We live in a time when our immune systems have to deal with numerous threats. Some of these threats include viruses, bacteria, pollution, heavy metals, emotional stress, unhealthy foods, and poor lifestyle choices.
When looking at any challenge to our immune system, it’s important to not just look at the physical body, but also the energetic and emotional areas of health as well. Doing so allows us to get a more complete picture of what’s really going on.
I used to run a clinic and there were a number of times when people would come in and tell me that they didn’t know where else to go for help. Many of them said that they had found relief by visiting different specialists, but the relief would only last a short time. This is a common result when we only look at the surface and don’t actually get to the root of the problem.
Looking at the energetic, emotional, and functional aspects of wellness gives us more information so we can see that bigger picture. We call this “vectoring” because we are observing how each area relates to and interacts with the other two areas of the Wellness Triad.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these key areas and how they relate to our overall immune health.
It all starts with energy…
The energetic component of wellness can be understood in terms of yin and yang. This is the ancient Chinese concept of opposition. A few of these yin and yang opposites include:
- Female/male
- Up/down
- Cold/hot
- Sedentary/active
- Interior/exterior
- Deficiency/excess
Energy is the most yang component of the body, followed by blood, then body fluids, then tissue. That’s why you can use an energetic assessment like a ZYTO scan to help you predict where wellness is moving because you’re actually at the beginning of the continuum—which is the most active part of the continuum.
Acupuncture meridians are another component of health related to energy. These are energy pathways that run through acupuncture points, which can be stimulated to release blocked energy. Energy is always moving through the body, but it increases in certain meridians at certain times of the day according to the body’s circadian rhythm.
For example, energy, or qi, increases in the lung meridian from 3:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. So if you find that you’re waking up around 3:00 a.m. every morning, you could have a weakness in your lung meridian. But this could also indicate that you have an issue with the meridian that has the least energy flowing through it at this time, which is the urinary bladder meridian.
When you’re looking at the body energetically through the meridian system, it’s kind of like you’re looking at a hose that carries water. And what happens is when someone comes along and steps on the hose, it restricts the flow of water. But when you put a needle in or when you stimulate the point, it resets the switch and takes the foot off the hose and allows the energy to flow the way it’s supposed to. Remember that energy is the most yang component of the body, so if you can correct the flow of qi, you’ll also impact everything else downstream from blood to body fluids to tissue.
Along with specific organs, each meridian is also energetically connected to specific vertebrae and teeth. When we look at the spleen meridian, for example, we can see that it’s vectored to the following organs and teeth:
- Stomach meridian
- Pancreas
- Middle cervical vertebra (C4)
- Middle thoracic vertebrae (TH6, TH7, TH8)
- Top 1st and 2nd molars (T2, T3, T14, T15)
- Bottom pre-molars (T20, T21, T28, T29)
Looking at these vectors helps you determine possible causes and effects. Let’s say, for example, a client comes to you and she’s had a chronically stuffy nose for a long time. Then, last week she fell down and hurt her back and all of the sudden her sinuses are driving her crazy now. And what happens is this can affect the tooth that’s energetically connected with the sinus and that part of her back, and now she gets an abscess that needs a root canal.
While these may seem like unrelated problems, we can see how they may be related to each other by considering vectors.
Addressing the emotional component
Emotions begin with information that is then filtered through a belief. This creates a perception, which creates an energetic response. The response will then inform amino acids to organize into peptides, and these formations will create specific emotions.
Let’s assume that the information we get is a virus. And it doesn’t even have to be exposure; it can just be the information of the virus or your beliefs about it. Your reaction might be a perception of fear that you’re going to die from it. This changes your energy pattern which organizes those amino acids and peptides into the emotions of fear and pensiveness. And these emotions will impact different organs and systems in the body.
I previously mentioned the lung and spleen meridians, and these are energetically connected to specific emotions as well. The emotions of anxiety and grief are related to the lung, for example.
Recently I met a woman at one of our seminars who was having inconsolable grief about the death of her mother. She had developed a dry cough since her mother’s death about a year earlier. We did an EVOX session with her to address those emotions, and it cleared her energy and she didn’t cough again for the rest of that 3-day seminar.
From this real-life example, you can see how emotions can lead to physical issues. When we address the emotion, the physical symptom goes away.
Emotions are often the key to the whole puzzle when you’re looking at an immune system problem, or any other health issue for that matter. If you can address the emotional component of health, it eliminates the possibility that the person will subconsciously sabotage themselves. In other words, that they will persist in their disease process or their unwellness because of some emotional attachment.
Reframing with the ZYTO EVOX allows a person to expand their perceptions so they have more information available to them. Expanding perceptions leads to expanded beliefs, and the person can now filter information in a more informed way. When we have more beliefs and more options, we are better able to create a more functional and emotionally balanced reality.
Functional relationships & maintaining homeostasis
Functional health refers to physical parts of the body and the way they work together. When we get sick, we can look at it from a functional perspective and look at all the parts that make up the whole.
Initially, we have the skin, which is your first line of defense against any kind of external pathogen. Then you have the lungs and large intestine. But what you may not realize is that about 50 to 70% of our immune system is focused in the digestive tract, so that’s very important as well.
We also have the lymphatic system, which is part of the immune system, and this includes the spleen. The lymph system runs through lymphatic nodes, and then you have nerve endings that come into the mesenchyme. This is a key area of immunity because all the good stuff and all the bad stuff that goes into and out of the cells has to go through the mesenchyme.
Another key area of immunity is the exosome, which is like a little envelope with information in it that our cells use to communicate with each other and to expel excess waste out of the cell. The exosome is an immune factor because some of the information that’s included will upregulate or down-regulate inflammation.
On top of the 50 trillion cells in our body, we also have about 500 trillion microbes that cohabitate with us. So when we look at immunity, the goal is not the elimination of all the microbes in your body. Rather it’s a happy cohabitation. That’s really what immunity is.
There are a range of strategies that the body may use to deal with an immune system challenge. It may induce a fever, cough, rash, or a runny nose to eliminate the virus, for example. This is what the body does to maintain balance between you and the microbiome that lives inside you. Things like heavy metals or even taking an antiobiotic can disrupt this homeostasis in the body.
General tips for improving immune wellness
While ZYTO technology can help us determine which areas of immune health are priorities for an individual, there are a variety of things we can all do to improve and maintain immune system wellness over time. These include:
Focus on these things and you’ll find that you not only get sick less, but will get better faster when you do get sick.
About Dr. Cook
Dr. Vaughn R Cook is the Founder & CEO of ZYTO. An Oriental Medical Doctor (OMD) and licensed acupuncturist, he has worked in the complementary and alternative medical field for more than 30 years, specializing in applications that integrate Western and Eastern medicine.