East Asian Medicine Tools For Immune Resilience And Cancer Prevention

Your immune system is doing quiet, relentless work every day, and when it struggles, it shows up as more than just “getting sick.” It can look like poor recovery, chronic inflammation, constant fatigue, or a body that can’t downshift out of stress long enough to heal. That’s why I’m so focused on immune function and immune surveillance as a core cancer prevention strategy, and why I wanted an expert voice from outside nutrition to widen the lens. 

On today's episode I’m joined by Dr. Jennifer Ashby, a doctor of East Asian medicine, licensed acupuncturist, and herbalist, to translate classic concepts into practical, modern language. 

Here's some of what we're covering today:

• how East Asian medicine maps “defensive” immunity through Wei Chi
• why exposure to wind, cold, damp, heat, and dryness is a useful model for barrier health
• lungs as an immune commander tied to breathing, skin, pores, and respiratory capacity
• spleen as an immune factory tied to digestion, gut health, and food-to-energy conversion
• kidneys as an immune battery storing Jing and what “push-through” energy costs
• practical ways to support immunity with sleep, hydration, movement, and breathwork
• emotional patterns linked to organs, including worry with digestion and fear with kidneys
• Dr. Ashby’s upcoming book The Energy Prescription and why fundamentals beat biohacks --> coming in October 2026!!

If this conversation helps you, please subscribe & share it with someone who needs a steadier energy baseline, and leave a review so more people can find these tools. 🙏

More about today's guest & how to connect with her:

Jennifer Ashby is a leading doctor of East Asian medicine, board-certified and licensed acupuncturist and herbalist in San Francisco, California. She is the co-founder and one of the lead clinicians at the prominent Lotus Center, a senior acupuncturist at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Health, and leading voice on integrative East Asian medicine and the role of Eastern medicine in lifestyle, disease, and epigenetics.

👉 Website: https://www.drjenniferashby.com/ 

👉 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drjenashby/

👉 TEDx Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nRkzuN_j4o&t=3s

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Transcript

Why Immunity Drives Cancer Prevention

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back everyone to the Ground and Root Podcast. I'm your host and holistic cancer dietitian, Deon Detraz. And this month, at the time of the release of this episode, we are focusing on what I consider to be one of the most important cancer prevention strategies we have, which is enhancing the function of our immune system and the surveillance of our immune system. Our primary defense against cancer, even though there's many reasons why cancer grows, as you know, if you've been following along here, our primary defense against cancer is really the immune system. And unfortunately, there are many things that can interfere with the function of our immune system. We discussed a lot of those in last week's episode. We're going to talk about some of them today from a slightly different angle. And when we think about a comprehensive prevention plan, optimizing immune function, optimizing immune surveillance really should be at the top of that plan. And thankfully, there's a lot of things we can do to help our immune system work better. So today we're going to talk about some of those things. But like I said, from a slightly different lens, one of my goals of this podcast is to not just teach what I know, but to also bring on experts from other disciplines who can help really broaden our understanding of what's possible with health and wellness and really open our eyes to all the different ways that all the different healing tools that we really have available to us. So today we have one such special guest joining us, Dr. Jennifer Ashby. Jennifer is a doctor of East Asian medicine. She is also a licensed clinical acupuncturist and herbalist and one of my friends. I feel very fortunate to have met her, gosh, I think maybe over a decade ago now, Jennifer. Does that seem correct? We we both got hired at the same time at the University of California San Francisco OSHA Center and just quickly became, you know, friends. We were obviously like-minded and we've been able to work together a lot over the years. So I feel so fortunate to have her here. And she's gonna share more about the immune system, but really from how can we enhance it with this more sort of a broader lens of encompassing East Asian medicine as well. So, Jennifer, welcome. So happy to have you here. It's so good to see you.

SPEAKER_02 2:19

Thanks for having me. Um, yeah, seriously, thanks for having me. I'm a huge fan of your work. You know, I send you so many patients. My patients love you. Your work is so important, your focus is so important. So thank you for all of that. Yes. Okay, yeah. So I have been in acupuncturist for over 30 years, and I've been at UCSF OSHA Center for Integrative Health for 12 now. And yeah, so it must have been 12 years ago that you and I met. And we lived near each other. We were very like-minded. We both had children, and yeah, we were became fast friends. In 2010, I went back and got a clinical doctorate in women's health. And prior to coming to UCSF, my focus was all things women's health related. And when I got to UCSF, there was the

Meet Dr. Jennifer Ashby

SPEAKER_02 3:10

need for me to see a lot of oncology patients. And so 12 years ago, I did a deep dive into translating East Asian medicine and everything we have to offer into the cancer arena. There were a lot of brilliant brilliant minds that came before me. And I took in their stuff and then did my kind of own translations, which have become I'm first author on a peer-reviewed Western Medical Journal paper from research that we did. Because when I write, when I create research protocols in the field of East Asian medicine, I do it pragmatically, exactly how we practice, as opposed to just creating easy-to-use reproducible protocols. They're actually individualized medicine. And so that's been recognized, which feels really good. I continue to have a million fabulous and kooky ideas about ways of validating what I do in a Western medical field without bastardizing what we do. And also, I'm super focused on creating jobs for people in institutions in my field when they're interested. So that's just a little bit about me.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

I love that. I know we could talk a lot just about your background, but which is fat, which is super fascinating. But I would love us to dive into this idea of just the immune system, immune function, enhancing immune function, but really, like you said, trying to translate the world of East Asian medicine into something that people, the common person, will understand. So, where should we start in this conversation?

