Welcome to our first blog, it is our intention to offer you an accessible peek into Traditional Chinese Medicine and how we approach yoni health. We want this space to feel informative and empowering. Often a woman opts for the more western approach to health and healing especially with common vaginal infections, not because it works really well but because it's familiar. We want to demystify Chinese herbs and their benefits through a once-a-month Herbal Corner, as a way of bridging the gaps to empower you to choose an approach to health and healing that is now familiar and works really well.
In Western medicine, diagnosis is the focus, in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) the patterns and symptoms are the focus. We speak different languages when it comes to health and healing, as we look at the body with a wider lens. We look at the organ system and its relationship to the other systems and the body as a whole. We look at the energetics of the organ and the emotional components that interact with the system and affect the reoccurrence of imbalances. We are like detectives, looking for clues, and eventually, we find a pattern. This pattern is discovered by many factors that aren’t considered in Western diagnoses. This allows for a holistic view instead of a zoomed-in hyper-focused one.
When it comes to vaginal infections, we do not label them as such in TCM, again, we look at the patterns that we find among the symptoms patients report to us. TCM is said to be anywhere from 3,000-5,000 years old, meaning it is a system that has its own way of looking at health and healing. One key aspect is the elemental and environmental influences that are focal in understanding patterns. If we take all of this and look at the three most common vaginal infections, we can start to see what patterns are present:
Bacterial vaginosis is a common vaginal infection that happens when some normal bacteria that live in the vagina overgrow, causing a bacterial imbalance. Symptoms: Thin, gray, white, or green vaginal discharge. Foul-smelling or fishy vaginal odor. Vaginal itching. Burning around the vagina & when peeing.
Yeast infection is a fungal infection that causes irritation, discharge, and intense itchiness of the vagina and the vulva. Symptoms: itching, irritation, redness, swelling, and burning sensation. Thick, white watery odor-free discharge with cottage cheese appearance.
Trichomoniasis is a sexually transmitted infection caused by trichomonas vaginalis (a protozoan parasite). Symptoms: A large amount of thin, clear and white, grey, yellow, or green foul-smelling vaginal discharge.Redness, burning, itching, and painful urination.
Reading each of these they appear very separate, and they are from the lens of western medicine. When we put on our TCM glasses, figuratively, there is a common denominator in all of these conditions. This in TCM is known as dampness.
Dampness is best understood by the changes in a women’s leukorrhea. Leukorrhea is another word for vaginal discharge and is not pathological by nature, it is a normal occurrence through the monthly menstruation cycle. When the leukorrhea changes to thick, chunky, smelly, or turned colors this is when we note an imbalance is present.
When you think of dampness, imagine the feeling of walking around after a downpour of rain, your clothing is soaked, and you feel bogged down and uncomfortable. This is dampness.
Dampness doesn’t just show up, it is created over time, through an imbalance. This imbalance can start in the yoni or it can begin in another part of the body and present only in the yoni. In TCM we want to think about the lungs, spleen, liver, san jiao [interstitium], and bladder respectively. These organs and meridians all play a role in fluid metabolism and movement. This is why some of the herbs you find in our yoni wash formulas say they enter into the liver channel or bladder channel. These herbs use that pathway and its interaction with the yoni to help in the transformation of dampness.
The yoni does a wonderful job self-cleaning, but when dampness accumulates and creates symptoms the yoni needs assistance to rebalance itself. This is where KYA yoni washes come in, we designed our washes to support the natural ability of the yoni to find balance. Each herb in each wash is selected from this holistic viewpoint of TCM to help resolve the symptoms while also working on the underlying imbalances within the system as a whole.