What you need to know about Dampness

Damp or dampness is a name you will probably hear frequently from your Chinese medicine (CM) practitioner.
Before you discovered CM you probably never heard of dampness. It’s a concept that is unique to CM, today Herbalist Marie Hopkinson talks about damp, and everyone should know about Dampness.

Firstly, damp is one of six pathogenic influences on the body. it can come from the outside environment or accumulate internally.

Internal dampness happens when our digestive functions fail. In Chinese medicine, the digestive functions are attributed to our SPLEEN, STOMACH and INTESTINES (Small and Large Intestine) organs as well as fluids being metabolised by other organs like the SAN JIAO (or tripple heater/tripple warmer), the KIDNEYS and BLADDER.

Rather than get too bogged down in a lot of detail, I’ll focus on the main culprits of dampness and how we can go about preventing and ridding it from our body.

The Spleen and Stomach essentially function as a cooking pot on the stove model:

The Stomach receives the food, and the Spleen function is to digest it with its energy (represented by the fire below the pot). The Stomach is slightly hotter that the rest of our body (around 38 deg Celc).

The Stomach requires the Spleen’s energy to do it’s job of breaking up foods and sending them down the rest of the digestive tube to either be absorbed or eliminated as waste.

In CM, we say the Stomach/Spleen digestive combo  likes WARM, MOIST and COOKED and hates COLD, DRY, RAW. What we mean by hates and likes is that the warm, moist and cooked are easier to digest – they take up less energy so your body likes that.

Cold, dry and raw foods take up more energy (use up more of the Spleen’s power or function) so they can weaken it if you eat too much, or particularly if you already have a weak Spleen or weak body from something else (like your just getting over a surgery or severe illness or cold and flu where you sweated a lot) then your body overall might be weaker and more susceptible to the greater demand that eating COLD, DRY and RAW foods places on you.

Dampness happens when the spleen gets overwhelmed, and fails to do it’s job – that is “Transform and transport”. The Spleen function gets buggered up and overwhelmed by:

• overeating – the stomach gets too full and there is no room to digest. too much food means overworking the Spleen and its gets tired and weak
• Eating “hard to digest foods” – this is basically anything that requires more work to do, tires out the Spleen function. (raw, cold, heavily processed and dry foods are all good examples)
• Eating whilst getting upset
• eating whilst thinking too hard or doing mental activities – especially habits created where this is a regular occurrence.
• Eating irregular meals – some too big, some too small, missing meals, then having one giant big meal etc.

Think of dampness like a muddy marsh. A sludge.

it’s like a fog or cloud in our body, it weighs down the limbs and muscles – your arms and legs feel heavy and sluggish when we are overwhelmed by dampness.

Cloudy thinking, muddle headedness, bloating, diarrhoea or loose stools and tiredness where you feel worse from doing things and especially heavy feeling in your body are all symptoms that can mean dampness is part of your CM diagnosis.

Some foods in CM are considered especially dampening. These are greasy, rich, sugary, creamy types of foods. Anything that is

Damp can come into our body from the environment too. In Australia we don’t see this as much because our climate is mostly dry. Living or working in damp places like a basement that’s damp, being in the pool or water a lot, working in a damp place where there is moist air can all cause symptoms of damp in the body that might be coming from the external environment rathe than an overstrain of your digestive functions (that would be called internal dampness).

IMPORTANT NOTICE: This information is provided in public interest of keeping people as healthy as possible. Common sense should always be applied. Too much of anything can be hazardous to health. This information is not intended as a substitute for medical advice or diagnosis by a health practitioner. If you have a health condition, you should check with your health care practitioner before using foods as medicine treatments, if you are in any way unsure about the suitability of the food agents, herbs or recipies for your body. In an medical emergency always contact emergency services, call 000 in Australia.

Chinese medicine organs and some words are capitalised to indicate they are different to the biomedical understanding of the organ. In Chinese medicine each organ represents the system of function according to ancient principals of understanding, including the channel system, spiritual, mental and physical functions. The traditional understanding of Chinese medicine organs is actually a functional system often encompass many now biomedically defined aspects such as lymphatic and endocrine (hormone) functions that are attributed to that organ. A lower case letter of an organ will indicate it’s reference to the biomedical organ. EG Kidney  (the Kidney functions of CM) and kidney (biomedical/physical kidney).

This article is written by Marie Hopkinson, the Chinese Herbalist & Acupuncturist at Metro Health and Medicine in North Perth. Marie is available for consultation by calling 1300 132 830 or email info@metrohealth.com.au

(C) Marie Hopkinson 2016 Reproduction permissible only with express permission of author.

Could you use more Energy?

Energy is a central focus of Chinese Medicine. In the clinic it’s common to hear people say they feel tired, or even just that they could use some more energy. Energy is called Qi (pronounced Chee) in Chinese medicine. Although Qi is more than the ideas that the English word Energy contains. Its a lifeforce, the force which provides movement, flow, and at the same time nourishment to the body.

Qi is more of a Yang quality. There are more than 10 different kinds of Qi in the body – Defensive Qi – or the energy that protects us from getting sick from exposure to external pathogens, is just one example. Food Qi, know as Gu Qi is another.

How do we make Qi? Food and Air are the two main ingredients. We can breathe in Qi. This is why breathing is so important and exercise therapies in Oriental cultures are centered around breathing (Qi Gong, Yoga, Tai Chi etc).

The second way to make Qi is from food. “Gu Qi” literally means “food Qi” – which is the energy our bodies get from nutrients extracted from our diet.

Making energy essentially depends on 2 things:

1) The source – having fresh air and nutrient appropriate food to begin with

2) The machine – Our body is essentially a machine to make energy. The bodies ability to process the air – the techniques we use to breathe, our posture, our habits and the bodies digestion are essential to extracting good Gu Qi from food and fluids. If you tune up your car to make it run better, doesn’t it makes sense to tune up your body from time to time?

Chinese Medicine practitioners are very concerned with your digestion as it’s the essential way for the body to make the energy it needs to heal itself. Even if you’ve come in with a sprained ankle or a headache, good digestion is important to the long term healing of your body.

Practitioners will often ask about bowel movements, appetite and the in’s and out’s of what you eat on a regular basis.

Good digestion means you will recover quicker from injury, react better to stressful and unforeseen events and generally be able to eat a wide variety of foods without too many side effects.

If you experience bloating, gas, diarrhoea or loose stools or constipation (not going every day) on a frequent/normal basis then your body could probably do with a tune up.

When you have acupuncture, there are many ways an acupuncturist can “boost your energy”. One common way is throught strengthening the organs in the processes above – the Spleen and Stomach are central to healthy diegestion. The Lungs are essential to breathing and getting Air Qi into into your body.

THIS ARTICLE IS WRITTEN BY CHINESE MEDICINE PRACTITIONER MARIE HOPKINSON. THERE ARE MORE ARTICLES ON MARIE’S BLOG ABOUT WHAT TO EAT TO OPTIMISE YOUR DIGESTION ACCORDING TO CHINESE MEDICINE.