05/12/2022
Inflammation is not bad.
It's so easy and tempting to label things as "good" or "bad", and it makes for good marketing and powerful trends (superfoods and supplements, diets that omit whole categories of foods, etc.). But Rumi was onto something ("Beyond good and bad there's a field. I'll meet you there"), and there's a lot more insight that can be gained when we look at movements and relationships rather absolute labels.
In the good or bad narrative, "inflammation" has been one of the favorite bad guys for quite a while, and is often labeled the "root cause" of someone's suffering. And then inflammation is easily correlated with a hot process in the body (red, warm, swollen, painful) and so cold medicinals are applied (pharmaceutical, botanical, etc.) to reduce the body's ability to respond to threats and challenges.
But to understand inflammation not as root cause, but rather as the branch of some other dysfunction, is hugely important. The body causes inflammation as a necessary, healthy process to heals us from injury, protect us from infection, etc. The question then is not "is there inflammation?", but rather "why is inflammation out of control in this particular case?" And there are many possible answers (this is why one-size-fits-all approaches to medicine are so limited).
One of my favorite formulas to teach about is Guizhi Shaoyao Zhimu Tang, precisely because it cuts through this very simplistic layer of allopathic thinking. This formula treats hot, swollen, painful joints (think rheumatoid arthritis), and it does so primarily with warm and hot herbs. In the case of this formula's application, the localized inflammation in the joints is due to fluids that have accumulated and migrated into the joint spaces. Hot acrid medicinals (Guizhi, Mahuang, Fuzi) are needed to metabolize and transform these fluids (the root problem). A single cold medicinal is used to specifically cool the joints (Zhimu), which is treating the branch.
Acupuncture itself is a process which creates micro-damage in tissues, causing a curative type of transient local inflammation, often with the result of decreasing chronic unhelpful inflammation.
A lot of the modern ways developed to treat pain have proven to be problematic. Luckily there are other methods available.
Anti-inflammatories may relieve pain in the short term, but blocking inflammation can lead to longer-term chronic pain, a new study reports.
