Welcome back to the FAKTR podcast, your go to source for cutting edge education in the world of sports medicine, rehab, and integrative health care. I'm your host, Jessica Riddle. And today, we're continuing our deep dive into five element acupuncture with doctor Andrea D'Amato. If you tuned in for part one, you'll remember we explored the core philosophy behind five element acupuncture, how it's rooted in nature, emotion, and the interconnectedness of mind and body. Doctor D'Amato shared how each element, wood, fire, earth, metal, and water correlates with specific organ systems and how emotional states and imbalances can manifest in our patients in ways we may not initially recognize. In today's episode, we're taking that knowledge a step further. We'll discuss how five element acupuncture can be applied clinically to address chronic pain, stress related disorders, and even athletic performance. Plus, we'll explore how understanding these elemental patterns can help you fine tune treatment plans and improve patient outcomes in ways you may not have considered before.

So whether you're interested in learning how to incorporate eastern medicine into your treatment protocols or if you're just someone fascinated by a more holistic view of patient care, this episode is packed with insights you won't wanna miss. Let's get started.

So in order to get back to our physical wellness. Slide, we're gonna wanna consider maybe using stairs instead of an elevator or an escalator and then walk whenever possible. So, airport travel, your work environment travel, you can park further away from the front door. I recommend this a lot to patients who just don't know how to start or are physically limited and what they can do, or are too intimidated to go to a gym or do something like that. I'll just say, well, if you're out running your errands, just park further away from the door and increase your steps. And it's something that they're like, oh, I never thought about that. Like, we're kind of conveniently minded instead of also always wellness minded. So we can learn to recognize also those warning signs when our body begins to still feel ill.

So before we get to that burnout phase where our body shuts down, we can just say you need an unstructured day where you don't have a to do list. If your life allows for that, where you can just stay in your pajamas for an extra hour in the morning and perhaps or give yourself a half an hour at the end of the day to get lost in a good book if you like to read or take a bath or turn your phone off or what or heck, if it means that you wanna zone out on some platform on your on your phone because that's what is gonna give your mind and body a little bit of a break. So you you don't have those warning signs of becoming ill, try that. Eating a variety of healthy foods and controlling your meal options. I mean, your portions, excuse me. We can lean into traditional Chinese medicine foods as well. Each season is going to have a food. So that's a part where you can also tie in the Eastern and the Western side of things as well.

There's a lot of information about that is not in here, but just in general that you could explore if that's curious for you. You wanna try to maintain a regular sleep schedule and get between seven and nine hours of sleep per night. Again, These are great suggestions towards that umbrella of wellness. Do the as many the best you can as possible. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. And then our spiritual side of wellness. Is going to be what helps you to develop a set of values that helps you see, meaning and purpose spirituality can be represented in many ways. So, either relaxation or religion.

It's not necessarily only your religious aspect, so it's going to help us cope with whatever's going on in our everyday life. So exploring your inner self, going into that introspective part. So even our our quiz in this learning your dominant element in this activity can help lean into that spiritual side. We can also experience if we experience life changing events, we wanna have to kind of take some some time to integrate them in and what that means to us. We spend time meditating, practicing mindful relaxation, acceptance, as I mentioned earlier, to just be curious. So, and then look for a religious space that you agree with if that's something that interests you and is important to you. So these are ways that you can sort of. All, like, integrate in that wellness side.