The Healthy Post Natal Body Podcast
The Healthy Post Natal Body Podcast
How Traditional Chinese Medicine can aid your postpartum recovery
This week I'm delighted to be joined by Brehan Crawford from Crawford Wellness as we discuss Traditional Chinese Medicine and the role it can play in your postpartum recovery.
Note; We're talking the REAL DEAL TCM, not the weird "let me sell you stuff you don't need" American style TCM!
Brehan has been practicing TCM for over 15 years;
In his 20s he started studying the philosophies and martial arts of Asia which led him to attend a Chinese Medicine school where he earned a Masters' degree in Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine.
Unsatisfied with the pseudoscience and superficial clinical experience of American TCM school he sought out a residency with a doctor of TCM trained in China, spent five years learning to manage complex chronic cases under his supervision, and eventually traveled to China to study directly from master physicians and martial artists there.
Over fifteen years of clinical practice he has accumulated many patients' stories of recovery, including mysterious onset of illnesses; mistreatment, gaslighting or disregard by the conventional American medical system; dissatisfaction & outright fraud from alternative medicine providers; and ultimately how they find the most benefit from practices thousands of years old with a deep basis in traditional culture that have justification from modern scientific evidence.
We discuss many things;
The problem with American TCM
From the benefits of Traditional practices such as Zuo Yuezi ("Sitting the Month") to the importance of taking time to REALLY recover postpartum.
Brehan explains what the impact of not being able to fully recover postpartum can look like. Issues like Fibromyalgia, chronic pelvic pain and IBS are not at all uncommon. We talk about the causes of these and how to resolve them.
I had a blast interviewing Brehan and, as I said in the podcast, I'm a big fan of the content he puts out.
You can find Brehan in all the usual places of the internet
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So this means that you not only get 3 months FREE access, no obligation!
BUT, if you decide you want to do the rest of the program, after only 5 months of paying $10/£8 a month you now get FREE LIFE TIME ACCESS! That's $50 max spend, in case you were wondering.
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And, of course, you can always find us on our YouTube channel if you like your podcast in video form :)
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Playing us out this week; "Lune Electrique" by L'espoir D'argent
Hey, welcome to Healthy Postnatal Body Podcast with your postnatal expert, peter Lap. That, as always, would be me. This is a podcast for the 23rd of Feb 2025, and you know, day before music means I have a guest on. Today I am talking to Brehan Crawford. You're going to love this one. This is fascinating.
Peter:We're talking traditional Chinese medicine and how it relates to postpartum recovery and all that sort of stuff. And we're talking a lot more than that. We're talking about the difference between TCM the real stuff and the American style, almost traditional Chinese medicine that mainly tries to sell you stuff. The things that work, the things that don't work, what you should be looking out for, how it can help your postpartum recovery, what sort of things you should be doing postpartum according to traditional Chinese medicine, what things you should be avoiding. You know this ties in very nicely with the Zuo Yuezi, the sitting the month episodes we've done previously with GM Whitley, with Guang Ming Whitley, and and and all and others, because I've done a few of these. Now You're going to love this one. So, without further ado, here we go. What is the difference between American traditional Chinese medicine and traditional Chinese medicine?
Brehan:Yeah, I think there's two main differences to speak to. Yeah, I think there's two main differences to speak to. First of all, in China, the profession of Chinese medicine provider, whether it's acupuncturist or herbalist and those professions are generally separate from each other. In the United States most people who go to Chinese medicine school will do both modalities in their practice to one degree or the other. But acupuncture is much more common in the West. In China people do one or the other and then the profession is a very professional education. So when you graduate from medical school in China, even if it's a Chinese medicine school, you have the equivalent of an MD and you can go and do a surgical residency. You can get prescription privileges for pharmaceutical medication as a Chinese medicine provider, things like that. Vice versa, you can go to Western medical school and then do a Chinese medicine residency and go into practice doing acupuncture or prescribing herbs.
Brehan:In the West it's very often more like a trade school kind of approach. They are graduate schools. I went to one in the United States, you know, got a master's degree. You can get doctoral degrees now, but the quality of the education is not the same as what you would consider, you know, for a medical doctor, and, and then the clinical experience and training was uh, I found the largest difference to be when I went to China is that, you know, it's a, it's a very rigorous professional field, and, um, I was lucky to get a residency here in the United States and really, uh, with a mentor who really busted my chops and uh made sure that I knew what I was doing and that I was competent to manage very complex cases um, in in my specialty. Uh, that's an uncommon experience in the West, and so a lot of people go to China and are shocked to see the level of professionalism that is embodied by the medicine, the level of scientific knowledge that is embodied by most of the providers there, and how much scientific research has gone into understanding the mechanisms of Chinese medicine. Over the last 40 years in Asia, the governments of China, japan and Korea, particularly, have invested dozens of billions of dollars into researching traditional medicine there, and so we actually have a great wealth of scientific data showing exactly how it is that herbs work, that acupuncture works, that qigong breathing exercises and gentle movement work, and so that's the.
