion is bad. It's sluggish. I can't think clearly. So these are not metaphorical descriptions. They're actually direct consequences of cells that are operating in a state of profound metabolic restriction.

So the TCM physician observing this pattern centuries ago called it chi stagnation. Now it could be chi deficiency also, but I'm going to go with stagnations for these purposes.

They didn't have metabolomics to measure ATP production, and they didn' have the vocabulary to describe mitochondrial dysfunction. Nobody had seen a mitochondria at that point.

You know, they're way too small to see. But they recognized the pattern. that energy is trapped, it's not flowing, and they develop treatment strategies based on that observation.

And by the way brilliant, brilliant treatment strategy. What's remarkable is that some of these ancient strategies actually work by promoting oxidative phosphorylation, the big term I used earlier.

which supports mitochondrial function. Certain herbal compounds have since been shown to contain CoQ10-like molecules or to upregulate mitochondria energy and biogenesis.

So acupuncture points that tonify chi appear to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and increase ATP availability. That's pretty wild, actually.

Yeah, the treatments were right. The mechanism was unknown. And so a couple of years ago, I don't do time very well, but there was something hit, you know, and you started seeing all these podcasts and books about vagus nerve dysfunction.

I would have patients come in and say, hey, can you treat the vagous nerve? And I'd say hey I can't not treat a vagal nerve. Chinese medicine has been treating the Vegas nerve for 3,000 years.

And so they didn't call it the vagus nerve, they know nothing about it, but they came up with treatments to treat it anyway. So when we talk about addressing cheese stagnation in a cell danger response patient, we're talking about the same thing Dr.

Navio describes, restoring the conditions for the cell to resume efficient oxidative phosphorylation. other words, doing its basic job. We're restoring the smooth flow of energy through the mitochondria, through to the body.

Removing the cell from a state of metabolic stagnation to metabolic flow. And that's exactly what Chinese medicine is about. So this is why the supplement protocol that we've discussed, and I talk to my patients all the time, of CoQ10, carnitine, B vitamins, magnesium.

This is why those supplements work. They work by activating the variety of movement that is needed inside the Krebs cycle to produce energy. And these aren't random interventions.

They're direct supports for mitochondrial function and hence ATP production. In modern terms, they restore chi. in TCM, They move chi and restore its flow.

One thing that I've noticed personally is how with the recommendations that a lot of companies and the FDA and stuff like that give for the carnitine, CoQ10, B vitamins and magnesium.

But with my own personal health journey, you know, I was severely ATP-divisioned and what the recommendations of like the B-vitamins and Magnesium, my body needed a whole lot more.

And it wasn't until I started increasing it and doing what my buddy needed that all of a sudden I start feeling like, oh, My body is actually using these.

It's different if everyone and that's kind of a point, you know, I talked to patients about chat GPT or any of the AI forums. And the good thing about those is they give you a lot of useful information if you know how to use it.

So it is concepts without context. That's why you need an experienced practitioner. Patients will say, well, how much B12 do I need to take? Some people don't need to take any.

They're getting enough in their food supply and their digestive system is strong enough, they have enough stomach acidity to get the B12 out of their foods.

Other patients have no ability to do that and they need take quite large amounts of vitamin B-12. Same with magnesium or any other supplement. It's really recognizing who who, the specific person and their specific condition, who needs how much of what?

And so that's where you get in trouble by basing all of your information off of the AI platforms is they don't have context. I mean, you know, just on a simple note, like I've seen over 70,000 patients.

hundreds and hundreds, thousands of herbal and supplement prescriptions. So obviously I have context for it, not just content. Now I'll look at ChatGPT or one of the other AI forums for information.

I think it's great. But how do you use that information, right? That's really the key. Do you want to use Chat GP to change the timing chain on your $50,000 diesel pickup?

I don't think so. So anyway, thank you, Catherine. Yeah. So one thing that I've noticed through my own healing journey is that Unless you've gone through it, you don't understand it.

