Digestion is not just what we are eating. It is what we are consuming and processing the people we spend our time with, what we read, what we watch on television, our feelings both realized and hidden, and of course what we eat.

Melatonin rolls casually off the tongues of so many people these days, everyone I talk to has an opinion or experience with it. Most people don’t realize it’s a hormone, and many people are using it incorrectly.

As an acupuncture physician and nutritionist many of the people on my daily schedule are looking for alternatives to the industrial medicine complex and its reliance on pharmaceutical interventions. While pharmaceuticals are fast-acting, which makes them attractive in our modern society of quick fixes, their side effects are often intolerable and at times even deadly, so patients look for “natural” and holistic alternatives.

I woke up this morning to another article about an athlete’s career ending because they got a pneumothorax (lung puncture) after receiving dry needling from a physical therapist. This upsets me because 1) this injury is happening way too often, 2) gives all of us in the needling professions a bad look, and 3) is completely avoidable with proper education.

I have seen this all over social media, on bumper stickers, and coffee mugs and I cringe every time. While I 100% believe “you reap what you sow,” and “what you project you attract,” I cannot buy into the notion of “good vibes only” for the sole reason that it does not allow space for us to feel the full range of our humanness. It is a completely unnatural message in our world; even physics tells us every object or energy has an equal and opposite, and Traditional East Asian Medicine is based on the principles of yin and yang, opposites which cannot be separated.

Did you ever make funny faces at your sibling, friend, or pet only to get told by an adult, “If you keep making that face it will stay that way”? Have you ever heard that those with oily skin should not use oil on their face? Or how about “the sun causes wrinkles.” Let’s find out if there’s any merit to these myths.