Brehan:That's one of the largest differences. The other one, though, is is a lot more subtle, and it's that Chinese medicine is inseparable from Chinese culture. And if you, if you don't, if you're not, obviously I'm not Chinese, and if you don't, if you don't come from a Chinese family or you don't go to China and see how the medicine is practiced in its native environment, in its indigenous environment, and how well integrated it is into everyday life in China, you don't really get a chance to appreciate how Chinese medicine is just part of Chinese culture. And so, while we have all the professional aspects around it you know, we have certifications and degrees and fancy titles and we have scientific evidence and all that the actual day-to-day life in people in China involves, of people in China, involves the use of a lot of Chinese medicine aspects. And that goes into things like, um, how you cook your food, uh, food is often cooked with Chinese herbs things, and you know we cook with herbs in the West with, you know, garlic, rosemary, you know, uh, chili, spices, things that have medicinal benefits to them. But we don't often think in terms of diagnosis and treatment when we're creating a meal. We just think what's going to taste good, and in China, those flavor aspects of spices especially are very closely linked to their medicinal benefits and their medicinal actions, and so, in certain climates, you'll see people using certain kinds of flavors which then become known as the cuisine of that region.
Brehan:So, you know, southern China, especially, where it's very humid, very sticky, very damp, people will use a lot of really hot, pungent spices, because that it, those things are antifungal. They, uh, they have a way of warming up your body as a whole, drying your body as a whole so that you can survive in a, in a, in a climate that's just riddled with mold everywhere, whereas, um, you know, in Northern China they're eating a lot more rich food because it's it's cold, but it's also very dry. So, they'll have, you know, in northern china they're eating a lot more rich food because it's it's cold, but it's also very dry. So, they'll have, you know, there'll be a lot more, um, rich stuff like lamb, uh, like wheat, like some of that. You know, it looks more like russian food, what we would think of as like russian food, or or, uh, central asian food, mongolian food, than than what we think of as, um, than what most Americans are exposed to as Chinese food in the West. It's certainly not like deep fried breaded meat covered in sugar sauce, but but you know, there's still a lot of vegetables, but it's also it's much more somewhere between like Central Asia, northern Asia and Middle Eastern food, and there's a lot of influences there from the Silk Road too, and those things all have medicinal benefits. So, you know, people are struggling from what we would consider very damp conditions in the West, whether it's, you know, um, endocrine system issues like uh hypothalamic, pituitary adrenal axis disorders or uh, mold illness, mold mold based injury, things like that. Um, we're going to use a lot of hot, spicy aromatic herbs in their formula, because those volatiles all have actions about warming up the body, about improving water metabolism so that things aren't so sludgy and mucousy, and mold spores and mycelium don't really like those aromatic elements. We can use that to get that out of the body if somebody's got a fungal infection, um.
Brehan:And and then you know also things like feng shui. Uh, the way that people design cities, the way that people design houses and living environments. Feng shui, that is a two word, a two character word. It literally feng means wind and shui means water. So it's, it's literally how is air and water moving through your house? And we talk about, again, mold. I'm coming back to that a lot. If you design your house with a leaky roof and not a good foundation, you're going to get mold growth all throughout it. You're going to get problems, uh. And when you have adequate air movement, uh, that's you know, and and things are allowed to breathe, uh, that's a much healthier environment for people yeah, and and that's it.
Peter:So there's a lot of fascinating stuff you you do toss on there, because one of the interviews and I just tried to find it and I still can't remember, I'll put it in the footnotes um, I did before with um doctor. We discussed right before we went on air, so to speak, as if he saw cold podcast being on air. Um, she was saying that a lot of the, the, the Chinese medicine hospitals and practices are within or directly adjacent to western medicine hospitals and I'm quoting the the western for all the listeners out there.
Peter:So it's it's seen as a and they'll refer to each other. So yeah, very much so very much so and and and the. The crazy thing for me and, and, and. I know where comes from. Don't get me wrong. I'm a middle-aged white guy. I'm very familiar where this comes from now, but the crazy thing is that in the West we still very much look down upon traditional Chinese medicine.
Brehan:In many ways we do yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and and is there.
Peter:And you know, I remember watching the comedian darryl brian saying, saying this years ago, was saying something along the lines of alternative medicine, which he captured. Yeah, uh, the uh tcm under um and you know, it becomes medicine when the research is done. That's how we know it, right?
Brehan:they would say that, yeah, a lot of people say there's no, there's no western medicine and alternative medicine or biomedicine alternative, there's just medicine and we, just when it works, we just call it medicine. Uh, that would be true in the west if we actually evaluated the evidence around all of these things like chinese medicine, which we don't. We also have a very limited view here of what quality evidence is, and just like there's different quality levels of scientific evidence, you know, if you have, say you have a randomized placebo, double blind, randomized placebo controlled trial with 20 subjects, that's both high quality evidence because it's randomized, double blind, placebo controlled, but also low quality because it's only 20 people. You take that and you expand it out to 2000 people or 20,000 people. All of a sudden that evidence becomes much higher quality. You can take a and we have a lot of correlative evidence that is used in clinical practice in the West and considered high quality, even when it's not randomized, double blindblind, placebo-controlled. It just shows benefit for a great number. You know such a massive number of people and that's things like not eating too much cured meat because it'll cause colon cancer or not smoking, because you know like we do have causative evidence for those things. Finally now, eventually, but it's taken a long time to get there, but it was so clear for for. So in China we don't have, for example, great quality causative evidence showing that Chinese medicine is effective against SARS-CoV-1 or SARS-CoV-2, like the original SARS from the early 2000s, or COVID-19, the virus that causes COVID-19. What we do have is massive correlative evidence showing that people who utilize Chinese medicine when they're sick with those things in addition to Western medicine, have at least a double rate of survival Right, you know, at least a half of a rate of mortality. So there's probably something there.