But how you become like super sensitive to a lot of stuff around you. And that's kind of like in traditional Chinese medicine, that your wei qi, your defense q, You're just like on alert.

You are very much aware of everything going around. Um, and often with the normal traditional chinese medicine your way q is supposed to mobilize rapidly during acute threat and then return inward once it's safe and it is established.

How does this parallel with sale danger response and why does way she becomes stuck in chronic illness? You know, it's funny, the parallel between these is so precise that it actually feels like Dr.

Navio reverse engineered cell danger response from TCM theory, which by the way, I'm not saying whether he did or didn't, but there are so many books written now where they're talking about different mechanisms.

Dale Bredesen's End of Alzheimer's comes to mind. It's basically a TCM book when you look at it, Traditional Chinese Medicine, where it talks about the different causes or conditions that make Alzheimer's likely or possible.

And I swear, it's just reverse engineered traditional Chinese medicine. Again, I'm assuming, and strongly, that Dr. Navio arrived at this model through molecular biology.

But the insight's identical. Acute defense is necessary and protective, but chronic defense, is exhausting and pathological. And that's why there are herbs that people take that are great.

Like echinacea is great to take if you've been exposed to an illness or you think you're starting to get sick. chronically take echinacea, it actually can over stimulate the defensive chi for too long a period of time and you actually start to get weaker or don't have the ability to process it.

And there are lots of things like that. So in traditional Chinese medicine, which is Weichi, which is W-E-I-Q-i, weichi is sometimes translated as defensive chi or protective chi.

Now one of the things that we have to remember with all of these terms is the written Chinese language are pictograms. So one pictagram can mean many, many different things.

In fact, if you look up the pict diagram Qi, the list is exhaustive of the things that it can means. But here we're going to translate it as defensive or protective Qi.

And it's distinct from other forms of Qi, like Ying Qi which is the nutritive Qi. It's what's responsible for your digestive process, constructive energy that builds and maintains tissues.

So Wei Qi has specific characteristics. Its very fast moving. It's active on the body surface and boundaries. And it's the primary defense against what's called Xie Qi, X-I-E Qi which are pathogenic influences like cold, wind, dampness, too much heat, and in modern terms, pathogens and toxins.

So it is what activates. Yeah. Would this be similar to like your immune system? So like when people have almost like autoimmune, like you're immune systems hyperactive?

It is exactly, it's not even like it. It's exactly that. And so, for example, one of the formulas that we use, like if I have a female that's here, and she's having particularly horrible periods, she is cold, has no energy, I use a formula called Donggui Buxhui Tongue.

That's my favorite. that makes that formula so successful is the two herbs in it are two of the three top microcirculation herbs. So it works very quickly.

It really activates your system with chi and blood so that you can actually function. But it's really a micro circulation thing. Yeah, so when a pathogenic influence attempts to invade the body, that's when the wei qi mobilizes instantly.

I had a t-shirt that I have a saying put on it from the original book of Chinese medicine though. the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Medicine. And it says, when the internal is righteous, external evils cannot invade.

Right? And I was like, yeah, if you keep that cheap process active, then the bad guys can't get in. We see that with the seasonal flu every year. Some people got sick and died.

Other people didn't even know that they had COVID. Other years, people didn't even know they had the flu because their Weichi was so powerful. It pushed the invader out before it could take over your body.

It also warms the area, increases circulation, activates immune response, and creates a protective barrier. Now, I talk about this with acupuncture. When you just put a needle into the skin, particularly if you do a little electro acupuncture, but even just regular needling, One of the ways it helps, there are many, but one of them is it draws what many people call the soup.

It'll bring red blood cells, white blood cell, serotonin, tons of other healing chemicals to the site where you put the needle. And so it causes healing.

Its incredibly powerful. So anyway, it activates the immune responses. It creates a protective barrier. And this is the acute inflammatory response, which as Katherine mentioned, you need the acute response.

You don't want it to become chronic. So you might feel this as a fever, some localized inflammation. Activated immune cells, the immediate protective cascade, and a healthy acute response, this is exactly right.