SPEAKER_02 4:47

So I will take East Asian medicine concepts, I'll use the words that are foreign, and then I translate them into Western medical terms, just understandable terms, so that people can understand the parallels that exist. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:01

I love that. Okay. Well, where you help guide us. Where do we where do we start in this conversation? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:08

Traditional Chinese medicine, which is now more commonly referred to as East Asian medicine because there's Japanese and there's Korean and there's other modalities. It doesn't talk about the immune system in the same way that Western medicine does, right? We're not talking about neutrophils and macrophages and antibodies and cytokines, but it has a very coherent parallel, not directly horizontally parallel, but relatably parallel mapping. So it talks about immune resilience and recovery and susceptibility to disease. And within this, we look at it from two major frameworks. The framework of what I'm I'll cover, which is called Wei Chi. And Wei Chi is like your acquired immune system. It's the one that reacts to opportunistic illnesses like colds and flus, builds antibodies. And then we have what's called this combination of what we call yuen qi, which I'll explain in a little bit, and jingqi, and the combination of those things which are mostly inheritable from your parents, the health of your parents from conception and birth, and how, which is a little bit more relayed parallel to your innate immune system, right? The immune system that automatically exists within your body and helps to fight things and gobble up things like cancer cells. So, again, like I said, they're not horizontally totally translational, but it helps with the concepts as we move along.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

Yeah. Okay. Well, do you think it would be more helpful to start with the kind of acquired immunity or the innate immunity? Okay.

SPEAKER_02 6:39

Because that's what people understand when people say, oh, my immune system's down. They're usually talking about the one that's able to fight colts and flus. So we call this waichi. And it's the body's trained, responsive descent defense system. It's not learned in the same way that acquired is. It doesn't in East Asian medicine, we don't believe that it maintains a memory, but it's similar in how we build it and maintain it. Fine through mostly lifestyle, which is where you and I parallel and join so well. And then also Wei Chi is enhanced by how we handle our protection from exposure to the external world. So it's got some key characteristics, of course. We believe that it circulates in the body's exterior. So you know that we say that our skin and our mucous membranes are the first lines of defense for opportunistic illness in Western medicine. 4,000 years ago, they were talking about this in terms of weichi, that it actually circulates in the space between your skin and your muscles.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_02 7:43

Which is also can be like fascia in your lymphatic system, ironically, right? And that area they call the coolie, right? So again, mucous membranes, skin, fascia, lymphatic system. And it re this space where the weichi lives responds to external external pathological pathogenic factors. So we believe that things like cold and wind and dampness

Translating East Asian Immune Concepts

SPEAKER_02 8:10

and heat can actually penetrate the body from vulnerable places. The most vulnerable place you have to be exposed to pathogenic factors is actually the back of your neck. If you think about this in terms of 4,000 years ago, it makes perfect sense. It's windy, you catch a chill. So a lot of people, when they get sick first, they start feeling achy or headache, or that ache starts in the upper body. So a lot of the translations, although they may sound primitive to some, are so logical when you figure out where their origins are. We believe that you can contract wind, cold, damp, heat, even dryness if you're overexposed to dry, deserty conditions. And then again, this is the so this is the idea is behind colds and flus and any other seasonal illnesses, and sometimes even allergies, depending you know, like environmental allergies. So how do we strengthen that? Well, one, if we're talking about exposure to external elements, when it's windy and cold or rainy, you want to protect your body from overexposure to the elements. It just makes sense. But as my husband, who's a Knowles guy, say he says uh there's no bad weather, just bad gear. Yeah, like gear. Yeah, 100%. Exactly. Yeah. So it's the same when you're going out, like you shouldn't go out when it's cold with wet hair, like I have right now, right? You shouldn't, if you're where it's really hot and the sun's beating down, you should protect your body with a hat. It's just so much of East Asian medicine, it's just logic. It's like common sense logic. So that's one way of protecting yourself, but the other way is through lifestyle. And our lifestyle, all components of our lifestyle completely affect the strength of our waichi. It's adaptive, it's an adaptive immunity. It's also adaptive to how your lifestyle is. So if you're underslept, overstressed, high eating a highly inflammatory diet, dehydrated, you're just not going to have a good immune system. You don't have to have all of those things. You might have one of those things, but every component of lifestyle affects it. It doesn't mean that you need to be, it's not about perfection in lifestyle because all effort counts in boosting our body's immunity, but you have to consider it when you're talking about boosting your waichi or boosting your ability to fight illness. We believe that it regulates through sweating, like with poor opening and poor closing, you know, how sometimes when you're sweating out a fever, like you feel like all your pores are open. And in these stage medicine, we describe that as like releasing the exterior heat toxin that came into your body. It's actually important. So we believe that when you take things to reduce the fever, if it's not too high, you're actually prolonging the disease's natural pathway of re uh resolving itself. Yeah, which makes sense. Yeah. So pores and how we keep the surface warm, if we've got chills. So yeah, so the lifestyle can be consciously cultivated through diet and hydration and sleep and efficient breathing and movement and exercise and paying attention to your gut health and your bowel movements, and then managing stress.

unknown 11:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:26

So oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

So the clinical parallels are there. I love this. I also love the idea, if you don't mind me, just stepping over a second. I love the idea of the sort of the out the out external elements influencing us too, right? Because I know you're also obviously, I mean, I think anybody who's an acupuncturist or East Asian medicine practitioner or even Ayurvedic practitioner, I think it's more top of mind, this idea of living in harmony with the outside weather, what's actually happening outside, right? And so we just entered spring. And so thinking about the elements of spring and how uh oftentimes people can get sick in the spring. I mean, not just with allergies, but because there's so much, there can be such an extreme between like some winter temperatures and energies, but and then the summer energy and trying to balance that. I mean, to me makes sense, but I could see how for some people that may just not have ever really been on their radar as, you know, except for maybe something their grandmother told them to do, but not that actually influenced the immune system, right? Correct.