Brehan:In addition, in China, tradition is considered a form of evidence, because the scientific method has only really been around for 150 years and it's only really been applied to Chinese medicine for the last 30 or 40 in terms of a research environment, and so it goes back a little bit further than that. They were doing stuff in the 50s and 60s, but it's really just expanded a lot the last three, four years, but prior to that we have 5,000 years of empirical evidence and clinical documentation. Doctors have been keeping chart notes in China for a very long time and you can also go back and historically see what kinds of formulas have come and gone and what kinds of formulas have stood the test of time amongst Chinese medicine physicians. And when you see something that's you know it, some doctor writes about it in his personal annals and it and and it, it goes through a fad. You know people will try it out, use it. It's popular for 20 or 30 years and then it kind of fades out. You can see like, oh okay, that didn't really stand the test of time versus some of the formulas that we have that we use the most often in a clinical situation to this day are 2000 years old and have been used consistently for 2000 years for pretty much the same purposes. And we know so. We know exactly what they're for and we know they're likely to be effective. And these things have again made their way into Chinese culture too.
Brehan:The first time you get sick in China, in most environments, you won't actually go to the doctor.
Brehan:You'll go talk to your grandma, or you'll go talk to somebody who's who's older, who's been using chinese medicine for a long time, and they they for many common complaints.
Brehan:They'll just say, oh, you need to take xiao chai hu tang, you need to take yin chao san, you need to take luai di huang, you know something like that, you take it and then, if it's, if you get better, great, and if not, then you go to the pharmacy and you talk to a pharmacy tech who might have a high school education but has been working in the pharmacy for 2030 years, sees what people are buying over and over for this kind of thing. They'll say, oh, get that, and you take that. And then you, if you know, or if you have a very complex situation and both of those people are throwing their hands in there, then you go see the doctor. But you know it's a it's, it's built into the culture what works, and tradition as a form of evidence is a valid form of evidence. When you have that much, when you have that weight of tradition you'd bring up because other than the say, I mean you call it Western supremacy, white supremacy type, not KKK style.
Peter:But you know we are better than right.
Brehan:Yeah, exceptionalism or something like that.
Peter:You know, western medicine is clearly better because everybody else is a peasant right. That is fundamentally what a lot of this discussion, that's the direction a lot of this stuff tends to take. When you talk to certain people online when you say, hey, this this person has, uh in this country, they try this for certain illnesses. They try this. This is their tradition, and indeed for 5 000 years, um, I mean, and probably longer, when you say that, because in the west we are very much used to fad uh very much right, very much.
Brehan:We embrace this. We love the fad approach.
Peter:Exactly that's kind of what we do and therefore it's very easy, I suppose, for for medical professionals, uh, or people just you know, generally speaking, who are very much into the approach that if a study isn't peer-reviewed is not a real valid study, right which?
Brehan:I mean sometimes.
Peter:That's true most things on pubmed uh, pubmedmed are complete nonsense, but we have a very much. A peer review doesn't always look like peer review. Do you know what I mean? As in the peer review can be 5,000 years of tradition that has been found to work because it is being used.
Brehan:That's the peer right. That's a lot of peers, Exactly.
Peter:There's a lot of people that stuck with it it and, like you said, there's something to it then, whereas what we tend to do is, um, we try something for five, ten years and then you know, I'll go back low fat diet. Low fat diet is clearly, uh, clearly, uh, better than than a high fat diet, for instance. Right, that was the thing in the 80s. And we take all the fat out of the yogurt, we add some more sugar to the yogurt and all of a sudden, it doesn't turn out.
Brehan:It's not a real solution, and I'm not saying that it's not really that much better than a full-fat yogurt.
Peter:It's kind of potato-potato sort of thing right. And I'm not saying people shouldn go full keto or anything like that. I'm completely diet agnostic. I'm just saying that we try things for 10, 15 years, then they we find they don't work and we discard them. Um yeah, and there's a funny thing about that.
Brehan:A funny anecdote in in um in chinese medicine, speaking of peer review, which is that you'll see if you go back and read a lot of these like uh, uh doctors memoirs and things like that, know someone who is practicing in the 1700s and at the end of his career he's very, you know, famous doctor, treats imperial family members, or you know really well, you know, well known in a region, and we'll write a memoir at the end of his career talking about all these things, and then 20, and talking about the formula that made him famous or something like that. And so he writes these beautiful stories about the how, how he cured all these incurable diseases and obviously trying to leave a legacy for himself. And 20, 30 years later, somebody else who's also a famous doctor will write their memoir and they will quote dr a, the original, and they'll talk about what an idiot that guy was and how he was absolutely diagnosing wrong. They're not kind, like if somebody there is a lot of critic, like and this is needed for high quality evidence is, for this is part of the scientific process and before we had the, the scientific method that we call today, where you're isolating one variable and, you know, testing repeatedly for that, which is a great thing to do. If you only have one variable. You, you had, uh, you, you have only had peer review. You only had other people in your same profession who were trying the things that you had said were excellent, excellent resources and medical resources, and, and if they didn't work, they, they, would call you out.