Weiqi surges outward to meet the threat. But here's the critical piece of TCM theory that's often overlooked. Weichi is supposed to be a temporary response.

Once the threats contained are eliminated, weichi supposed return inward. The body is suppose to down regulate the alarm signal, right? Much of pain is because certain chemicals called cytokines or interleukins get activated and then they don't deactivate.

For example, I have gout and so the The gout crystals are still in the joints. They're still there. There's nothing that I know of to actually take them out, but I no longer have any pain because I discovered that my pain was caused by an increase in interleukin 6 that wouldn't calm down.

So once I learned how to calm that down, I have zero pain from goug, even though I still have gouts. It reminds me of when you would talk about how you see X-rays of people and you'd be like, this is how are they not in pain?

How are the walking? And they're just fine because of their inflammation. They've been able to calm down their information. Absolutely. I see this on, uh, cat scans and X-rays of the spine.

Remember coming in one time and at that time we still use light boxes, you know, where you put the X ray or the cat scan and see it with a light behind it.

And I turned it on cause there was a scan that was on it and I said, Oh my God. You know? And, I talked to the acupuncture was treating this man. Can this guy walk?

This is one of worst scans I've ever seen. She said. Yeah, as long as I treat him once a month, he's fine. And I've seen other patients whose CAT scans did not look bad at all, and they were in horrible pain because they weren't putting out the fire.

Now in chronic cell danger response, something breaks this cycle, the way she fails to return back to its source and the acute threat, infection, toxin exposure, injury, trauma, whatever that may be.

may have resolved weeks or months or even years ago, but the body's defensive posture remains locked in place. And so the inflammation cycles just keep going, they continue, and the immune system remains over-activated.

The nervous system remain in threat detection mode, right? All of the fighter jets have been scrambled. They're out there looking for the enemy. chronically activated and it exhausts your reserves.

That takes a huge amount of energy to mount that Wei-Chi response. And so you want it to shut down as soon as it's safe. So why does it happen? Well, there's several mechanisms that both traditional Chinese medicine and cell danger response, several places they really converge on first.

incomplete pathogen or toxin clearance. For example, there are studies done in Scandinavia that show If a child has either a measles vaccine or actually gets the measels that the stronger the rash, the strong, or the immediate acute response, less chronic danger happens.

And the Chinese medicine say, we want to vent the. We want the rush to come out. we don't want it to have a go deeper. this toxin and stay in the body.

So, vent the rash. Don't stop the rush. And so, that's one. You don't get complete clearance of the pathogen. It fragments… So if fragments of original threat are still there, like persistent Lyme bacteria, despite antibiotic treatment, or you have lingering mold, toxins, and tissues, which is incredibly common.

I mean, incredibly or you have viral particles or the remnants, the body's threat detection systems perceive an ongoing threat. Very wise, right? But the nervous system never receives the all clear signal.

So Wei Qi remains mobilized. And in Chinese medicine, we describe this as persistent Xie or evil Qi. pathogenic influence not being fully expressed. Now, the second thing that happens is you get a blockage of the communication pathways that signal, hey, it's safe to come out now.

I mean, I remember a few years ago, there was a Japanese infantryman that had been hiding, and I think it was in the jungles of Philippines since World War II ended, like decades and decades.

Yeah, because he didn't get the communication that the war was over and that's what happens in the body with cell danger response, right? They don't know the wars over.

And so even if the original threat is completely gone, the cell to cell and the nervous system signaling networks that communicate, hey, it's safe to come out now.

The dangerous paths can be disrupted. And this is where certain signaling becomes critical in CDR theory. The cells are releasing danger signals so that they keep the ATP down, but the nervous systems Signals are impaired.

So in TCM terms, the sanjiao, which is called the triple energizer, it's both an area of the body and an acupuncture channel or meridian. And the Sanjia pathways of communication are congested, preventing the bottom from recognizing internal safety.