SPEAKER_02 12:27

So I have a way that I explain it when I'm teaching medical students. So in Western medicine, a human's body is the macrocosm that's considered in in focusing on health. And then the components of DNA and your cells, neurotransmitters, anything biochemical within your body is the macro is the microcosm. So your body's the macrocosm, and the components of you are the microcosm.

Wei Chi And Seasonal Exposure

SPEAKER_02 12:56

In East Asian medicine, it's the opposite. Your body is the microcosm, and everything that you come into contact with in your life is the macrocosm. The idea that the external world does not affect our physical, emotional, and spiritual health is ludicrous. So cause and effect is a huge uh engine behind all of the theories of East Asian medicine. So East Asian medicine's focus is literally homeostasis or balanced physiology. And we have this unique way of diagnosing how a human is becomes out of balance, and we all do, and then we have a unique set of skills to rebalance the body. So if we can all agree that a body, when given the opportunity, and if it can, which is often the challenge in oncology through oncology treatment, if we can agree that a body will return to a state of homeostasis if it can given the opportunity, you completely understand the theories of East Asian medicine.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

I love that. I have to tell you a little story. I knew nothing about, I don't know when your first exposure to East Asian medicine or acupuncture was, but for me, I knew nothing of this when I was younger. And then in my 20s, I actually started having hormonal stuff. And so I started working with an acupuncturist, and it was like my first experience in this world. And I still remember, which now makes sense to me, but the time didn't, even when I was like 21, 20. I don't know, I was young, right? And I still remember that first appointment. And he was his Chinese medicine doctor's thick accent, almost really difficult to understand, but I was doing my best. And he was talking to me about like how I was dressed, right? And what I was wearing, and that you're not protecting your you're not protecting your kidneys, and there's too much exposure here, and you should not be wearing this and you should be wearing that. And I just remember being like, what?

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Judgmental.

SPEAKER_00 14:56

So confused. I mean, now it makes sense to me, but that was like my first introduction to this idea of, and I know you're gonna talk about the kidneys too in a minute, but that it's actually important to protect yourself from wind or from coolness, right?

SPEAKER_02 15:10

Exposure, but first off, kudos to you for going to an East Asian medicine practitioner at 21 years old. Yeah, people ask me a lot, who's your favorite audience? And I say six-year-olds. They're like, six year olds. And I'm like, if I could start teaching people cause and effect of lifestyle and slow death or chronic illness, you know, yeah, everybody would be out of a job, right? So good for you for going at the age of 21. So there are some specific ways. Is this a good time to jump in? Yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

Yeah, wherever you're feeling called, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:42

Okay. So there are ways in which I'm not just gonna leave it at this amorphous lifestyle, right? So in East Asian medicine, there are very specific organs, and we look at our or the organs not the same, exactly the same as the Western medicine function of the organs, but we have East Asian medicine's theories of the functions and the energetics of the organ. And so I'll be speaking from that platform. But there are specific organs related that we boost when we're trying to boost the waichi, right? Your acquired or defensive immune system. And so I kind of want to go over those and how the listeners would pay attention to those from permanence perspective. So the governing organs for waichi are first the lungs. So in East Asian medicine, the lungs are responsible for the skin, not just the lung organs themselves. They govern the skin, which, as we said, is that first line of defense, also mucous membranes of the nose. And then also we focus on the spleen. So, to your expertise, this there's a notion of something called the school of the spleen and the stomach. And we're going to go through that in detail. And although they didn't explain it in terms of the gut microbiome, they described it that a healthy gut creates a healthy person. Period. Bar none, you don't have a healthy gut, you don't have a healthy person. So we'll go over the fact that the spleen, which is a very important organ in East Asian medicine, regulates this source qi that boosts our immunity. And we'll see that both in the innate and in this acquired immune system out of ours. And then the last is our kidneys. If we are born with the completed kidney, what we call qi or energy, we will always be catching up with our immune function because it is the source of life. There are there, the lungs are our immune center commander, if you think of it that way. Not only does it help create wei chi, but it distributes it in this coolie area to protect our entire body. So when it's strong, our that our defensive protective devices are strong as well. And it controls our respiration and the opening and closing of our pores, which has as much to do with protection as it does in diagnoses. So if you are out, if you have a soccer game and you end at night and it's getting cold, and the fog's coming in like it does here in San Francisco, and your pores are opening while you're sweating and you're exposed to this cold, damp environment, you are actually reducing your waichi. And if you do it repeatedly, you are exposing yourself to the elements of getting sick every time. So it's pores opening and closing, not just in terms of what happens when you have a fever or you have chills, but also how you expose yourself to the elements we had just discussed. So, as a first line of defense, what do we see if that lung chi is weak? We have somebody who's getting frequent colds, frequent flus, weak voice, shortness of breath, spontaneous sweating even without exercise, and somebody who suffers things like allergies,

Lifestyle Levers That Strengthen Defense

SPEAKER_02 18:55

like environmental allergies, or even asthma. Chronic asthma depletes the lungs, and therefore you have a you struggle more with not getting illnesses. And since East Asian Medicine believes that the lungs uh govern the skin and body and hair, and this is where those pathogens first attack, right? The wind, the cold, the heat, the dampness. So that's the lungs component in terms of waichi development. And then the spleen, as I said, the school of the spleen and stomach, which is becoming more and more important the longer that I practice. Cause again, I believe that gut microbiome is the it's the beginning and the end of it all. You can't get better with a poor gut microbiome. So the spleen being the so if the lung is the immune commander, the spleen is the immune factory. And I'm going to explain what it's a factory of. It is responsible for transforming food into energy that we then use to build our immune system. And we call this transformation of food into energy. We call it gucci, like gucci. Um, and that is, yeah. So the spleen is responsible for extrapolating the essence of everything we put in our mouth to giving us a healthy gut microbiome and a strong immune system, which I know that you're inside going, yay, yay, yay.