Brehan:And and we, we, you know, we like to think that science is infallible, but there is, you know, talk to anybody who works in academia. The pressure is there to to publish and to get repeatable results. And if, and if somebody calls you out on your data or, god forbid, you work for a pharmaceutical company and you get a study that comes back showing that your drug is not effective or is harmful, you're out of a job. And so some of these people are, are publishing bad data, are paying for bad quality peer review, and we hope that that gets sussed out over time, but it doesn't always. And some of these things even make it. You know, we'll make it all the way through FDA approval, make it into the general populace, uh, until the weight of evidence becomes so obvious that that this process was flawed somewhere along the way, that someone was corrupt? Uh, you know it's.
Brehan:It's one of these things where you, you look at uh, tradition is not infallible either, but it is a way of cataloging evidence.
Brehan:That's not necessarily a that works very well for uh systems, biology-based approaches which is a fancy way of saying holistic approaches, where there's more than one, more than one moving part, there's more than one variable, and so when you're treating, when, when you're working in a population basis such as you know your podcast, your content is mostly about postnatal recovery, about postpartum recovery, for, for postpartum mothers and, um, that's a demographic.
Brehan:So the in and in in Chinese medicine we have very specific categories of uh, formulas of dietary recommendations, of lifestyle practices that are utilized for postpartum mothers specifically, because we have thousands and thousands of years of tradition showing how, you know, people are just happier when they do this and uh and have better quality lives. And we even know that some of the very difficult to treat diseases that we have very commonly nowadays are clearly seen in a population of postpartum women autoimmune disease, fibromyalgia uh, you know. Uh, susceptibility to post viral conditions, which is my, my own practice specialty uh, things like long COVID, uh, chronic fatigue syndrome. Fibromyalgia is often post-viral IBSBS, where your body is more vulnerable after you give birth, and if you don't recover properly, the possibility for a serious and difficult-to-treat disease setting in becomes much, much more likely.
Peter:Yeah, and it's fascinating that you brought up like fibromyalgia and and all that type of stuff, because it's the in the little, the little bit of pep. And everybody who listens to this um will know that I don't do a tremendous amount of preparation for my podcast because you know I'm a busy boy and I've got stuff to do. But every now and again I tend to look at stuff the incidence of fibromyalgia type things in nations where they adhere to some form of postpartum care, and by postpartum care I mean I don't like to call it self-care, because that implies that you book a weekly yoga class or something like that and facial, but postpartum care, as in….
Brehan:It should be done by a community. It's not just about one woman making a smoothie for herself. Yeah, exactly, that's it.
Peter:So women who practice the sitting the month, and again I will link to the old podcast I've done on this but where other people take care of the woman, where all the food is basically kind of planned out but at least it's highly nutritious and it's it's focused around recovery right, yes, so it's both highly nutritious and easy to digest exactly, yeah, exactly there there is.
Peter:There aren't huge quantities of of of tricky fiber. You're not eating tons and tons of sweet corn type stuff, um, but, but it's, but it's. The instances seem to be, from what I could find significantly lower, of cases of of where women have that postpartum period where they really are managing and the community helps them manage to look after themselves and the baby, rather than you know the washing and the dishes and and all that type of stuff and the husband, yeah, um, the consequence seems to be that you have significantly fewer, uh, postpartum issues on the back of that. Now, this sounds ridiculously obvious when you say it out loud, right as in if you take good care of yourself after a traumatic or life-changing experience, such as giving birth and pregnancy, you will have a better health outcome. It sounds remarkably straightforward right, it's very pedestrian.
Brehan:Well, of course you will. Of course you will, and nobody does it, and yet we do such a terrible job of it here yeah, it is absolutely atrocious over here.
Peter:so, so what can other than looking after yourself a bit better and reading all the, all the books and all that type of stuff immediately postpartum and planning it a bit during your pregnancy? What do you find is one of the issues that you're like okay, this helps with fibromyalgia. Are you going back to lifestyle changes predominantly?
Brehan:Do you mean once the fibromyalgia sets in, or if a woman's experiencing, you know, a flare, that in a postpartum period?
Peter:where she was pretty much.
Brehan:Oh, uh, so, uh, the way that Chinese medicine approaches fibromyalgia is that it is a, it is a what we would consider a layered syndrome. So there are multiple causative factors, multiple contributing factors, and addressing those in the right order is the best way to recovery. And so, if we often see it catalyzed by a virus, so it's something that many women will experience after they get sick, and then they think they're better but the pain stays. You know, like when you're sick, when you're fighting a flu, when you're fighting COVID, when you're fighting any kind of not any kind, but many kinds of viruses, your body's levels of inflammation go up. Il-1, il-6, you know these kind of interleukins, the inflammatory markers, c-reactive protein, all of these things will be measurably higher. And in a healthy body they should resolve after the virus is gone. So, and like, you know, it hurts when you have a fever.
Brehan:I had the flu last year. I was in so much pain and uh, and that's why traditional cultures will use things like diaphoretic herbs, like a sauna, uh, you know stuff that helps you vent, that, that helps you sweat it out, and uh, and then you know, and rest is critical, yeah, and unfortunately for many, many postpartum women, for many mothers, they one. They don't get a chance to rest because they're so isolated in the West they don't have the community support. You get sick, too bad. You got to go to work, you still got to. You got to take care of your kids. You got to get up during the night. You don't get a chance to be sick. You don't get a chance. You know there. It's not that if you're laying down in bed with a fever, it's not that you're being lazy. You're working hard on the inside and you need to recover, you need to rest, you need and you need extra time. A lot of people don't understand how critical that last day of rest is.
