Li Hua, L. Ac. TCMD

Anxiety

Anxiety is one kind of mental problems. In clinic, female patients are more than male. It probably female patients prefer to see doctors for help. Traditional Chinese medicine looks at the whole body system and thinks mental and physical connect and influence each other. In the present life, anxiety is an un-ignorable common problem. The experts estimate that there are about 4 billions people who have mental or nerve problems in the whole world. This problem will get worse with more competitions of the modern life. WHO (World Health Organization) will unite every country to make effort for every body’s mental health.

Among the various mental problems, anxiety is the most one. The anxiety patient’s typical syndromes are shown from the mood. The patient has restless or undefined feeling. Anxiety patients are easy to feel fearful, sometimes feel frightened. Anxiety patients usually are un-concentrated, worried, or un-stopped thinking, physically, feel tight in the chest, have insomnia, rapid heartbeat, sweating hands and feet, fear darkness. When it gets more serious, blood pressure will rise; the pupils will be dilated; limbs will be numbness; neck and shoulder will be sore and tight. Other uncomfortable feelings appear, such as, frequent urination (not a lot amount of water each time) and irregular bowel movement. Patients have more than one syndrome.

In clinic, I divide anxiety into two main types: anxiety feeling and anxiety problem. Because of all different kinds of stress in real life, people will have more or less anxiety syndromes. If these syndromes will not stay long, disappear soon, I think it is just anxiety feeling, only the patients can feel it themselves; if the anxiety feeling stay long and you can’t release it by yourselves or you have not seen doctors in time, this feeling will develop to anxiety problem and other people can tell it from your spirit, that will influence your normal life, work and study.

Anxiety can be helped by Traditional Chinese medicine and western medicine. Anxiety drugs have more or less side effects and patients may rely on them very much. Traditional Chinese medicine thinks to treat anxiety from the whole body system. I usually help my patients to find out what cause the anxiety, and then treat them by the natural way – traditional Chinese medicine, which will not make patients addictive. I suggest to use acupuncture or TuiNa (Chinese medical massage) combined with proper exercise and diet if just start the anxiety feeing. I also suggest to use the combination of traditional Chinese medicine with western medicine first and then to take off the drugs when anxiety is controlled. In this way, patients will not take drugs for long term and have better and steady result. Of course, I still recommend anxiety patients to do proper Yin and Yang exercises and have more hobbies and get balance nutrition during the treatment. To prevent anxiety, I suggest to work and rest on schedule and set up the body clock, to jump off or frozen life problems and think positively. If you look for balance diet, I highly recommend the website: www.DrWeil.com and www.aac2000.com

I wish you to live happy and relaxed and to put more color in your life.