A 55 year old woman, came to me complaining about a sudden deterioration of her fingernails. Her fingernails were indeed fragile, soft and easily bent.  She couldn’t associate this sudden deterioration of her fingernails with any recent event or a specific medicine. She also complained about issues with her digestion,  constipations, bad sleep, occasional hot flashes and a sense of cold in her back.

Diagnosis

First I performed a computer test using the TestBalance device, according to Su Jok theory. You can see the results of the test on figure 1.

For some of us it’s not unusual to feel discomfort from stomach bloating and formation of intestinal gas after having a meal. Most of the time the bloating goes away after a few hours and may reoccur after the next meal.

If the bloating does not go away and persists for days you may want to visit your doctor. In this article we are going to deal only with short-term stomach bloating, which related directly to intake of foods.

Reasons for Stomach Bloating:

• Dairy products can increase gas formation. Traditional Chinese Medicine explains this as a weakness of a spleen which is the case with most adults. The modern medicine explains it as decrease in presence of enzymes necessary for processing lactose (dairy sugar) contained in dairy products.
• Badly digested food can promote increased formation of gas as well. Good examples of such foods are cabbage, beans, yeast, nuts, potatoes, sunflower seeds, fruit, sweets, soda water and certainly any fatty products.
• Eating too fast causes ingestion of air that also contributes to stomach bloating

A 25-year old man had been suffering from mouth ulcers for many years, when he came to see me. The ulcer was extremely painful and the area around it looked slightly swollen. The ulcer wasn’t permanent, but would come and go periodically. The patient consulted conventional medical specialists on multiple occasions, who gave him various prescriptions that only helped for a little while and then the ulcers would reappear.

(A mouth ulcer is an open sore inside the oral cavity. Typically it looks like a white oval on flesh with an inflamed red border.)

A 35-year old woman, my patient, came to me with a strong pain over the left eye. The pain was throbbing in character and aggravated when lying down. She lived near my house and therefore she was able to come to me as soon as she had the pain.

Earlier I treated her for back problems. Also she was inclined to depression in connection with a problem in her family.

My patient came to me with her 14-year old daughter. The girl had been suffering from epigastric pain for a year. (“Epigastric pain” means pain in the stomach area.) During the epigastric pain sometimes there was a headache. At age of 12 the girl had the Gall Bladder removal operation. Her mom recalls that in her early childhood the girl often expressed anger and used to be very irritable.

The girl was very worried before the first treatment and refused to do acupuncture.

Her mom thought that some of the medicine her daughter took could have been the cause of the pain, but she couldn’t figure which one if any was at fault.