Ancient Secrets For Today’s Hormonal & Libido Health

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

This is going to be fun because we don’t have anybody talking about this, which is traditional Chinese medicine. I’m interested in finding out what our differences are in traditional Chinese medicine between acupuncture and herbs that can help with hormones and libido. But before we get into that, I just want to ask you a little bit about what traditional Chinese medicine is and how you got into it.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Oh, that’s a great question. Traditional Chinese medicine is a complete holistic system composed of many modalities. People think, “Oh, just acupuncture.” But there are many other things. There is acupuncture, there is herbal therapy, there is qigong and taichi, and there is dietary therapy. There are other aspects of it that we don’t usually talk about, but people think they’re separate. Feng shui is part of Chinese medicine. There is even cosmology, like astrology, too. We already have things like Chinese-based reading. However, you will come to me and maybe ask me for these things. I’ll read my astrological chart. But back in the day, thousands and thousands of years ago, the court physician was like an advisor to the Emperor and the Empress. The court physician would advise him on all of these things and even Chinese calligraphy. The teacher to the Emperor and the Empress, and this is the medicine for anti-aging because it was for the royal family because they wanted to continue the dynasty. If they kept their health up, then they could continue to rule for thousands and thousands of years. It was always the elixir of life, trying to find it. I want to be immortal. That’s Chinese medicine in a nutshell, and how did I get into it? That was your second question. Interesting. If it was not anything on my radar, I’ll tell you that my first career was as a professional ballerina; that was what my dream was. Chinese medicine was not even a thought. You retire from that. I ended up in corporate, doing information technology for a large media company and a movie company in Atlanta. I got sick there. The stress was just horrible. I went from doing something I loved to something I just hated. Every day. I don’t know if anybody can relate to that. It was not good for me. As a result, I got very sick, and I ended up with uterine cancer in my twenties.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

Wow.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

One of my good friends was going to a Chinese medicine school in California and said, You need to go see an acupuncturist. I’m like, “Accu what?” She just said, “Just go.” I started seeing an acupuncturist in Atlanta, and I went to another place that worked with nutrition. It was just amazing because all of that together helped to heal me. I had to go to five different gynecologists to diagnose me.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

Wow!

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

I was working on myself holistically because you wait around for the Western medicine game to figure this out, and I’m like, I got to take my health into my own hands. Long story short, I went ahead and did that. Of course, we said, Well, we got to do a hysterectomy to figure out what stage I didn’t want to play with my life, but I was, for several months, working on myself mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—everything they say in Chinese medicine. I said, I just went ahead and chose a date, and they did not take my service or my ovaries. I had my ovaries, and I learned how to be my advocate. But they took out the uterus, and when they went to pathology, the pathologist called me and said, I don’t see that tumor anymore. It’s not even there. I had healed myself from cancer and in hindsight in 2020, looking back and like, maybe I should have asked for them to look again before I wasn’t, but I was in my twenties. I was young.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

You still would have gotten the same answer because, being in the traditional medicine field, they’re like, we don’t know what it is until it’s out in a petri dish. It’s like they take it out and put it back.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Yes. After that, I quit my corporate job, and I was like, I’m going to take Chinese medicines. It was a well-paying job, but I didn’t care. You can’t pay me a lot of money. Like when you sell your soul and you have all this stress. No one can ever pay enough money. I was like, “Forget it. I’m going to go be a poor student and do this because I need to help people.” This is amazing. I’ve been doing it and never looked back.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

Oh, my goodness. That is such a miraculous story. That is amazing. We’ve been talking a lot with this summit about how stretch stress affects libido. Not just health, but libido, health, and fertility—all those things put together.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

When you asked me, I was like, “Yes, this high.” I understand all that down there. I may have that cancer, but still, I thought taking out the uterus would affect my libido. I went to Chinese medicine school after I learned all those secrets and put them into practice. I went straight to that book. I started looking up everything. There are some issues after a hysterectomy; you have to think about those things. 

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

Now I’m curious: what is it with Chinese medicine that they would say about libido and hormones, and then what things do get recommended with Chinese medicine?