Brehan:I had a patient yesterday who, uh, she had been in complete remission from fibromyalgia, got the flu this year, went back to work, went back to the gym and to work. She's a realtor. On the first day that her fever was gone, she was still tired, she still felt achy a little bit and she was like I need to get back to work and I need to exercise. I got to hit my gym goals for 2025. And she, she went to the gym. She pushed herself real hard. She came home she collapsed and her fever came back and you know, and now she's in a real fibro flare, she's got you know, the fatigue is immense. We'll get her out of it, but it's it's.
Brehan:You need to take that one extra day to let yourself rest. After you feel you feel better, like you get through the most of the virus, and then you're like, ok, cool, I can go back to work today and go back to the gym today. Don't do it. Take one more day. Even if you, even if you open your email and respond to you know one or two things, even if you go for a, you know, like a five minute walk outside if it's sunny, like get some fresh air, do that, that's fine.
Brehan:Move your body very gently. Don't push yourself, don't overdo it. Take that extra day and and and unfortunately for many women in the West they can't, the pressure is just too high, uh, but, but that's where we start with with recovery is no, it's like trying to like. I'll ask my patients who can take care of your kids today? Who can take care? Who can you delegate something to at work today, because you need to? You're, you're pushing yourself too hard here and your body does not have the resources to recover. Can, can the kids be instructed wake up, dad, if they need something in the middle of the night.
Peter:Um, yeah, no, because that's a fascinating point, because that's what I tend to find with a lot of my clients um, that the idea of going back too soon and then, all of a sudden, indeed, gym or or work or or whatever child care, just whatever stressful situation you can add to life they'll tend to go back to, to that. And then a month later you talk to them and, yeah, I just can't shake this off, right, it as in I'm still tired. I don't know why I'm still tired. I had the flu a month ago and it's because, yeah, because you never really had any real recovery, you never finished, to put it in very Western terms, you know, there's a reason they tell you to finish your dose of antibiotics.
Brehan:Of course, Right, your symptoms may be gone, but you're going to take those last two or three pills.
Peter:Exactly because they make the difference.
Brehan:Absolutely.
Peter:And that is very like you said, due to societal pressures, there's no blight away for anybody listening. I'm not blaming anybody going back really, really soon, but it is something that is kind of how we've been set up, isn't it to function over here?
Brehan:in the.
Peter:West.
Brehan:Yeah, it's still, you know, the wild, wild West culture in the United States especially, I think, kind of kicked in where it's very individualistic, it's very ego driven, it's very adventurous, it's very much like you want to do this amazing thing that you might die trying. Cool, we're going to celebrate you. You know, get rich or die trying kind of a thing. Unfortunately, you know, for better or for worse, we that that leads to a situation in which we don't support each other. Yeah, we're not. You know, a lot of people have forgotten how the power of teamwork, uh, the power of having a large family organization, you know, we see nuclear family is what's treasured in the west versus the extended family, and it it, it's a form of torture for a lot of people, especially women, it's a form of isolation yeah, it's a really, really difficult spot to find yourself in.
Peter:it's cool. So, going back to the thing, so do you tend to start with explaining the importance of rest?
Brehan:I do.
Peter:And recovery rather than you know, because, to hark back to the American TCM approach, anyone and you must cringe a little bit as well. Well, maybe you don't, I don't know, but it's when I first started meeting holistic healthcare professionals 15 years ago, holistic meant something else than what it means now. Almost people have almost taken the word, because taking a holistic approach is a sensible approach. Right, we look at everything.
Brehan:It should be, I think it should be, it should be the norm.
Peter:It's often not, let's say, whose first instinct is to say I will sell you loads of supplements, and then that seems to be the way, the way it's gone. So so you start by telling people, by asking people, telling people to, to rest more than anything, and what kind of food choices do you?
Brehan:tend to come across that you like.
Peter:This is useful for recovery.
Brehan:The kinds of things that they should have been eating or should have been fed postpartum Right, and so it's often. I joke sometimes that if I were to write a book about diet, it would be called the soup diet. You know, cooked brothy soups, cooked vegetables, little bits of lean protein, highly nutritious, very nutrient, dense stuff. But it's also easy to digest. I think porridge is underrated as a health food. You know, made from a little bit of rice or oats or barley or millet or quinoa or buckwheat, you know something. But you just cook, cook the bejesus out of it with a lot of extra water. Add maybe an egg or a small piece of fish for some protein. Uh, add some cooked vegetables, add some mushrooms, add some spices to that.
Brehan:We in the west we often think of porridge as like the only thing we have is oatmeal or maybe you grew up with like cream of wheat or something like that, and it's usually, you know, you add fruit to it or brown sugar, some maple syrup, maybe some cinnamon, and it's delicious and there's nothing wrong with that either. Like that's, that's a that's, you know, a great way to get, you know, a lot of healthy carbs in and some fiber and some spices, but, but uh, savory porridge, which is really just soup, it's a, it's a um, uh. I think it's underrated as a health food and it's it's uh. You know, people who are in chronic pain are? They often, almost always, have some aspect of digestion that's compromised and so they need we, you know we.