SPEAKER_00 20:23

Yeah. I appreciate the other angle too, though, right? Because yes, we might speak to it as making sure you're eating the food, the ingredients that your immune system needs to stay strong. But I like this concept too of how it's moving through the spleen to help that happen. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:40

So we don't talk about the sleeve much in mustard, though, right? It's and it's taken out if it's a problem. And when it's taken out, East Asian Medical Practitioners are like, ah. So it's producing the raw materials, like taking the essence from the raw materials of your food and hydration, right? Hydration has a part to do with this too, how we transform our fluids and it turns it into what we call the quality of our chi and blood, which we'll find are both acquired anonate immune system components. So the spleen is incredibly important in East Asian medicine. And when the spleen is weak, we see frequent illnesses, a lot of fatigue, especially after eating, bloating, gas, belching, loose stools. And then somebody who, when it's extreme, will have lots of phlegm production. They just they just look like a damp, phlemy person, and a lot of allergies with a lot of during expected of fluids.

SPEAKER_00 21:40

So that's I'm laughing because I'm thinking spoken like an acupuncturist to say they look like a damp phleemmy person. I can imagine all these acupuncturists, you know, walking down the street and sort of identifying people.

SPEAKER_02 21:54

Somebody a friend of mine um once said to me, You need to go on TikTok and you know. Everybody was had their there was the thing of sticking your tongue out with pictures, you know. Because you need to diagnose all these famous people, just like on their tongue, yeah. Yeah, so she's got, and I bet she suffers from I still might do it during a lull in my life at some point, but anyway, so so again, East Asian medicine believes you cannot have a strong immunity without strong digestion, it's just an impossibility. And then here's the kidneys. The kidneys are the spark of life, the kidneys are everything that it is the foundation of every single part of life and health in East Asian medicine. You can't escape talking about overall health and well-being without incorporating the kidneys into the talk. And people don't really think of their kidneys in terms of immunity and overall general health, and we can't exclude them from overall immunity and general health. So we call the kidneys your immune battery. They're the spark, the fire of life that keeps us strong and vital. And they store something that we that is really important to us that we call Jing, J-I-N-G, Jing, Jing Chi. Um, and it is the essence of life. Now it is your constitutional strength, it is your genetics, but not only your genetics. It is, it has jobs, right? We you it it's responsible for our growth and development and our age and how our body goes into the last chapters of declining qi, predetermined. And this essence, this jing qi is finite. When we use it up, we all die, every single one of us. And the twist to all of this is that you can use it for everyday

Lungs Spleen Kidneys As Immune Team

SPEAKER_02 23:45

living, but it's finite. You should not leave it to its jobs, growth and development, and age and decline, right? Expected healthy decline. If you use it to get through a Wednesday, you know, we do tap into it at times in life when it's appropriate to use it, childbirth and recovery from serious illness and surgeries and in it in emergencies, that burst of superhuman energy to get through immune emergencies. But if we're tapping into it on the daily, right? If we're tired in the middle of the afterday, afternoon, when we are pushing through physically, emotionally, or spiritually, that energy, that push-through energy comes from somewhere. It's the big issue I have when Adderall is prescribed to get people going through cancer treatment. Now they get to choose quality over quantity. People get to choose, but I want them to choose, I want that to be an educated decision. Caffeine is the same. If you're using caffeine to poop or to get through the day, that's not real energy. You do you've washed your feedback mechanism so you know if you're pushing through or not. So Jing Chi is finite and it has jobs. And if we're using it to push through, if we're pushing through energy on the daily, or if we're responding to inconveniences in the same way a saber-toothed tiger is chasing us, an inconvenient email, a daily chronic stressor should not be responded to with the same stress hormones, cortisol, norepinephrine, epinephrine. We are depleting our jing. And when we chronically deplete our jing, something's going to break. Autoimmune disorders, when our innate immune system is no longer strong enough to help gobble up the cancer cells. I actually believe with today's modern society that we all have cancer cells inside of us. And it's when our immunity becomes weaker than the source of the cancer cells that cancer thrives. So this kidney immune battery is essential not to preserve because you can't replenish it totally. You can try to stop the leak, but you can't regain what you've already lost. And that's another reason why six-year-olds are my best, are my best to just understand. So, so they're your constitutional strength, they're your genetics, and we can tap into them at times, but we shouldn't use we shouldn't be pushing through every day. Cause when we do, understand that you're depleting the only battery you got.

SPEAKER_00 26:23

I feel like this is really important, Jennifer, because I feel every single person I work with or speak to who's, you know, either facing cancer currently or has in their past, you can't speak to everybody. But I feel like everyone I've this is like a common thread. I mean, how often are people really pushing through just because of their crazy lower?