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Yes.  I’m going to have to give you a couple of foundational things. Now, it’s a combination of therapies—not just acupuncture, but everything. the symbol, everything is yin and yang. Yes. The correct way is to say yang, not yang. That’s the American way. It’s yang; that’s like light; that’s dark; that’s male; that’s female. It’s all about balancing that. You can liken it in Western medicine to something like your autonomic nervous system. To break that down for people, it’s like your fight or flight, stress under stress, or relaxation. Like you have an on and an off switch for your body. In Chinese medicine, yin and yang are used to correlate. In Western society, we’re running, running, running. We’re running. That’s more yang, but we don’t take that time to have that yin phase. You can even liken it to exercise like running, like actually running basketball or cardio. That’s very Yang-oriented. But then you have to balance it with yin exercises like yoga. Taichi, does that make sense? Yes. listening to Chinese medicine. There are times when we look at things as excessive or deficient. You can have a male, a man that’s, like, angry and like, “Oh, he’s got a purple face. He looks like he’s about to have a heart attack. He is just angry.” But you can also have a male or a female who’s, like, timid and like, low voice, deficient, or like that. You can tell that it’s very easy to make those comparisons, and everything is a pattern in Chinese medicine. In Western medicine, it’s conditions like PCOS; there is a name for it, there is a label for it, or you have one. What’s another one? heavy bleeding. I forgot about Western medicine. What’s Western medicine?

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

Dysmenorrhea.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Dysmenorrhea, amenorrhea, or erectile dysfunction. Those are all labels and names. But for us, we have patterns. It’s like we’re in the fall pattern now, at least where I live. What happens in the fall? The leaves turn colors; they change. Maybe there’s mold; it’s cooler. But we group symptoms, and that’s a pattern. Someone will say, “Oh, I have this.” Exactly. What pattern? They’re going to say all the other symptoms that go with it, and you put it in that pattern. When it’s that pattern, then you choose all the points that go with that pattern, all the foods that go with that pattern, and what else? The diet that goes with that pattern stays within that pattern. Now, when it comes to libido and hormones, well, let me back up a little bit. Let’s start with the three treasures. The three treasures in Chinese medicine are: you should always protect your jing, your chi, and your shen. They say if you protect those three, then you’ll live forever. You’re jing is your essence; for men, it will be sperm; for women, it will be like tea, the eggs, the ovaries, etc. Even your menstrual bleeding. Protect that. You can say hormones always pick your DNA, your blueprint, and your essence. You have your chi, which is your energy. Like I said before, in Western society in the United States, we exhaust ourselves to no end. It’s always that on switch that we never rest and turn ourselves off. 

We have Shen, which is our mind, our mental capacity, and just our emotions. You should always not control them but protect them. Don’t go crazy. Don’t stay anxious. Don’t stay in depression for too long. You can go through it, but you’ve got to get help for that. You have to protect those three treasures that every single human being has. If you don’t, then that’s when it will start to affect many systems, especially the hormonal system, your libido, and everything else that goes with hormones. You have all these sexual dysfunctions. In Chinese medicine, three organs have a lot to do with libido and hormones, especially sexual health in general. The kidneys believe it or not. They look at the kidneys as very important. We call it the gate of life. Ming men, Ming men, means the gate of life, the gate of vitality. That is what protects your kidney essence, we say. That is important for our sake. For kidney yang, it’s the male sexual drive. Kidney yin is for female sexual drive. When men’s kidney-yang starts to deplete, they’ll get erectile dysfunction and impotence because they are wasting their kidneys either overworking by drinking or doing all these horrible things, like maybe not taking care of themselves, smoking, or just poor eating, which is not good. You’re exhausting your kidney yang. 

Of course, now you don’t want to have sex, poor sexual activity, or, as they say in the books, excessive sexual activity. That can cause problems as well as sexual dysfunction, too. Having too much sex, male or female. For women, kidney-yin, whose Chinese name is Tian Wei, is the bleeding, the menstruation. If we don’t protect our menstruation and inhabit it regularly throughout our lives, then there will be infertility, just like fertility issues. You’ll have lots of problems there. In pregnancy, everything leads up to it. We have a poor diet and stress. Stress exhausts us. We go through perimenopause and menopause, during which the kidney yin goes down, then you have the hot flushes, and all of that stuff happens. When the kidney yin goes down, then the libido goes down too. We think of those things. But the other organ associated with sexual dysfunction would be the liver. They say he is like the commander of the body. It tells the body; it tells all the other organs what to do, so she has to go this way. That way, it controls and says that this is where the blood flow goes. That’s what they say in Chinese medicine. But you have Western medicine. It’s used for detoxification. That’s important. and there are many things delivered to us. But for us, if you are stressed, you hold it and bind it in the liver. When you are very stressed, guess what? There is no good circulation there. The other organ is also the heart, which causes a lot of anxiety and depression. Nobody wants to have sex. You’re having a lot of anxiety, and it causes stagnation in the liver. Now it’s affecting your hormones. Those are the three organs that would be the main ones. But of course, digestion—there are other ones too, but those would be the main ones for Chinese medicine. I hope that made sense.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