Brehan:That's a stage of treatment. That stage two is is focusing on the gut, and a big part of of that and you can start at the beginning, you should start at the beginning is getting rid of the stuff that you're eating that's making you sick or keeping you sick, right, you know? And it's, yes, it's the hyper processed, ultra processed foods. Those are not good for anybody. Those things are very digestible in some situations. So you know, like, we don't want you eating potato chips, but if you want to have a couple of crackers, you know some gluten free crackers or something like that is very easy digestible starch, starch, okay, cool, you know if that's sitting well, but we want to get people away from a lot of cold food, in particular cold beverages, cold ice, cold stuff, smoothies, ice cream, eating frozen fruit that that's that cold stuff is very hard on the on the body.
Brehan:It takes a lot of metabolic activity to warm it up to where it can be digested, and the effect of putting cold on the inside of your digestive system is the same as putting ice on an injured part of your body. It's going to reduce inflammation because it's going to reduce blood supply. But in a healthy body you need blood supply to heal and you need blood supply to your digestive organs for them to digest your food, and that's why most, most traditional cultures use warm food almost exclusively, if and especially as medicine, especially for people who are in a chronic illness situation yeah, because that's that again.
Peter:That's that's fascinating, because it's the sort of thing that we have touched on on before on the podcast the importance of of understanding what you're eating. And even when you're talking about putting ice on muscles, right, the the old ice bath approach, right? I remember? Um, yeah, one of the tennis players in the in the uk andy mary was to be fair was like number one in the world for a little while. He did this little follow me around for the day documentary. You watch him do 400 meter sprints until he vomited, until he threw up and then and then he goes again and all that you know if you want to be the top guy in the world, that is top tennis level.
Peter:Top athletes are never healthy people. Right, they just, they're just machines. But they're never healthy. They, they're just fit for function.
Peter:Every single one of them and I've worked with one or two tennis players every single one of them is A completely out of their head and B constantly struggles with injuries and all that type of stuff. But what he always used to do after training sessions was jump in an ice bath and remember. You see this in American football things as well. Nobody does that anymore other than wim hof followers, and those guys are all completely out of their mind there's there.
Brehan:So, yeah, wim hof I I don't know specifically where he's at. He he took a lot of his breathing methods from tibetan buddhism, where you can use breath work. You can use qigong to warm up your body to the degree that you can safely sit, you like. You see these monks, they've been doing this for thousands of years. They go up and sit down in a glacier, uh, and just meditate and you'll see the steam just rising off from the ice around them, um, uh, just through breathing, just through breathing, and uh, you know, he took that kind of method and made it extremely popular. That's valid and you can do that and go dunk yourself in an icy pond and get the shock value from it. The whole fad about ice baths and things like that, you know it's there. There is, for some people not for, you know extremely depleted individuals, like postpartum mothers, most of the time extremely depleted individuals like postpartum mothers, most of the time.
Brehan:But you know, in a very replete person, you know like a young man who's a professional athlete is a great situation for this. Yeah, if you want to dunk yourself in ice for 30 seconds for a minute, like that's OK, but putting ice on a bruised shoulder for 30 minutes not a good idea You'll get great fast-track to arthritis.
Peter:Yeah, exactly, hardly anybody uses ice anymore for any sort of injuries, as far as I'm aware. And I know I probably got one or two emails from people saying, well, actually I still do it and it's fine, but the ice pack is kind of, you know, it's nice for bruising, don't get me wrong, it gets the bruise down.
Brehan:But other than that, um, you know, the deal constructs blood vessels. Yes, exactly so you know. Yeah, you get less of a bruise, but you also heal more slowly yes, exactly.
Peter:But you know at least you don't get a big lump on your head if you've got your head, do you know what I mean?
Peter:and then you're bald like I am, but it's, it's. It's interesting like you said, it's the to still have that approach of loads of cold, hard to digest, uh, foods it's. It's a strange one because, of course, what, what we, what we don't, what we never discuss. It's a strange one because, of course, what we never discuss and I'll say this for postpartum recovery, at least in the UK and the US as far as I know is dietary changes to help with recovery. It never gets brought up, mom gets handed the baby, mom leaves the hospital, mom goes back to probably the other child and then back to work and mom has sandwiches sandwiches at lunchtime, because mom's always had sandwiches at lunch. I mean, you need to eat right, and nothing really changes. We immediately go back to our old diet and even if that diet is a healthy diet for someone who is not postpartum, that doesn't translate to being a healthy diet for a postpartum person. Does that make sense?
Brehan:Yes, yes, uh, yeah, the context is everything what you eat for health at one part of your life may not apply somewhere else. You've got to treat yourself like you have the flu, you know. You've got to treat yourself like you're very old. You've got to treat yourself like you're, you know, and you've got to help have people treat you that way too, unfortunately For you know not forever, but for a period of time until you really recover. You need to eat food that's very easy to digest.
Peter:So how long would you recommend that period is? And even for people I know that's probably how long is a piece of string sort of question yeah, to some degree.
Brehan:I mean, you know they call it sitting the month for a reason that's a fairly universal tradition of you know, giving yourself 30 days and and, and I think that's really important. Uh, I think easing, you know, I think, uh, doing things that help you pay attention to your body's own inner state and state of vitality are really important. In China, people commonly will learn to assess their own tongue.
