Did you know you can catch a “heat”?

It’s a thing…

Wen bing theory - warm disease theory in traditional Chinese and east asian medicine

Transcript:

Did your mom or your grandma ever tell you not to catch a warm when you go out? Because that's the thing. So we know about sunburn, right? We got to protect against sunburn, we know about heat, exhaustion, and heatstroke, which are pretty extreme. But what about catching what they call in East Asian medicine, a wind heat. So most people will know about catching a cold, right? It's pretty colloquial, it's pretty well known. You go out, you dress the runway, you stay out in the rain and the wind, right, you're gonna get a cold. Fair enough, all right. And then East Asian medicine, their diagnosis for for that particular thing, the disease that you get from being out in the wind, and the cold is called a wind cold.

The disease that you get from being out in a wind, in the wind and the cold, especially where there's rain, you get what's known as a wind cold damp, which is a way of saying that you are exposed to those particular elements. And in that exposure, you can tracted pathogenic factors or sickness, things that are related to the wind, the cold and the dampness. And there's there's discussion and dialogue for, for parsing out and saying where in what part of the body is it stuck in the lungs, and the chest is in the superficial layers of the bodies and the deep layers of the body. And there's a lot of conversation that we could have, you know, years and years of discussion about different depths of the body in which disease gets trapped, if you will, for lack of a, I mean, that's a fair term actually, layers in in which like, for example, bacteria gets stuck different bacterial colonies, which I think most people are most familiar with, you know, how bacteria right gets into the sinuses, and then it goes into the lungs, and then bacteria can live in your gut, right, and they can live in your intestines, they could live in these different pockets of your body, you also have different bacterias that live in your ears and in your mouth and in your you know, dif all different parts of your body.

So similarly with these, they call them the external evils in in Chinese medicine and their wind, heat, cold dampness, and summer heat. dryness, right, these are the external conditions that can affect the body in ways that are mirrored, right. So if you spend time in a dry climate, you'll know that your throat gets parched. Makes sense. If you spend time in a cold environment, you're gonna catch a cold, if you spend time in a hot environment, you're gonna get heat related condition and symptomology, right symptoms, you're going to your body is going to react differently. Same thing, if you've spent too much time wet, same thing, if you spent, you know, you know, time in a windy environment, you get stiff neck, stuff like that. So it's not that far fetched. And it's discourse, a discussion about disease that has been around for 1000s of years. So there's actually a lot to learn from it. Unfortunately, with microscopy and virology and studying of bacterias, and viruses and stuff like that, I think that particular way of thinking and looking at diseases is going to really, really gain a lot of valid, valuable validation in the coming decades, about, you know, what bacteriums are we supposed to have in certain climates and what bacteriums when they get in and become disproportionate and problematic, there's gonna be a lot of proving of that, you know, catching heats and catching colds and how they're different stuff like that. But anyways, we're talking about heats.

And the difference between a heat and a cold is in how your body reacts to heat. So without getting too much into it, I just wanted to bring to your attention that the way you know, especially some of the wives tale things, you know, the the mother's medicine and the grandmas medicine, stuff like that. When when that a lot of that stuff gets passed down without differentiation without conditionality. What I mean by that is, you know, people say like, Oh, if you have an ear infection, put garlic in your ear, right? garlic oil in your ear, right? And I'm not saying that's bad or wrong, but I'm saying there are times in which you can have pain in your ear or a clogged ear, and that would be a worse idea. Right?

That would be something that makes it worse. So there wasn't a whole lot at least in my growing up and I'm not I can't speak for everybody on this, but when I was growing up, there was never really any discussion about if you're, you know, for the wives tale stuff like oh, you know, have a shot of whiskey and and swaddle yourself and go to bed like Yeah, well, I did grow up in a cold climate. And usually when we would get sick with that thing, it would be the winter and that that is a fair thing, but one can have you know, One can experience chills from a heat from heat condition, which is kind of confusing. So if you were to try and treat that with whiskey, you'd make it worse. If you were to try to treat that with whiskey and going under the covers, it would get worse. So I don't, I'm not trying to dissuade people from doing or trying that stuff, but rather want to pay homage to show that there is more to that discussion than most people realize. And I'm not trying to talk people out of trying to help themselves, but rather say, hey, look, look at all this other stuff that happens, also, and keep that in mind when you're trying to, you know, treat yourself and this is what we keep in mind when we treat ourselves having been educated as doctors.

So whew, man, we went for a wild ride in this in this recent heat that we caught, we caught a wind heat with a side of dryness, which was not fun, we were out on a super hot, windy boat, and then we went into an ice cold air conditioning. Ice cold air conditioned hotel room, which we don't have air conditioning or house, we never use air conditioning. So for us, that was a pretty major change. And that combined with being rundown from being overworked, and having just been out on a boat going snorkeling, you know, taking a boat tour and the wind and the sun and the cold and he all these, you know, the assault of the if you pardon the assault upon the assault of the ocean elements on our, you know, little scholarly immune systems has kind of, you know, kind of took its toll on us and we were we were worn down and then we went into an air conditioned apartment which is you know, if you've never got gotten a cold from air conditioning that I don't think you've ever asked yourself Have I ever caught a cold from air conditioning? Because everybody has or you know, dang close to it. So anyway, that's a topic for another time.

But yeah, you can catch a heat just as easily as you can catch a cold and I wanted to make people aware that this whole school of thought around I think he was from the 1640s there was a path there was a another pandemic and this is at the time of this recording we're on the heels of the pandemic or you know, we're coming off coming out of the the worst days of the pandemic and who knows what this will look like looking back 2, 3, 4, 5 years from now but now we're dealing with long COVID and stuff like that but the book that is talking about these warm February with a comfort row diseases these fevers diseases heat diseases it's the wind being school borne disease pathogen school, right so I have that book here this textbook here borne diseases clinical guide was go away. You have his textbook here and and that's that so yes.