It’s fascinating. I just find it interesting because, first of all, it’s enlightening. After all, we think of Western medicine as being modern. But sometimes Western medicine just doesn’t have a clue about Chinese medicine. long. If we had this knowledge, and it’s something that we’ve skipped over in traditional Western medicine, the world would be a different place if we incorporated more of it.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

It would be nice because it’s how to live daily, and that’s what people need to know. When I work with people, I give them guidelines. Well, I had mentioned the guidelines before, and we all chuckled in Chinese medical school when we read this and this. Let me read it. It’s from the Swedish dynasty, from 581 to 618. In those years, the classic of The Simple Girl is what it was called. They say that at age 15 if you’re in good health, the frequency of ejaculation for men should be two times a day. They even have guidelines here. The average person is healthy once a day. Poor health; they have it by ages like 20 and then up to 70 years old, like maybe at 70 years old. If you’re in good health, you should have an ejaculation every 30 days. Average health, none. because when you have four males in ejaculation, you’re letting go of your kidney essence, and you want to hold on to your essence, leading to qigong and taichi. It’s all about preserving essence. You can have vitality and a longer life because we’re talking about the emperor here. You don’t have the emperor; it’s the same. They even have the minimum recommended frequency of ejaculation according to age. They have, like, age 20 every four days, and you go all the way up to age 60 every 30 days. They have guidelines. It doesn’t have to be followed strictly, but loosely, with just loose guidelines. Even the amount of sex one should have changes with the seasons because you follow them too. In the spring, you have higher sexual activity, and then it declines in the winter. Everything goes in cycles because Chinese medicine mimics nature, and that’s mimicking.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

Something is interesting about that. I just came across a study, that had to do with testosterone levels in men. because I was trying to look up, like, what are the standards for testosterone levels and what research have they done? I was shocked that there was this pretty large Western study that looked at male mortality. the risk of dying and is associated with testosterone levels. What they found was that men’s testosterone levels are the highest. This brings up the season. They were the highest in the late summer to early fall, and they were the lowest in the winter. In the winter, we saw the highest levels of deaths related to low testosterone. What made me think of seasons with you?

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

That’s seasons, too, and that’s why a lot of the court physicians had to teach the emperor moderation and how to live forever. Don’t lose your essence. Don’t lose your jing, because you can spread your seed everywhere, too. for the females, too. What do you eat at different stages of your life? Because maybe at 42, 50, or 60, you can’t eat like you did when you were in your twenties. For women, they say that in Chinese medicine, I don’t know about Western medicine, but in Chinese medicine, they say that hormones change every seven years. In Chinese medicine, for men, it’s every eight years. If you do the math, 40 to 49, it correlates. Quality matches up, and even for fertility, you have to eat a certain way. I love it when mothers bring young girls to me who have just started menstruating. Then I started to teach them: This is how you should eat for your menstruation. When women come in, they want to get pregnant. This is how you should eat. This is all of the lifestyle you should have or even post-pregnancy. This is how you eat, or even go into menopause or perimenopause. This is how you should eat now and then. Perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopause: There are guidelines for everything. It’s good to share that with people because they don’t know. We just eat the standard American diet all the time. Does that make sense?

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

Where does the role of acupuncture come in with all this?