Brehan:Tongue diagnosis is a big part of Chinese medicine. Like you, just look at your, stick your tongue out in the mirror shape, color, how thick is the coating? You know what are the veins underneath it look like it's very easy to tell the state of your body's um, internal ecology. Are you damp or dry, hot or cold? Uh, you know these kinds of things are. You can tell in an instant just looking at the tongue and you can change your, your diet appropriately. You know, going for things like drinking warm water or herbal tea throughout the day, um, adding ginger to your food or drinking ginger tea, uh, should you, should you be more on the soupy diet or is it okay to have some chicken wings?
Peter:you know that kind of stuff so so so did you say because I do want to go back to this that fibromyalgia and gut health, as in IBS type stuff, is linked, because I see that a lot in postpartum women, yes, so fibromyalgia. Would you like me to oh?
Brehan:yeah. So we break fibromyalgia treatment down into four stages. For the most part there is a stage zero, which is just reflection, noticing what kind of breathing, into four stages. For the most part there is a. There's a stage zero, uh. And there is a, which is just um reflection, noticing what kind of breathing your body is tending towards and uh. And then doing some journaling, uh. And then there's a fifth stage, uh, which for most people is optional. They don't, they don't actually need the fifth stage.
Brehan:For the most part, the four stages work through different layers of what we call excess in Chinese medicine. So the first stage is infections we call that wind. The second stage is dampness, which has a lot to do with the IBS presentation. The third stage is autonomic dysfunction, so that's the role that stress and trauma play in catalyzing fibromyalgia pain. And the fourth stage is blood circulation. And the fifth and the fourth stage is, uh, blood circulation. And so whether that's micro clotting, whether it's elevated prostaglandin levels, uh, that's where we'll.
Brehan:We will do things like regulate the woman's monthly period, make sure it's not crazy painful, super heavy. Uh doesn't have giant clots in it, things like that, uh. Then the fifth stage is where we tonify, we build them back up. So for many women in an acute postpartum period they will need to do that fifth stage for a brief period of time and some of them will go into remission just from that, unless they've caught a new virus, unless they have predominant IBS.
Brehan:You know, running to the toilet five times a day or can't poop at all that's a great example. But for the most part we run through stages one through four in order, and then we'll do stage five just for a couple of weeks, just clean, just to, kind of as a finishing move, and then they're usually in remission for a very long time. They can come out of it with a new immune cascade, so catching a new virus, occasionally getting a vaccine. I typically recommend my patients follow their doctor's advice in terms of vaccine scheduling, but that is a known side effect of vaccines. For people with a history of fibromyalgia, anything that activates the immune system can trigger a flare of pain.
Brehan:If they go through a crisis in their life, a period of prolonged stress, have another kid uh experience a motor vehicle accident, you know, something like that, like that can cause a flare of pain, that's neurogenic pain, and then we can. We can, or directly, you know being injured, that'll do it again too, and so then we can do. You know we'll go through whatever stage is appropriate, but they usually come out of remission a second time much faster than the first.
Peter:Yeah, that's like muscle memory, almost isn't it?
Brehan:time, sorry, easier to go back into remission a second time and become more resilient over time. Because, uh, the patients learn to um, accept the pain as a signal from their body, like as a warning sign that something is out of balance, and they take action towards changing that very quickly, and so the severity of injury, the severity of chronic inflammation, is less, even if the pain is more severe, they'll notice right away oh, this is wandering pain, I need to do stage one again. They'll go do some nasal humming, they'll do a sauna and sweat, they'll drink the appropriate tea, and then you know, within two, three days they're out of pain. They'll drink the appropriate tea, and then, you know, within two, three days they're out of pain, no-transcript, get fired from a job, go through a divorce, be in a motor vehicle accident. They're not physically injured, but they're really shaken up and all of a sudden some of that like electrical or burning pain is coming back, cause that's the pain that's typically represented in stage three. They know, okay, it's shy, ass on T, it's, uh, this breathing exercise that we do, called the Huff and Puff, uh, you know, maybe doing some foot soaks and a few days of that, and they're regulated again. Uh, and that's why you know, I think education, like like I was talking about at the beginning, most Chinese medicine is part of Chinese culture, all of it, really, and and um.
Brehan:So that's what I try to teach my patients is how to take care of themselves and how to take care of their own families. Because, like I feel like If a woman goes into some kind of disease or illness situation in a postpartum period, the greatest healing for that that I've heard from them is not only their own recovery but then being able to help their own friends with it, help their daughters with it when their daughters have children, and making effective medical care part of the culture of how we take care of each other, I think is probably the capstone piece of recovery Because, again, just like being isolated causes so much illness, causes so much suffering, suffering, taking people out of isolation can can cause so much cultural healing yeah, no, that is an excellent point because it is something that I've come across quite a lot.
Peter:Where I am, I see maybe I don't know 15 people a week or something like that. I don't see a tremendous amount of people because I don't like working that hard anymore now that I'm 50. But it's basically I see for a lot of my new postpartum care.
Peter:I am the only person they see once a week other than their husband or maybe their parent who pops in every now and again and, as I always tell myself and I always tell them, I'm a lovely person, but if I'm the only guy you see once a week, you need to be hanging out a lot more. I mean, yeah, it is, but it's ridiculously common. And I don't stay in a small village, right, edinburgh is still the capital of Scotland. It's not a huge city, but still 600,000, 700,000 people.