SPEAKER_02 26:47

And cancer treatment would be an appropriate push-through time, right? You can't rebuild your energy when you've you're, you know, having to go through really strong treatments that just knock you out. But within that system, you can't, I think one of the let me rephrase. Within that system, I think one of the hardest things is for people to be living in a way where life feels recognizable and rewarding. And so for some, there's a tendency to continue to push through to do that. And the answer to honoring your daily battery level and still living a life that feels recognizable and rewarding is it's different for every patient, every person going through this, not only through treatment, but like stepping into survivorship, it gets so complicated, right? Yes. Um, so within that arena, this takes on a whole different conversation than for it would for a college student or a mother of several children or whatever. They're different, they're different conversations, but it still has the same foundation of like you. So what I teach is I teach something, I teach this thing called the epic eight, and it's using eight lifestyle competencies to have a toolbox to be able to boost your daily energy, your daily chi, so that you don't dip into this essence, this kidney essence unconsciously, and that you learn how to use your physical, your emotional, and your spiritual energy as a gauge to whether you're doing these eight things right. And if you are pushing through, you then have a toolbox to look and say, How did I eat today? What did I eat? When did I eat? How did I hydrate? What was I drinking? How was my sleep? So you have things all on your own that you feel that you're more in power of the way that you feel because you have a toolbox to check in with on the daily. I totally digress, Deanna. I'm sorry. No, that's a no, not at all. I think the prenatal and postnatal cheered are they're the foundation of everything I teach.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

Yeah. And I think that to your point too, about like how obvious, you know, obviously it's gonna be a bit different whether you're moving through something as stressful and tedious as a cancer journey versus working

Jing The Battery You Can Drain

SPEAKER_00 29:05

on or just being in prevention and trying to stay cancer free. I feel like just like a general, just general education, public health messaging. You know what I mean? Just general health and wellness, not pushing through and not tapping into this battery when on a daily, like when you don't need to, that feels huge. That feels like such a take-home message, right there.

SPEAKER_02 29:28

Huge take-home. And then the other thing is in terms of just speaking to everyone from all socioeconomic backgrounds, the notion of having the privilege to be able to make that choice does not resonate with everybody in every situation. And my messaging to that is that all effort does count. If what you can do in the face of that, if you're working three jobs, you're trying to get through cancer treatment, your children are home and hungry, if you if what you can do is drink enough water so that concentrations of too many toxins are not building up in your body and you're aiding your digestion. Oh my God, that's a lot. I can't tell you how many patients come back to me and say, My energy is increased so much just because I'm hydrating properly. And I teach them all the tricks of how to hydrate when you're in chemotherapy and you got neuropathy in your mouth and you're sensitive to everything. And so when I say all effort counts, I'm like, find the thing you can do and do it. You know, it's not that you have to be perfect and all eight. Yeah. So the kidneys are very important. Yes, they are. They are when somebody's kidneys are weak, you do have chronic infections, you have poor recoveries, you have autoimmune patterns, and fatigue that just doesn't improve with rest or dietary changes or hydration or constitutionally appropriate movement, right? I remember it was well, you might have even been speaking at this. We were in the international, no, the integrative oncology symposium that Dr. Anand Truba put on. And there was remember that was years ago. Yeah, there was an oncologist there who, an integrative oncologist and Dr. Natalie Marshall. And I was talking about preserving your Jing Chi while you're like going through treatment. And she comes on and says, You all have to move 150 minutes a week. And I messaged her and I was like, Okay, that makes and she's a competitive weightlifter. Okay. And I was like, I you and I just told everybody exact opposites of that huge issue with what you just said. Explain to me. And it was in we weren't saying different things, we just had different language. Everybody has to move 150 minutes a week, but she's not telling people going through chemotherapy to go to Zumba class. She's saying that if walking to the bathroom gets your heart rate up, whatever it is that gets your heart rate up, you still have to move. And by not moving, you're adding to a multitude of burdens in your body and adding to deconditioning, which is not going to lead you to a better outcome. So, anyway, again, I digress. So, autoimmune disorders and fatigue that doesn't improve with rest, uh, and just learning how to listen to that need to rest and also get movement in. So, wei chi, okay, is nourished by the health of our lungs, how well we digest our daily food and our food choices, and those two things, and actually everything else we do are all rooted in our kidney essence, our the strength of our kidney qi, or what we call our kidney jing, that fire spark of life. And a lot of that is inherited. And so if you know that there's certain genetics in your family that aren't great, it's a little bit more important to pay attention to these things. But in doing all of these things, in paying attention to how we navigate all of our lifestyle choices, we are also either upregulating bad genes or downregulating bad genes that we might have a susceptibility to, and or we're up regulating or downregulating good, healthy genes. Yeah. So that's just weichi. Yeah. That's just a required, yeah, responsive energy.

SPEAKER_00 33:21

So when we think about, I wanted to also just sort of bridge this in the idea of you know, things that could be impacting immune function versus like how we enhance it. So when we think about these three systems that you just described, the lung, the spleen, and the kidney, it sounds like I mean, it could be either or, right? If they're depleted, that could be decreasing immune function. And then it would also maybe be the opposite of like how we restore is by boosting those three organs, correct?

SPEAKER_02 33:50

Exactly. So for the lungs boosting would be utilizing them. So and in different ways. So I teach 10 different kinds of breathing that all have for different outcomes what it's going to affect. There's the one for there's three for decreasing stress, but different ways. There's the one for sleep, there's the one for lung health and immunity. But have you did you read the book Breath by James Nestor?

SPEAKER_00 34:17

No, but I have heard of it.

