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Our lungs, our fatigue

by Joel Whitehead

Just recently after a busier-than-normal summer and a whole lot of changeable weather, I came down with a bit of lung congestion. What was my first clue? Well, the fact of the matter is that the cough was only my second clue. My first clue was a tiredness that was beyond normal sleepless nights and no exercise.

A cough is our body's way of getting infections out. In fact, our whole household was coughing a bit this summer, and it was reassuring that my children have such fine and healthy sounding coughs and short-lived bouts of it.

In Chinese medicine we would call this a lung problem of the excess kind. In other words, outside forces, viruses and or bacteria, attacked the compromised immune systems of an otherwise healthy body. In the end we took some Chinese medicine that lubricated the dry phlegm and did a treatment to help assist the expectoration process.

But fatigue, the kind when all of our volition for life is gone, is often because of deficiencies of the lung. A person who grows up wan and pale and listless, incapable of doing too much, often has a sunken chest, a sign of poor lung development.

The chest may also look quite expanded, as in the case of an asthma victim. I suspect that most chronic fatigue patients ultimately are people who don't get their proper intake of 'Qi' (pronounced chi, which is the Chinese concept of energy) from the air.

All things are cyclical and interdependent in Chinese medicine, and most often it is not finding out whether it is the chicken or the egg that is the cause (except to note that lousy chickens make lousy eggs and lousy eggs make lousy chickens). By this I mean that is does no good to look at the lung by itself. It is absolutely essential to look at its interdependent place in the body structure.

When I was in Japan, I treated a young boy of nine for emphysema. One day after a session his mother conjectured that my advice would be to make sure he didn't do much exercise. I saw that the boy wanted to play and had reasonably good health otherwise, so I told her that playing to the limit of his capacity was almost essential to overcoming his problem. The boy smiled. He had many a rough go in the process of creating good lung capacity, but eventually completely outdistanced his problem.

If I had seen that the lungs did not have good bodily support, my advice might have been different. Our lungs bring air into the body but they no other means of nutritional support. If the spleen (in Chinese medicine this includes functions of the pancreas and the small intestine) and the stomach do not send energy up to the lungs and the rest of the body, they will become flaccid and weak. In today's busy society this nutritional deficiency is often at the root of fatigue problems.

Going deeper we have the kidney yin and yang as possible causes. If the kidneys are a long-term factor in lung health the person will usually have low back ache and or knee aching as well. Anyway, we say that for the energy of the lungs to be pulled down, the kidneys must be strong. When an asthma victim has a hard time breathing in, it is the failure of the kidneys to pull the energy of the lungs down and so the kidneys must be tonified. If the person has a hard time breathing out, the problems are with the lungs themselves. If it comes on at night or in the summer, and is dry in nature causing a dry mouth and dry nasal passages, it is possibly the yin forces that are weak . If the problem is cold induced, it is the yang forces that need to be supplemented.

Because the lungs govern the skin of the body, lung problems and skin problems often coincide. If because of some stressful situation we develop eczema, we then associate it as our stress organ, the liver, attacking the lung. By calming the liver and tonifying the lung through the spleen, we can cure the eczema. If it is psoriasis, it shows that dampness got past the lung's first line of defence temporarily, but thereafter settled in the skin. Again we would tonify the lung through the spleen and seep the excess dampness to take care of the matter.

Fall is a particularly drying time, and the lungs hate to be too dry. Our skin in turn will become dry. So, stay healthy, eat well, and dress for the weather.

Copyright © Joel Whitehead. This document may only be modified for technical reasons (e.g., compatibility with other platforms), but the actual content of this page may not be changed. One electronic copy and one paper copy may be made for personal use, but this document may not be distributed under any form, in whole or in part.

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