Now, this Sanjao is not really, there's not a lot of attention put on it in my experience in acupunture colleges. But I studied with a fellow named Wong Ju Yee.

And he used the Sanjiao channel on every chronically ill patient. He said, you've got to open the sanjia. And in his book, he's got beautiful, beautiful explanations.

So if there are any acupuncturists listening to this, I would recommend reading Wong Ju Yi's classic book on meridian theory and especially the Sanzhao channel.

Yeah. If the acute threat was severe or prolonged, or if there is an underlying history of trauma, right? That can be physical or mental, emotional. The nervous system becomes hypersensitized to the threat.

It's like a smoke alarm that's been triggered so many times that it now goes off at any hint of smoke. Even when there's no fire, the TCM description is the way she remains at the defensive perimeter, unable to relax its vigilance.

Now you've got to remember that a lot of the Chinese medical theory was developed during the warring states period when the Chineses were constantly at war.

So many of their examples are examples taken from warfare and military. And so the fourth thing you get is depletion of regulatory psych capacity itself.

Now again, Weichi is very powerful. It's very mobilizing, but it's resource intensive, right? If you're fighting a war overseas, you are using a lot of resources.

You're using massively more than if the army were just sitting at their base in the United States. So it's resource intensive. And so after months and years of chronic activity, the body's reserves just become depleted.

I mean, you only have X amount of energy available. The adrenal glands, sympathetic nervous system, and the immune system are all absolutely exhausted.

do one or two tests here in the office and know that their adrenals and their nervous system and immune system are completely exhausted. One thing that I like is that in Chinese medicine, the adrenal glands are related with the kidney meridian system, and the kidneys are the water.

That's what puts out the fire. And so if your body's on fire, you know, with that constant stress, yeah, your going to be empty. Well, yeah. And paradoxically that, as you're saying, that exhaustion often manifests as continued inflammation or heat and continued Weichi mobilization because the body's just become stuck in a dysregulated state.

You know, forgot to take its foot off the gas pedal. It's like its fire alarm system isn't malfunctioning. Not only does it keep ringing, but the central control system is too depleted to shut it off.

Right. Like the little boy that called wolf. And so the clinical picture of chronically hyperactive Weichi looks a lot like the patient experiencing persistent, low-grade inflammation.

They have chronic pain, often widespread. It can be in multiple locations. They're frequently cold or have temperature dysregulation. Sometimes they're warm, but usually cold.

The immune system is paradoxically both overactive, producing autoimmune antibodies, chronic activation of lymphocytes, et cetera, and ineffective. they can't catch every infection. They can fight off persistent pathogens.

So the patient has chronic fatigue because the nervous system is locked into this state of arousal. Alertness takes energy. They sleep poorly because of threat detection systems in the brain never quiet down.

Why can't I go to sleep? Because your brain won't let you. It's looking for the next danger sign. And so they now have… I'm sorry? You're stuck like here, you're just stuck in the head.

Exactly. And these patients often have autonomic nervous system dysfunction, blood pressure, instability, heart rate variability problems, digestive dysfunctions, et cetera.

The traditional approach to this kind of presentation is often to intensify the attack. Patients are giving even more aggressive immune suppressing drugs, more anti-microbials, and more detox programs.

From a TCM perspective, it's like trying to force Weichi back inward by attacking it. Guess what? That's not going to happen. And this almost invariably makes things worse.

You're essentially telling the body's defense system, your vigilance isn't working hard enough. You need to be more vigilant. It just makes the exhaustion worse and worse.

And you and I see this all the time. I have one patient came in with a full page in small font of illnesses. And they were all true. I mean, Lyme disease, mold exposure, et cetera.

Then we turned to the next page and it was an entire page of supplements. It's more common than we realize. Yeah, so they were supplementing her to continue to stay in that Weichi overactivity.

And so sometimes it's hard because those patients don't want to give up anything. It's like, well, if I had just one more thing, it might be the right thing.