SPEAKER_02 34:19

You have to read it. Okay. Oh, it's in it's in my lifetime top five. Okay. Most modern humans are incredibly inefficient breathers. And breath is really good that it teaches us kind of how we kind of got here. So it's like this biographical, anthropological, sociological, medical, research-oriented, experiential book on just freaking breathing. And it's fabulous. It's so well written. So we're really inefficient breathers. And when we're talking about our lung health, so this defense, this first line of defense, this coolie, we the health and strength of our lungs is very important. And the way we do that is through having a breathwork practice and exercising, right? Zone two exercise, which gets our lungs working and our heart working harder so that we're oxygenating our blood, are essential. So in terms of lung chi and also not smoking, not vaping, not doing the injurious, obvious stuff. But another interesting component, and especially for those going through oncology journeys, the lungs, so every organ has emotions that it houses and is responsible for. And that's the lungs like request for expansion to help us process a difficult emotion. So when it comes to the lungs, it's use and not doing obviously injurious things. Often in cancer treatment, we've a level of anemia, which gives us shortness of breath. And through all those things, it's really important to make sure that you're expanding your lungs as much as possible. The spleen is all about food choice, but its emotion is over worry, being overly pensive, chronically worrying. Right. Also a really big challenge in the oncology journey.

The Epic Eight And Real Life Limits

SPEAKER_01 36:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:30

So again, the way to strengthen it beyond developing coping mechanisms that you'd never thought of before in your life when you can, is to that your food choices are going to make a really big difference. And in East Asian medicine, we're all about easy digestion, aiding our digestion. So we're all about slow cooked foods. We love crock pots, you know, we love, you know, we don't like instant oatmeal. We want you to cook that stuff for 40 minutes, right? We love kangies and things that have a grain base and then everything else. We're not talking about boiling things to death and or having things necessarily bland, but it's just make cooking them. We believe that raw foods take more energy to digest than they do the energy that they give back. So if you're a person that eats a lot of raw salads all the time, you're actually at a chi or energy depleted state because you have to warm it up and then break it down. And often the returns. So we believe in all those veg, but you steam them or you blanch them or you saute them, just warm them up at least to body temperature so that they're easy and easier to digest. My morning breakfast is a bed of dark leafy greens, a couple of tablespoons of kimchi, and a couple hard-boiled eggs. And uh I leave all of that out till it's room temperature before I'll eat it, right? Because I don't want to overtax my spleen. Okay. And then the kidneys preservation and restoration is really just not pushing through every day. It's preserving what you can fear, and phobias are what reside in the kidneys. And that's a really big challenge in a cancer journey. So what I find is it's not about saying don't be fearful, you know, don't be afraid of, you know, like scanxiety and stuff is not the thing that's gonna totally deplete it. But when you have those moments, let it move through your body and get on to the next thing. I always say that, and this was this was brought home so much for me when I went to Africa a few years ago on safari, that not a single animal stays in a state of stress once the stressor is gone. The stress comes, they have the appropriate stress hormone shot through them to help try to save their lives. And then when it's not there, they're just grazing and swatting at flies, right? And so I thought about that in terms of how heightened we just hold stress in our body. And again, none of this is a statement about not having stress with it. It is 2026, we all have a lot of stress, but it's choosing what gets you get what is deserving of the embodiment of stress and what is not. So keeping the perspectives, uh if you're stressed out about upcoming scans, you're stressed out about what's coming up in treatment, that is an appropriate response. But when you have some answers, when you're the scans have come back, like whatever it is, to the best of your ability, work on tools to not continuously be releasing those stress hormones because those will deplete your kidneys.

SPEAKER_01 39:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:49

Easier said than done. But that's like the ultimate super happy goal.

SPEAKER_00 39:54

I mean, we do speak to this too of getting stuck in these emotional feedback loops, right? Where we're worried about something or fearful about something or stressed about something, and we just kind of keep replaying it, even though that's not necessarily changing the situation or changing how we respond to it. We just get stuck. And so learning tools to help you get out of that loop can be really helpful.

SPEAKER_02 40:17

Yeah, vulnerability is where I think it all comes down to. I think the cancer journey is the ultimate state of vulnerability. And I think that there are processes that I have found that, you know, Brene Brown's work on vulnerability, I think is really good that the fear of what might be happening does not save us from the effect of what might happen. And also Byron Cady's work about being able to deconstruct the stories we tell ourselves as a means to just help reduce the burden of it all. Yeah, I think can be really helpful for some people. And that all that kind of work helps preserve kidney chi.

SPEAKER_00 40:58

Yeah, I love that. I love that thinking of it too from that holistic lens of the emotional elements that are also impacting those organs.

SPEAKER_02 41:06

Yeah. So the beauty of Chinese medicine to me, one of the things that attracted it to me when I was me to it, when I was in my twenties and was like riding motorcycles through Baja and had no plan for doing anything with my life yet. I was going to be a political speech writer because it was a Reagan era and I was like, you know, yeah. Was the notion that a human being, our holy trinity for a human being in this medicine is that is your physical person, your emotional person, and your spiritual person. And there is nothing that identifies separateness of those three components of self. That a whole person is a whole person. So you would never think of tonifying someone's spleen she without dealing with the emotional and the spiritual

