When I meet a new patient, I wonder, “Who is this person? How is she feeling? What does she need to become whole on all levels — physical, emotional and spiritual?” To find out, I ask deeper questions about her well-being in order to find the symptom’s cause and treat it.

Any symptom a patient reports can be the result of an imbalance in one of the five elements — Water, Wood, Fire, Earth and Metal. Once this happens, the imbalance can spread throughout the body, because all five elements are connected like members of a family. When one member is sick, unable or unwilling to do his tasks, the rest of the family suffers. In time, they all become symptomatic, too.

Because symptoms and imbalances are interrelated in this way, I need to know more than just that my patient has migraines, arthritis or insomnia. Those symptoms can be the result of imbalances in any organ or function, so I have to find the elemental cause.

In classical five-element acupuncture, this is done through the senses — perceiving the odor (yes, odor!), color, sound, and emotion that identifies which element is out of balance. Then I work empathetically — feeling what the patient feels in order to understand the level of disease.

If a roof gutter fills with leaves, water may stagnate rather than drain, encouraging clogging and the growth of unwanted seedlings. In the same way, when the body’s gutters and drains stop flowing, manipulation of an acupuncture point opens and clears out stagnation, encourages flow and returns the body to a balanced state so that it can heal itself.

Symptoms are the body’s distress signals, clues to what’s going on inside. When symptoms are suppressed by prescription drugs, the body is being told to “shut up!” But centuries of Chinese medicine have demonstrated the wisdom of listening.