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Oh, yes. With acupuncture, use those acupuncture points as switches, like a switch to turn on a light or turn it off. As a doctor, too, when you put an acupuncture point in, there is an apparent movement towards the brain and an efferent movement away from the brain. You’re controlling. If you have, let’s say, shoulder pain, I don’t have to be on my shoulder. I could go on your leg, and there is a switch there that will turn on that part of the brain to stop the pain over there.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

That is so cool.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

That’s to be targeted. Does that make sense? If you’re like, “Hey, I have problems.” Male or female, in the genitalia pelvic area, there are points for that area. Chinese medicine is a medical art. It’s not protocol-based. You’ll need that because it’s emergency medicine. But for us, it’s a medical art. You can make lasagna. I can make lasagna, but we have different ingredients. In the end, it’s lasagna, and you still get the same result. In Chinese medicine, you’re very creative with what you do, and as you do this longer, it’s like you choose fewer points, and it’s like they have done that. I hope that made sense.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

I love it when the two worlds start to combine because I heard recently that there was some study where they were able to map out, I don’t know if it was with functional MRI, but it was some kind of imaging study, and they were able to prove these nerve nodes that were on the body that they’re going, oh my goodness,” look at there are these nodes of nerves, these like little packets of nerves, and they’re corresponding to the acupuncture points. Once again, I go, “Oh my God, look at that! “That’s something they’ve known about for thousands of years. We’re just going like, All right, well, we need to see proof. Now, well, we’re finding the proof. I just find it incredibly, incredibly fascinating.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Well, it’s good you brought that up because I read a study also. Well, they were doing acupuncture points on anesthetized animals. They wanted to look at all the different numbers. It was like a somatic nerve bundle: number two, number three, and number four. They wanted to see how the acupuncture points on the front paws. The back paws are acupuncture for animals, too, depending on how and where the blood flow would go on these anesthetized animals. The ones they chose were for hormones, and they saw that for female animals, the blood flow goes straight to the uterus. It was fascinating. Yes. I talked about that study a while ago, but it was cool. They even saw the acupuncture points. I would go to the middle section of the brain. You can control blood flow with Chinese medicine. You can talk about many different conditions. It’s just where you need the blood flow. Just tell me. I don’t care where you need it. Just tell me.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

Which would be great for erectile dysfunction, because erectile dysfunction is a blood flow problem.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Exactly. With acupuncture, there are those. You say you have erectile dysfunction. great. Let’s go ahead and take care of this. You have to pick the points, the point prescription, as we call it, and, well, diagnose, first diagnose, and the treatment plan. You would go ahead, pick the points, and then you would pick the herbs that go with that pattern. For me, well, you’ll say erectile dysfunction, but I could say kidney yang deficiency. Some herbs go straight to the kidneys and help the kidneys get energy throughout the whole meridian. That’s why we don’t think of food that way. But food travels and influences certain organs. They figured that out in Chinese medicine. That’ll be for the food. It’s the same thing for the herbs. What meridian does it go to? What organs does it affect, and what type of effect will it have on that organ? We categorize food and even herbs into many things. Like, let’s talk about red ginseng, the color red, and you want something more, like blood and red, which helps circulation. Ginseng helps to dilate and helps with blood flow, and it will go to the pelvic area, not just white ginseng. I’m talking red ginseng. There is a specific one. Does that make sense?

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

Yes, that does make sense.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

And to give you an even simpler example, have you eaten sushi before?

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

Oh, yes.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Just so the viewers understand this, how we even look at food, in general, is just that the whole dish would be very balanced, like having the combination of it because they say anything underneath the water brings cold into the body. That’s what they say. Fish are underwater. They are cool. But let me give you a different example. If you ever had ginger, like put it in your mouth, what do you feel in your belly? Do you feel hot or cold?

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

I feel a little warm.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Warm. That’s the effect of ginger. It warms you. It’s good for digestion. They say when you eat fish, it’s cooling, which has a cooling effect. How about when you have peppermint? Do you feel hot or cold when you have peppermint?

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

I would say cold.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

That’s the energy of that food. We call it dietary energetics. If you have sushi, you have fish. What else do you have that is maybe warming?

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

The ginger and the wasabi

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

You have the ginger over here that warms the cold that you just put in your stomach, and then you have the wasabi, which disperses anything that may be stagnated because cold brings stagnation. There is an herb that they put, but they always put something plastic. It looks like grass or something, but it’s an herb that you chew on to kill parasites. That’s the real way because then the wasabi will disperse it.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

Oh, wow.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

That’s a balanced meal. You should eat the ginger if you have a cold; you should eat it if you have a warm one; and then you should, and then anything else happens, you know? That’s what we do too. It’s the same if people come to us and know about Western drugs. We know there are energetics in drugs too. Does that drug make you feel cold? Does it make you feel dry? Like, let’s take Mucinex. If someone takes Mucinex, it’s drying. When cessation comes in, they’re dry. I have to moisten them with my acupuncture points. Recommendations for dietary therapy: I have to do the opposite of the side effects if they’re too dry. Does that make sense?