Breathing Exercise Food And Digestion

SPEAKER_02 41:55

components that come into spleen over worryingly, over pensive, or another thing that comes into spleen she is overworking, overstudying, like an imbalance between the intellect and the physical components of your body. You're ignoring what your body needs because you're hyper-focused on something intellectual or that takes brain power. So, whatever it is, we have all these tools to balance the person. If I'm dealing with anxiety, I'm not just dealing with the symptoms of anxiety, I'm dealing with the root of where that all comes from. So now I'm gonna, this will be a little bit shorter. Is it a good time to go through and sure? Yeah. So innate immunity is what we call yuan qi, mixed with that jing kidney qi, right? These are deep-rooted source qis that we have when we are born. And these combine to create something with the Wei Chi called jong chi, the H-E-N-G. And these are deeper substances that represents the body's constitution. They are always present, they have nonspecific resistance, like in fighting internal pathogen forces like cancer or other components of chronic disease, autoimmune conditions. This innate immune system does not require prior exposure or learning of the illness. And so this jung qi, which is the product, is what we call our upright or our correct qi because it is so strong it addresses everything. It's part of Wei Chi, and it's part of this innate immune system, UN source qi. It's always on, it's always ready to defend our body. The classical principles apply here that when your upright qi is present within, pathogenic factors cannot invade or take over. And lifestyle can really affect, even if you have genetic predisposition, predisposition. Lifestyle can really, again, upregulating or downregulating our genes. We can't change our DNA, but we can affect when they turn. On and off to a great degree. This is the East Asian medicine equivalent of this innate immune systems, constant balance of our body. And this yin and yuan qi, this nutritive qi combines with the zhang qi. And these create these deep insides in terms of nourishing and defending your tissues from the inside of your body. It takes that food essence that we generated and extrapolated via the spleen and stomach, and it puts it into an immune defense response. Part of that energy goes into your innate immune response and defense of your body. It mirrors the innate immune systems, deep tissue surveillance, I think is the best way to do it. So when atypical cells arise, it goes into attack. If anything breaches or anything becomes rogue, any internal pathogens like autoimmune disorders of the gut. This is the defensive component that tries to go in and heal it before it takes over. Think of Crohn's and diverticular and IBS. I've never known an IBS case without somebody who literally swallows their emotions. You know? Yeah. And then we can think of the ging essence of the innate immune system more like your deepest constitutional substrate, right? That is stored in the kidneys. It governs the body's inherited immune blueprint, as we discussed. It is our constitutional immune capacity from a very deep level that we are all born with. And we, as I said, we sustain it through lifestyle. I teach that through that thing called the epic eight, right? Those say medical literacy and lifestyle competency. And as our Jing essence naturally declines in midlife, that innate surveillance often weakens. And if you can add to that how we've lived our life and what our exposures have been, not only to how we ate, consumption of alcohol, living life with joy and the balance of stress, all of those things affect that innate surveillance system and weaken it. It doesn't mean you're bad or you're wrong. It's just the natural way of life. We map this a lot, and I map this a lot in terms of perimenopause and menopause as well, but lifestyle affects it all. Yeah. So again, with innate immune system, your kidney chi is the root of it all, and your spleen chi generates to help keep that energy flowing into your innate immune system, which gobbles up rogue stuff within inside your body. So I'll just summarize these concepts quickly. So the air you breathe and how you breathe it, right? From your lungs and the food that you eat and how well hydrated you remain, the lungs governed by the the air governed by the lungs helps that air descend into the body. Your food and your water are transformed by the spleen. The air, qi or energy we call qing qi. And the spleen that transforms food and water, we call Gucci or green qi. And those come together. And remember, we're translating this from a 4,000-year-old system. Those come together into what we call pectoral qi. Think of your stomach and your lungs, like they

Fear Worry Stress And The Body

SPEAKER_02 47:25

weren't really talking about your pectors, your muscles, but in the area of the pectorals. And then if you think about that vital essence, that kidney chi over here on the side that's inherited from your parents, that comes down and is mobilized and turns into that yuan or that source qi. So that pectoral qi and that source yuan primordial source yuan qi combine to create something that we call zheng chi. And those split into two separate paths, your defensive weight qi, and which is your adaptive immunity, and then your nutritive ying qi, that primordial qi of your innate immunity.

SPEAKER_01 48:07

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 48:08

So yeah, so really I like the way you describe that at the end too, just because you can visualize, particularly for any of you who are watching this on YouTube, then you're actually seeing her do it with her hands, which might be helpful instead of just listening. But yeah, but that but we're still whether we're working on adaptive or innate, it's sort of the same principles that we're trying to nourish and rebalance to support both, correct? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. And we do that best through these lifestyle pieces. And I made sure to take some notes so I could put them in the show notes too. I mean, just you know, so that's kind of summarize for people, but the concept of some of the primary ways we support the lungs, we support the spleen, we support the kidneys so that it's top of mind for you, as obviously we can dive much deeper, but as a good places to start. Yes. Yeah, great. Is there anything else you feel like it would be important to share before we wrap up?

SPEAKER_02 49:04

I mean, I think that just knowing that your choices to the best of your ability affect your body's defenses, both acquired and innate, and that doing whatever you can, the best you can in whatever stage you're at is enough. But to know that there are tools that help your body do and enhance its innate wisdom to get us through whatever journey you're facing is in there. And just know that your participation with it is essentially important to not only your emotional and your spiritual experience, but your physical experience while you're in it.

SPEAKER_01 49:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:47

Yeah, I love that. And I love the reminder too of just you don't have to be doing all of it for it to be helping you, right? That reminder with the with the water, with the hydration. It's can you pick with whatever's true for you right now, knowing that it might shift down the road and you may be able to add more and more things, but whatever's the one thing that feels the easiest entry point is going to make a difference, right? It's gonna start to shift. And that's really what we're looking for.

SPEAKER_02 50:13

Yep. So, like I talk about a lot about hum breathing as a way of reducing that sudden acute anxiety around so many things that come up in the oncology journey. And like humbre, the resonance of hum breathing affects your vagus nerve and calls forth your parasympathetic nervous system as a means to help bring your that resonance down so that you're not constantly producing those stress hormones that that affect your kidneys.

