You've been tired for a while. Months, probably longer.
You've had the bloodwork and it came back fine. That's good news. It's also where the conversation ends, and you're still tired.
So here's something to do with it.
Tired is one word doing the work of several different situations. They feel nothing alike from the inside. They want different things, and which one you've got is most of what tells me where to look.
I've written before about the three I see most, and what they feel like from the inside. This is the other half of it: how to work out which one is yours.
The useful part is that you can sort them yourself, this morning, with four questions you already know the answers to.
Before anything else
Some tiredness belongs with your physician before it belongs with me, and I'd rather say so at the top than bury it.
Weight coming off that you did not intend. Fever, or sweats at night. Getting short of breath on stairs you used to manage. A tiredness you can date to a particular day. Tiredness alongside a new lump, or bleeding, or a cough that has not cleared. Those are physician questions and they go first.
And if your panel came back clean, that's real information and not a brush-off. A test reports what it measured. It's a true fact about you, and it's one input on a much longer list.
One: when does it arrive?
Not how bad. When.
Some people wake up already behind. Nothing got restored overnight, and the day starts in debt. Some wake up fine and then fall off a shelf at a particular hour, often the middle of the afternoon. And some run well all day and then can't stop at night, which is a different animal again.
Morning, afternoon, evening. That alone narrows it.
Two: what does moving do to it?
This one surprises people, and it's the question I'd keep if I could only keep one.
Walk for ten minutes. Not a workout. Ten ordinary minutes.
For some people it lifts. The limbs were stiff and sluggish, the movement loosens them, and they come back a little better than they left. For others it costs them. It feels fine at the time and they pay that evening or the next day, and the payment's out of proportion to the walk.
Those are two different bodies. One's slowed down. The other's short of something. Pushing the second one the way you'd push the first is how people end up further back than they started.
Three: what does eating do to it?
Specifically, how do you feel forty minutes after lunch?
Some people go heavy after a meal and the head goes thick, as though the whole system went somewhere else to work. That tells me the middle of the body is struggling with the job it was given.
In Chinese medicine the middle is the Spleen and the Stomach. Their work is to take food and turn it into something the body can use, and then to send the clear part of it upward. When that lifting falls short, you get the heaviness, the thick head, the flatness after meals. It isn't a mystery and it isn't laziness.
Other people get the opposite. They're fine after lunch and wretched if they skip it, and three in the afternoon is a cliff with a shake in it. That's a different question, and blood sugar sits upstream of a surprising amount of what I see.
Four: does sleep pay you back?
Everybody says no. Hear the question again, because there are two ways to fail it.
One: you sleep badly. You can't get in, or you wake at a particular hour and lie there. If that's you, I've written the hour-by-hour version separately, because waking at two isn't the same problem as waking at four.
Two: you sleep well. Seven or eight hours, nobody disturbs you, and you wake up as though you hadn't been to bed. That's the one worth noticing, because it rules a great deal out. Sleep isn't where this is going.
What you do with four answers
You've got four facts now: an hour, a response to movement, a response to food, and whether the night pays you back.
Any one of them on its own is thin. Together they make a pattern, and the pattern is what I'm reading for. A morning start with a heavy afternoon and good sleep isn't the same picture as an evening wind-up with a crash after lunch. Those two get treated differently from the first appointment on.
That's the honest answer to why I ask so much about things you didn't come in about. One symptom with eight sources of information around it is readable. One symptom on its own isn't.
It's also why I won't tell you how many visits anything takes. I don't know yet, and neither does anybody who quotes you a number before they've looked.
What a page cannot do
A page can hand you the four questions. It can't answer them with you, and it can't do the part that isn't a question at all.
That part is hands. Where the abdomen is tight and where it gives. What the tongue says about fluids. Whether a spot that ought to be quiet is tender. Your own numbers read next to all of it, if you bring them. A first visit's a full hour and most of it is talking, because I want to know why this, in this person, at this time of year, before I treat anything.
I practice in Williamsport, so this is written for anybody inside driving distance of it. Muncy, Montoursville and Jersey Shore included. Here's what a first visit actually looks like. If you'd rather read before deciding, there are pages on sleep and insomnia and on everything else I treat. The summer version of the depletion picture is in an earlier piece on the Heart and the Kidney. Book whenever you're ready, or call the clinic at (570) 322-6824 if you'd rather ask something first.
Four questions. Write the answers on the back of something and bring them.
best all ways always
This is general education, not medical advice. It is not a diagnosis and it is not a treatment plan for you. Talk to your own healthcare provider about your own situation.
Dr. Jeremy E.R. Reidy, BS, MSOM, AP, DOM is a Licensed Practitioner of Oriental Medicine in Pennsylvania and a licensed Acupuncture Physician and Doctor of Oriental Medicine in Florida. He practices in Williamsport, treating the whole presentation rather than the complaint somebody walked in with, and reading blood chemistry alongside the tongue and the pulse.
Want more of this? The Regulation Brief is a weekly letter on what your body has been trying to tell you, written the way it gets explained in the treatment room. Subscribe at theregulationbrief.substack.com
