Traditional Chinese Medicine and Leaky Gut Syndrome

Among the potential causes of Leaky Gut Syndrome is the fact that antibiotics can create an unfavorable balance between “good” bacteria and “bad” bacteria in your colon. This can lead to increased permeability of the intestinal lining, allowing harmful substances from your intestine into your bloodstream. This is the allopathic (Western Medicine) explanation.

However, practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) have another explanation. TCM describes the healthy function of your body’s systems in terms of qi (pronounced “chee”), or life energy, and yin and yang, which refer to balance. Heat and cold must be in proper balance, and when they aren’t, problems can occur. So, part of the objective of TCM is to restore this balance when it is disrupted.

In the view of TCM, antibiotics impose a cold influence on your digestive system, This has the effect of depleting yang from the spleen and disrupting stomach-spleen harmony, which in turn disrupts your digestion and ability to properly absorb liquids and the food you eat. Moreover, qi is depleted and your body’s ability to sustain the small intestine’s integrity is disrupted.

Your spleen controls your small intestine, which is also the site of the distribution and absorption of qi. Hence when qi is depleted, fluid accumulates in your small intestine. In other words, your small intestine’s integrity is compromised by interruption of the spleen’s ability to properly regulate the small intestine.

Practitioners of TCM describe this phenomenon in terms of an “insult” to the liver by the spleen. This insult moves the liver into “excess”, which causes blood and qi to stagnate. The liver thereby becomes unable to do its job of cleansing and distributing blood. Therefore, a TCM expert will employ “Zang-FU” therapy to address this imbalance and impairment of liver function.

Another TCM theory called “Wu Xing” posits that depletion of your spleen will also move your kidney into excess in an attempt to compensate for your spleen’s depletion of yang with excess yang from another source. As a result, you will experience insomnia, stress, and anxiety. Eventually, however, depletion of both the yin and yang of your kidneys will diminish. This results in a depletion of your reserves (yuan-jing). Hence, the flow through your energy channels of ying qi will also diminish, which reduces your ability to respond properly to pathogens.

In the view of TCM, your digestive tract lies outside your body (similarly to allopathic medicine’s view), and when your wei qi is depleted as has been described above, toxins and pathogens enter the body proper and drain its energy reserves and leading to the symptoms of leaky gut.

TCM treatment of leaky gut syndrome therefore requires that normal levels of wei and ying be restored – in other words, that balance be restored. To do so requires regulating your kidneys and your spleen, which will lead to repair of the intestinal lining. In part liver congestion and blockage must be “dredged” (relieved).

Much of what contributes to this overall condition is the fact that how we tend to eat in modern society depletes your overall qi and results in damage to your spleen (which supports what we know about the importance of a proper diet for leaky gut) . In addition, your kidneys’ qi is sapped by the stress commonly experienced in modern life.

To treat this, acupuncture will typically be employed by a skilled practitioner of TCM. Acupuncture is an ancient TCM technique that enables the restoration of qi flow where it is deficient and helps to restore the body’s balance, or yin/yang. Even practitioners of modern Western Medicine have acknowledged the value of acupuncture for treating pain and anxiety, so even if you are skeptical about TCM, you should consider acupuncture as part of your tool set for recovering from leaky gut syndrome.


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Traditional Chinese Medicine and Leaky Gut Syndrome

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