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

This makes sense. Now I’m starting to think about how, when it comes to herbs, sometimes especially Western medicine, in the way we’ve been trained, everyone’s looking for the pill that’s going to fix things. But, even if we took the herbal knowledge from Chinese medicine, it might not be the herb because it might not be the season or the pattern for you. It’s not like you can sit here and ramble off. Well, we have these herbs. They’re going to help with hormones and libido. 

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Right.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

It’s all individual.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

It’s the first personalized medicine because it was for the Emperor’s wife. It was for them. like I could tell you a whole bunch. That’s why you have to see a TCM practitioner who can distinguish the different patterns because you can have five different men, all with erectile dysfunction, but you have to treat them differently based on their constitution and their lifestyle with different herbs. But they’ll all be fixed with whatever they’re dealing with. But they’ll all sit together and go. “What did she give you? Oh, she gave me this.” “What? Does that work for you? It didn’t work on me.” Does that make sense? You can just ask for one herb, but there are herbs to help with things like vaginal dryness.

If there is some dryness, that’s why you can help many in complicated cases, and you don’t have to have like 12 bottles of different things. You can put it all in one formula, a balanced formula that will hit everything that makes sense.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

We see that too often in Western medicine, where you take one medicine for one thing, and then you get the side effects of that medicine. Then you get to go on another medicine to treat the side effects. You have to take another medicine to deal with the side effects of the second drug.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Then you come to the acupuncturist. I’m like, “Oh my God, what’s going on? Let me just try to balance you and restore some homeostasis here, no matter what it is—whatever hormonal issue or whatever sexual dysfunction issue you’re having.” But I will say this: for the herbs and Chinese medicine in the foods, it’s usually warming because you want to warm the kidneys; as they say, the kidneys go with winter.

In the winter, if you live in a wintry climate, you should always keep your back warm and even just rub your kidneys. You’ve maybe taken a Qigong class with me.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

I’ve done a couple of your qigong classes and I love them.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

You like to just rub your kidneys. That’s how you can warm up pretty fast, too. you probably feel, especially if you’re cold and low-back, and it’s nice for you. then there would be food too. Now I could say foods for that, like yes, the energetic problem is warming if you eat meat and it warms the kidneys, and kidneys are good for just sexual libido. All of those chives are warming up too. Walnuts—they say it’s good for brain health, but it’s also good for fertility and sexual life. They say that in all Chinese folk remedies, this is a folk remedy for impotence: to eat 20 walnuts a day. However, if you have a digestion condition or a nut allergy, don’t do that. I’m just asking you to talk to your TCM practitioner. It helps to lubricate the intestines. if you can eat them. Lentils and beans are good, and warming chestnuts are alright. Like I said, start cooking with more ginger. That makes sense.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

Yes.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Shrimp is good. It’s warming. Oysters, of course, but don’t get food poisoning. If you have a shellfish allergy, don’t eat that.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

This is funny because there is that rumor that oysters are aphrodisiacs. Maybe that’s why.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

These are all aphrodisiacs, too, in Chinese medicine. Even eggs are a blood-immune tonic. That’s good for women. You want foods that help nourish you, and that’s what you should do even after pregnancy. I’m sorry. I’m running all around the place because it helps many different conditions, not just from one thing, but you just think of what nourishes yin and what nourishes yang, and this group that all together. Good.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

You’re making me want to go back to school. I need to know more.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

It’s been a long time. You don’t want to go to school.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

Yes, I don’t think I can start again now, but it’s making me go. Wow. I want to know more about this.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Even Dong Quai is good; people talk about that a lot. Black cohosh doesn’t work on everybody, especially women.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

I found that. Yes.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Because it has a different energy compared to Dong Quai. Rehmannia is alright; it nourishes blood, and for women, that’s a good one too. Those are pretty general. We usually have a lot of those in Chinese herbal formulas for women. Now they do get into some things for men, like I know they even say about seahorses, but in this country. There are things that they do. But here, I’m talking ancient times, sea cucumbers. I’ve never eaten one.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

