The Center for Integrative Health and Healing

By: Rebecca Rice, L.Ac
The other day I was marveling at the fact that I hadn’t come down with a cold or flu all year!  To the surprise of my pride, the next morning I woke with chills, mild fatigue, and rhinitis.  Now I do see my missteps of the previous day-getting overjoyed with the sunshine and warm weather I went outside with damp hair and a lighter jacket, thus making myself more vulnerable to cold and flu viruses.  I also had a big cup of hot chocolate and later that night was walking in the cold March wind to my car returning from a concert, wearing the same light jacket.
In Chinese medicine the nape is called the ‘wind gate.’  This is the area in the back of the neck where external pathogens can enter the body.  This is why many Acupuncturists wear scarves in the winter – to protect the wind gate.  I certainly provided the perfect invitation to the cold I contracted by exposing my wind gate through cold damp hair, wind, and lowered the strength of my immune system with sugar.
The treatment I chose was a hot shower, hot ginger tea, and an acupuncture treatment to open the wind gate, expel the pathogen and consolidate the wei qi. (The wei qi is the protective qi which lies at the surface of the skin and regulates what enters the body and what does not-chills are a sign that the wei qi is weak and has been infiltrated).  Because I acted quickly with incorporating all of these therapeutic responses, I was able to significantly reduce the severity and the amount of time I had the cold.  Thank You Chinese Medicine!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Acupuncture, General, Preventative Health, Traditional Chinese Medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.