Traditional Chinese Medicine for Gynecological Issues

by Dr. Chun-Kai Jason Wang, Dr.TCM, B.A., ATCMA member

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has a very long history of treating women's health issues. Up until the 1900s, Traditional Chinese Medicine was divided into four main departments: general medicine, gynecology, pediatrics and external (surgical) issues. To this day, external issues have unfortunately been lost to antiquity due to the advent of antibiotics and modern surgery, leaving only three surviving departments. 

Gynecology has been an important pillar of Chinese Medicine because TCM theory emphasizes yin-yang harmony and expands this concept into clinical practice. Yang pertains to men and Yin pertains specifically to women. Historically, it was important for families to have many children, as the offspring of a family are related to multiple aspects of old Chinese societies, including but not limited to economic and agricultural utility, political influence, warfare manpower and old age security. As a result, women's health and fertility were highly valued and emphasized within these old social systems, some of which carry on to this very day of course. It is interesting to note also that amid the birthrate crisis of most industrialized nations of today, more of the above themes may resurface as discussions in the public sphere.

Gynecology in today's environment has a very marked difference from the past. Notwithstanding the list of biomedical exams and checkups that are performed for this discipline, the major change, even for Western medicine, is really the delayed child-bearing age of modern women. The delay is at least 10 years but the physiology of women has not fundamentally changed; namely, menopause still occurs around 50 despite the buttress of improved modern living environments and better nutrition. These improvements are, however, countered almost completely by the increased burden on women as a result of their participation in the labour force, which is becoming more and more cutthroat and competitive, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence. Women, comparatively from the past, are now increasingly suffering from mental health issues such as stress and depression.

With that being said, TCM can still help a woman achieve her health goals because at the end of the day, women's health issues have not actually changed since time immemorial. Yes modern stress levels can seem unbearable but this is not new. In the past women also suffered stress---stress from polygamous families where multiple wives of the same husband compete with one another clandestinely for matriarchal power within the household, exactly as depicted in historical Chinese dramas. The resulting symptoms of menstrual pain, PMS, ovarian cysts and the like are still the same as they were in the past. And these exact syndromes and symptoms have been documented meticulously throughout the history of Chinese Medicine clinical scholarship with clear instructions of how to treat them.

Take for example, menstrual pain. This particular symptom could be either due to certain things growing in the reproductive organs and/or due to general hormonal imbalances leading to circulatory aberrations through the area. Regardless of what it actually is, TCM recognizes this typically as being due to 'qi stagnation'---that is the lack of smooth flow of the body's vital energy, leading to the condition of being 'stuck.' This 'stuck' situation arises frequently from mental feelings of frustration, agitation, stress and depression. These mental disturbances directly affect brain chemistry which then affect the reproductive organs because they receive hormonal signals from the brain as part of their ovulation circle. (I have encountered women patients who said their period completely stopped during a period of high stress.) The TCM practitioner then usually tries to 'course' or 'dredge' the 'qi' in order to 'unbind' the flow through acupuncture, Chinese herbs, tuina-massage, cupping, among various modalities to 'open up' the patient's 'blockage.' In fact, when you go get massage to 'de-stress' or 'unwind,' this is exactly what you are actually trying to achieve---freeing up blockage so circulation becomes smooth again. Yet, as downright metaphysical and even 'unscientific' as this sounds, after a series of treatments, if patients have a chance to go check their hormonal status, it is not infrequent that they show objective changes in addition to the improvement of the patient's subjective symptoms.

This article is of course too short to shed light on how TCM can fully help women achieve their goals but in a nutshell, 'qi stagnation' is a central theme in many health issues faced by women and men alike. Through the use of various TCM treatment modalities, patients can usually start to feel their body resuming its normal function.

Dr. Chun-Kai Jason Wang is a licensed Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine (DTCM) and Registered Acupuncturist (R.Ac.) who practices in Surrey BC and also holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies from SFU. He can be contacted a https://drwang.ca/

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