I’ve eaten them. They’re like giant slugs.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Yes. It’s then that I’m like, I don’t know how to cook that. It just looks crazy.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

I tried it twice, and I don’t know what made me try it the second time.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

I should try it. I know. I see it all the time. Oh, but yes, I hope that made sense with food. You want warm food. That’s why we say don’t drink cold water all the time. It should be room temperature; always keep your essence warm because it likes to be warmed up. It’s the same when we think of fertility, and that could be an issue that some people are dealing with. Yes, there are things like deficiency of yin and hormones and all that. Or there could be some excess here and a deficiency there; you just have to regulate them. But sometimes people have unexplainable fertility. I’ve seen this, and there is a diagnosis. I’m thinking of one in particular. There are many diagnoses in Chinese medicine for fertility. It’s not just that this person has fertility issues—multiple things here—but one is a cold in the uterus. We use a warming technique because, as they say, you have a bun in the oven; you have to get the oven warm. Even if you’re out there watching, put your hands right underneath your belly button. Is it cold or warm? Does it feel cold or warm? Do we even have to touch the patient, see? Maybe even check if your tummy is cold or warm. There are different temperatures; you have to see what’s going on. There is stagnation there. Something’s not going on. Sometimes just warming up. The uterus helps with fertility. I know that sounds strange, but that’s an actual diagnosis. They get pregnant. You’re like, “Oh, that’s cool.” But stress has a lot to do with sexual dysfunction. The basis of Chinese medicine is all about the blockages of chi. Either your brain, you’re stressed out in anxiety, depression is causing blockage of chi, or your food or lifestyle is causing it. We just have to help you decipher that. like what exactly that could be. as long as a patient’s willing to dive into what that is, and of course, it’s awesome. It’s awesome helping people recognize things and get connected to themselves because once they get connected to themselves and then they have their partner, the partner can get connected to themselves. Then the sexual relations will be wonderful between them, leading to a better sexual life. I hope that makes sense to you.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

Oh, my goodness, Jayne, this was fantastic. I learned a lot in this session. I appreciate you explaining all this stuff I have. It’s like I know about Chinese management. I feel like I have a whole new understanding of it that I never had before. I’m sure I’m this excited about it. I’m sure everybody else is going to enjoy this lecture. Yes. Where can people find out more about you?

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

My website is lotusacupunctureclinic.com. I’ll give you our website, and that’s my place here in Virginia Beach. But I work with people all over the country. I do some telehealth. I also practice functional medicine. We talk about nutrition well—regular, standard nutrition. But the thing about me as a functional acupuncturist is that I blend those two, and then once the patient understands the foundations, we go into Chinese dietary therapy and get even more personalized because you have to have a good foundation and understanding, and people say you eat healthy, but healthy is different from clean. We have to understand those things first, and then we start to learn more. Everything builds upon the next because Chinese medicine is all about teaching the patient—let’s say, teaching a man or woman to fish. They can catch fish for the rest of their lives. That’s what we do. I love them, but I don’t want to see them every day with all these problems they need to learn.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

And get better. The opposite of traditional medicine is to get people better. I just keep having them come in, and that’s what people want to do. They don’t want to have to keep coming in and paying co-pays and deductibles or fees, or like, I want to come and pay and get healthy.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Yes. I always ask them if they’re willing to learn, and I’m willing to teach you how to take care of yourself now. There are a lot of patient responsibilities, like willingness to get better and wanting to get better, because we have all, like, I always joke and say, I need like nine lifetimes to learn Chinese medicine because it’s thousands of years old. But I will teach you as much as I know, and I will keep going and keep learning it. It’s just that you continually learn; many books haven’t even been translated into English yet.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

Oh wow.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

I know.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

That’s amazing. Yes. Thank you very much, Dr. Jayne, for taking the time to be with us. I appreciate it.

Jayne F. Dabu, DAOM, LAc, DiplAc

Yes, thank you much. I enjoyed it.

Betsy Greenleaf, DO, FACOOG (Distinguished)

All right, everybody stick around because we have more great sessions coming up at the solving sexual dysfunction summit.