Your Body Is an Ecosystem
Which Makes Me Your Gardener
It felt important to have this first post cover a foundational topic, although I am sure to veer off into packing guides and new product obsessions from time to time, my ultimate goal in my writings here is to shift your perspective of health and how to tend to your body.
Mechanic Mindset
Earth Day came and went, along with the annual burst of eco-aesthetic content but I am here to remind you that just like the planet, your body is an ecosystem. And it deserves more than one day of awareness.
To appreciate the value of how Eastern medicine views the body, it helps to first understand how Western medicine sees it.
In Western medicine, the body is very practically and precisely divided into systems with correlating organs, tissues and functions. Cue flashback to anatomy or physiology class when your professor announced “this week we learn about the digestive system”. Although it is practical to learn about the incredibly intricate thing we call our body, in parts, little to no attention is paid to how these systems co-exist and impact each other.
One of my favorite books, Between Heaven and Earth, describes Western medicine as seeing the body as a machine, organs as parts, symptoms as malfunctions and the doctor as the mechanic. Trained to identify what’s broken and fix it, usually quickly and without much consideration of surrounding ‘parts’. It’s a brilliant model for acute problems. If you have a broken bone, a bacterial infection, or need emergency care, this system works.
“For the mechanic, it is best if the parts of the machine are standardized and uniform. That way the parts are interchangeable, easily replaced, and the ways in which they break down become predictable from one body to the next. Standardized diseases develop from established causes, protocols of treatment are fixed.”
The problem becomes that Western medicine focuses mainly on how people are the alike and pays little attention as to how they are different. Symptom x = diagnosis x = treatment x.
Truth is, if it were really that simple, I’d be out of a job. But instead, my practice is packed patients who’ve been told by their head scratching Western medical doctors some version of the classic: “I don’t know what to tell ya.”
Just this past week alone, I’ve seen patients for chronic bloating, unexplained infertility, persistent anxiety despite prescription treatment, endometriosis pain, insomnia, back pain, low sperm count, burnout, and fatigue (just to name a few).
So why is treatment with me (or rather Eastern medicine) so effective for people who feel like they’ve hit a dead end with Western medicine?
What does Western Medicine have that Eastern doesn’t?
In short, a birds eye view and root cause approach.
Eastern medicine sees the body as a living ecosystem, more like a garden than a machine. It’s not about perfectly functioning parts working in isolation; it’s about relationships. The soil (your digestion), the sunlight (your energy), the water (your fluids), and the seasons (your environment and emotions) all play a role in how well you feel and how quickly you bounce back when things don’t go perfectly.
If your body is a garden, you can think of me as your gardener. I’m not here to fix but to tend. I don’t chase symptoms, I look for patterns, root causes, and the relationships between all the moving parts of your body. My job is to help restore harmony to the ecosystem that is you, so your body can do what it’s naturally designed to do: heal, grow, and thrive. When you consider you body as a garden, you immediately see the regenerative magic it hold when given the proper conditions and also the value in tending to it regularly, not just when things go wrong.
So when patients come to me desperate for answers. It's not that their symptoms aren't real, or that there isn’t a cause, but rather that the tools and training available to Western medical doctors are not attuned to see the relationship between symptoms because in their eyes, they belong in different systems (and end up with you being referred to a bunch of specialists). They are looking for mechanical failure, I am looking for ecosystem imbalance.
Same symptom, different causes, different treatments
The most valuable part of Eastern medicine, is that we understand that the same symptom can have very different root causes depending on the person. Take bloating for example. For one person, bloating might be due to a weak digestive fire (what we’d call Spleen Qi deficiency) where the system just doesn’t have the strength to break things down. Another person might have too much internal dampness, leading to heaviness and stagnation. Someone else might be bloated because they’re stressed and their Liver Qi is stuck, disrupting the flow of digestion altogether.
Same symptom. Totally different root causes. And therefore, very different treatments. A good gardener, doesn’t treat every wilting plant the same way just as a good doctor shouldn’t treat every patient experiencing bloating the same way.
It begs repeating that there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to health and that’s why the thing that helped your friend may be doing absolutely nothing for you! Exception to the rule, however, is that rest + digest digestive tea truly does help everyone with bloating.
Step Into the Garden
If you’ve been doing “all the right things” and still not feeling better, it doesn’t mean you’re broken. It just means your garden needs a different kind of tending.
In no way is this to say that we abandon Western tools. In fact, the best care often comes from blending both paradigms. I love to review imaging and labs to give me a deeper insight into what could be contributing to my patients symptoms. But where Western medicine often stops at diagnosis, Eastern medicine steps in to ask: how do we restore balance?
I use acupuncture and herbal medicine to gently guide the body back toward its natural state of health, nourishing what’s weak, clearing what’s stuck, and supporting the body's own ability to heal itself. Together, when done consistently, this approach creates lasting, sustainable change, not just temporary relief.
Let’s get your garden thriving!
xx Dr. Stolberg
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