Peter:There are 5,000 women giving birth every year, 5,000 women give birth in this city every year, right, and yet I can be the only person they see once a week. That is, it can't be good for your health, and the problem we have now of, of course, is that there's a lot of and listen, social media is great and all that type of stuff, um, but there are downsides to it. If, if your only connection is to other people via social media, then it's very tempting to fall down a rabbit hole of support groups that are not necessarily supportive no and you must have come across, because I look at your youtube channel, which is phenomenal, right.
Peter:So you, it's completely different from a lot of other. I say recommended facebook groups do you know what I mean? But where support is judgy, or it's sales or it's MLM type stuff.
Brehan:I have seen so many of those groups where it's run by somebody who is professionally sick and by that I mean they are being financially compensated to stay sick so that they can consider themselves kind of the alpha sufferer and they will push, they will push scams or they will say nothing you do will ever work except follow me, yeah, which, like that, should be such a huge red flag. I mean, that's, that's running a cult and it's uh, yeah, that's not to say that all support groups are bad, find support yeah, so support is great yeah but, um, it should be.
Brehan:Support, should be a series of tools. It should be a series of personal connections. It should not be a religion and uh, yeah, which is and I hope people don't take that out of context Having a healthy spiritual community can be a wonderful blessing. Being part of a church group or whatever Community ties are fantastic in traditional cultures, often because of religion and because of church groups. But, yeah, facebook groups, watch out, watch out, there's a lot of toxicity in there and the funny thing is it's like what you said.
Peter:I come across a lot of much more straightforward cases diastasis, recti and all that type of stuff. You know, separation of the core and of the stomach muscles, essentially, which is just you put that together with some exercise. It's basically it is not brain surgery on any level, but the amount of support groups that one of the, the one of the people that used to work for me used to send me, used to used to send me links all the time, support groups and it was always oh, this is a lifelong condition, this is stuff you'll need to manage forever.
Peter:This I'm like it takes me three months to fix all this type stuff any sort of women's health physio takes three months to solve this particular issue, and it's like what you said with regards to the, the professionally sick person, as in, if they're telling you that you will have this forever and it's usually then dependent on you at some stage handing them money, then you'll need to hand them money forever.
Peter:That is kind of how that thing goes. That's a huge, huge red flag. When I see someone who says I've had this condition for three years, well then you should be giving other people advice, right? And I always tell people this that if God forbid, I end up in hospital with I don't know cancer. I'm 50 years old, so it's going to be cancer, right? That is. That's pretty much you know. If I end up in hospital, I'm going to go to break a leg or be cancer. If I'm in a cancer ward, I don't take my advice from the other patients.
Peter:I I don't take my advice from the other patients I take my support from the other patients.
Brehan:No right, you can have great conversations with them, but you should take your support from the oncologist yes, I tend to listen to the to, to the lady or the man who comes in wearing the white coat and has a stethoscope, who at least says hey, pete, I studied this for a while, I have a treatment I mean, yeah, you, you want to listen to the person who successfully helped thousands of cancer patients get into remission and hopefully stay that way, exactly, yes, not the people who have their only experience with it is their own condition. You know that's valid experience. Lived experience is valid experience, but it doesn't make you an expert at a demographic level.
Peter:No, exactly, and that is where to go full circle with kind of where we started. I find that that is where I that's why I like your stuff and your YouTube channel and all that type of stuff is because it is separate from the American TCM approach, which is very similar, and I'm not crapping on every practitioner that uses that approach. We have them in the UK as well, by the way. Of course, there are a lot of good ones, yeah, but there is a tendency to add an element of lived experience through it that doesn't necessarily have. That becomes dominant when it comes to dealing with treatment plans.
Brehan:Right If it supersedes evidence and tradition. That's a fallacy.
Peter:Yeah, exactly, and that's like I said. That's why I liked your stuff a lot and, you know, if you put in the effort to go abroad to actually study the real thing rather than, rather than take a six-week course, which some of the courses in tcm are six weeks in the uk, by the way for anybody.
Peter:Some of them are eight hours eight hours jesus yeah, it's scary, I wouldn't even let someone stick a needle in me after eight hours of training. I mean, you know it's. I wouldn't even let someone stick a needle in my dog after eight hours of training. Done that is mental cool. We've touched on a tremendous amount of stuff. Was there anything else you wanted to cover?
Brehan:no, that's great. Thank you so much for having me on peter no, that was superb.
Peter:That was really really good. I'm not happy. No, I will press stop record here, and press stop record is exactly what I did, as always. Thanks so much to Brian for coming on. I will obviously link to Crawford Wellness website and all his stuff. His YouTube channel is phenomenal. It's really really good. The videos he has are not just entertaining and they're not full of nonsense, like I said, which you get with a lot of the American-style TCM practitioners. I like his approach. I think there's a lot to it and you know, check it out, I'm a big fan.
Peter:That is me done for yet another week. Next week we are talking um attachment theory and all that sort of stuff, relationship management and how that relates to really raising kids and and all that sort of stuff with beth milterman. You're gonna love that one. That was. That was a mind-blowing conversation for me in more ways than one. So that is up next week. For now, here's a new bit of music. You take care of yourself, peter at HealthyPostnatalBodycom. By the way, you know the email address. It's also in the send us a text thing. Thank you for listening. New bit of music no-transcript.