SPEAKER_00 50:45

And so tiny little techniques. Do you know hum breathing? Oh, yeah. I do it almost every day.

SPEAKER_02 50:51

Yeah, me too.

SPEAKER_00 50:52

I notice actually sometimes I notice when I'm stressed, even in the grocery store, like there's too many people around me or something. All of a sudden I'll be humming to myself and not even realize it until later be like, okay, it's just like self-regulating there. There's like too much chaos.

SPEAKER_02 51:05

How many of us had elders in our life, particularly women, who hummed through their day? They hummed while they were cooking, they hummed when they were outside, they're humming and humming. And I realized that it is self-regulation. Yeah. That's another thing I want to teach six-year-olds, right? Oh my gosh. It's just let's tell our body that we can actually go into rest and digest. And that rest and digest state, as much as you're capable, it doesn't mean that when you're out of it, you're doing a ton of damage. It means that when you're capable and you can go into it, and you're telling your body you're safe. Because we don't go into rest and digest when the saber-toothed tiger's chasing us. So it's a really difficult time in life to really figure out when you can do it and when you can't. And you only know because everybody's journey is so individual when you try. I can get a hold of this one, I can't get a hold of that one. But when I get home, I'll get a hold of it again. Like all that effort counts.

SPEAKER_00 51:58

Yeah, I love that. And I would say, too, just a reminder that we're also not going to heal when we're not in a rest and digest state, right? Fight or flight is not a healing state. So when it's a survival state, a short-term survival state. But yeah, I like to think like typically when I teach about nervous system regulation, it's like we need to have more moments in our day, even if it can't be the whole day, more moments in our day where we're in that rest, digest, heal space

Innate Immunity Yuan Qi And Zheng Chi

SPEAKER_00 52:25

so that we can make progress, right? We can move forward in this journey.

SPEAKER_02 52:29

It sounds insulting to some people that maybe have to have been just diagnosed and stuff, like what a pipe dream. But I deeply understand that notion. If you're not doing it, you're not failing. But my encouragement is to keep trying because it's the continued trying that will eventually help train yourself when you are capable of going into it.

SPEAKER_01 52:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:57

Yes, 100%. I think that feels like a good place to end. But I also want to make sure, and again, I will put this in the show notes as well, but that people know how to connect with you. You have a book coming out this fall that's going to be teaching more about the Epic Eight. Do you want to take a minute to talk about that? And then we'll have you back on to talk about the book.

SPEAKER_02 53:17

I was giving a talk on menopause and was incredibly tired after a long clinic day and realized I was giving a talk on menopause to the most resourced group of women in the world and thought to myself, okay, this what am I doing? And just gave my talk. And at the end, a woman came up and said, You should write a book. And I was so tired and so punchy. I said, Why, you want to be my editor? And she said, I actually think I might. And I was like, Oh my God, I'm so sorry. Hi, I'm Jennifer. So a year and a half later, there is a book coming out called The Energy Prescription, which you've all just learned about. The energy prescription, Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science for Thriving Through Menopause. The irony is that it is very parallel to constitutionally what people are going through post-treatment and into and in-between treatments. So it's actually really applicable to this audience. And it comes out October 19th. And I'm incredibly excited.

SPEAKER_00 54:13

As you should be. It's great. I mean, it's going to be such a gift to the world. So we will definitely make sure to have you back on in October, just to remind everybody that this is out now. But certainly, yes, learning more about these epic eight lifestyle tools that is going to work across this is what I really think is beautiful too. And we touch on this quite a bit in the podcast is like, you don't need 20 different plans for all the different diseases or things that could happen to you. Do you know what I mean? It's really like getting back to the basic pieces, the basic tools that are gonna actually keep you healthy through all the things. So what is applicable for menopause is also gonna help you stay healthy and hopefully reduce your risk for cancer, right? So I think, yeah, it's all relevant, it's all applicable.

SPEAKER_02 55:00

All relevant. Yep. And I always say, you know, in this world of quick fixes and biohacking and longevity, this. And I'm like, if you don't have your basic lifestyle skills at least partially mastered, don't waste your time and money. And they're usually all you need. Like, how many things can't be regulated through proper nutrition based on what you're facing? Like not a white with a little hung breathing, with a little hungry thrown in.

SPEAKER_00 55:26

Yeah. And water, that's it. Water and some sleep and some sun, maybe.

SPEAKER_02 55:33

So yeah, I'm with you on that one. I'm all about going back to, especially in this world of technology, that's taking us further and further away from just our inability to recognize our body's own innate wisdom as to what it needs, right? I think that going back to basics is more and more important. I appreciate you so much, Jan, and all your work. I mean, seriously, having

Hum Breathing Book News And Closing

SPEAKER_02 55:55

you as a grounding peer and just pushing through against a system that is not always super pro what we do. You've been a you've been a grounding force for me. So thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 56:07

I appreciate that. I really do. And we need our we need our people that we can that we can lean on and refer to and work through this crazy world with. You are definitely one of them for me.

SPEAKER_02 56:20

You're definitely one of them for me too.

SPEAKER_00 56:22

Good. Well, thank you guys so much for being here. I hope you found this conversation enlightening. Like I said, I'll put some of the information in the show notes, certainly how you can connect with Jennifer to her website, her Instagram, her upcoming book, all the things. And if just a quick reminder, I know I do this every time, but I feel like we're still such a new podcast that if you love what we're sharing here, please help us spread the word. Your help will get it into the ears of more people, which is like all I can hope for that we can spread this message far and wide. So I so appreciate you. And I will see you again on a future episode. Bye for now. Great. Thanks.