You know, usually it means taking some things away. So in cell danger response, this means reducing the actual threats. Ha ha. To really clear the infection that's persistent, reducing the toxin exposure that is ongoing.

If you live in a moldy house, you're not going to get rid of the toxins in your body. You're just continually overexposed. you've got to support the nervous system's ability to perceive safety.

So these things like vagal nerve stimulation, parasympathetic activation. through breath work and meditation, trauma-informed therapy, the Gupta protocol, et cetera.

You need to restore the metabolic conditions for cell to exit the defensive state. Yay! Removing the metabolic waste and inflammatory signals that keep triggering the danger response.

I'm sorry, you were saying? No, I just think people don't realize that the ATP is so vital, but it needs those nutrients. Um, in order for it to work, it's just, when you're at that state, sometimes you just can't get it from your food anymore because you end up breaking it down.

Exactly. And so, as you know, I'm a, an advocate of the school of this spleen and stomach. So in the around. 1100, 1200 AD, there were many schools of thought that kind of separated out in traditional Chinese medicine.

And my hero was a fellow named Li Dongyan, who wrote The Treatise of the Spleen and Stomach. He said, if you don't treat the stomach and the spleen, and spleen being the functional activity of being able to assimilate your food and break it down.

He said you're doomed to failure. I mean if you give them herbs for the liver, it won't do any good because they can't absorb the herbs through the livers.

So the primacy, the priority must be in his mind the spleen and stomach and I found that to be absolutely accurate and i'm so happy that there's so much microbiome research being done because that's directly in line with the I'm sorry, the treatise of the spleen and stomach.

So in TCM terms, it means you got to expel any residual pathogens. You need to nourish and tonify the deep reserves, not the surface. You to guide the wei chi back inward through calm, supportive interventions.

you need restore the body's capacity to recognize safety. There's an entire condition in Chinese medicine that where we consider an evil is stuck in between.

It's half internal and half external and there's specific formulas to treat that. But it is a known TCM thing. The remarkable thing is that these two frameworks developed centuries apart, right?

Centuries apart and with completely different vocabularies are describing the same therapeutic strategy. Stop fighting. Start supporting, signal safety, restore reserves, let the body's natural healing cascades compete.

As I've said many times, the doctor treats, nature heals, right? The body heals. We just want to give the ability to respond appropriately. And when we do that correctly, yeah.

The way she destabilizes, or I'm sorry, demobilizes the chronic inflammatory markers begin to normalize. And we see this because we do a lot of lab testing.

So we, we it, you know, in our patients and we can feel it with our hands that these things are happening. But it's nice to get a lab test that shows, oh yeah, yeah.

This is really working. Look, those inflammatory markers, your high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, which is a major indicator of cardiovascular damage, has gone from 156 down to 2, right?

So we can see that you're at much less cardiovascular risk at this point. So the cold extremities start to warm up, the sleep improves because you don't have to be on high alert.

The pain begins to resolve because we've lowered the inflammatory chemicals. Energy returns because actually you can use the energy for something useful other than just fighting a battle that shouldn't even be there.

A nervous system begins recognize that the body is no longer under threat. So Catherine, let's, Continue this. Yeah, there's a lot of great information.

I think we should do a part two. Let's do that in the future. You don't want to overwhelm people listening to this, so we'll end it here. And so you can really see the the continuity, I'll say, the supporting nature of cell danger response and traditional Chinese medical theory.

Then we'll come back and talk a little more about how to treat it, how do you get out of that, you know, fight or flight syndrome. Love it. Great. Well, thank you.

Thank you for tuning in. We'll be back with another episode. Bye-bye. real clarity and balance can begin. Visit alamedaacupuncture.com. That's alamedaacupuncture dot com to learn more, explore our supplements, or book a call.

We'd love to hear from you.

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Cell Danger Response Through the Lens of Chinese Medicine

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Alameda Acupuncture

Ancient medicine for our modern world

Cell Danger Response Through the Lens of Chinese Medicine

About the Expert

Recent Posts

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Interested in knowing if we are the right fit for you and your condition?