I had the wonderful opportunity to meet this charming Native American woman who was diabetic and who came in for another problem but with a propensity to be affected by her diabetes. So, although the diabetes was not the primary reason for the visit, we nevertheless visited it.

I pointed out to the patient that seen from a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) perspective, there is a particular view of how the body responds to change. From the TCM point of view, the body has five functional blocks, each integrating a piece of the nervous system with an emotional perspective, then with the combined general body function. These functional blocks thus have a spiritual/mental/emotional/nervous system/and physical component. Furthermore, these blocks interact with each other in a feedback fashion to stimulate, or to slow, the function of each other. These blocks then are functionally responsible for the adaptation of an organism so that one division is responsible for adapting to change, another to the need to incorporate energy, another to transport energy, yet another to utilize energy and so on. If there is a need to respond to change, then one adjacent system would be shut down and another stimulated.

For example if the change were a threat, specifically that a person is being hunted by a predator, it then would not useful to be digesting food to bring in energy. This system would thus shut down, but the energy transport system would still be useful in order to deliver energy to portions of the body that were being utilized in responding to the change. In this view, the increase in blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure in response to a threat should then be viewed merely as a form of adaptation. If this adaptation is not completed, the maladaptive response would be an imbalance and the levels would remain elevated. Thus the action of the system preparing to adapt, and failing to adapt, would be seen in our Western society as stress, whereas in TCM, it would be seen as failure to restore balance.

 I also informed the patient that on the level of Modern Physics, where everything is connected, we are all the same, yet paradoxically, different. This means that we are the same, but we have different expressions of the same thing. This is the same way that each snowflake is a different expression of frozen water crystals.

Each branch of humanity is a different expression of the same, and a three-thousand year diet of fruits/vegetables and meat has left Native Americans with few tools to handle a high carbohydrate load. An excess of carbohydrates then leads to elevated sugars, altering the adaptation response of the state before.

Furthermore, it is the nature of energy to attract to itself what it is missing. So there also will be a correlate of an unusual attraction to potatoes. I advised the patient that when she feels an overwhelming desire for one type of food, it does not take much to fill it, but it is the human tendency to eat way beyond satiation.

I used the example of French women who have a tendency to cook with a lot of butter sauces. But their secret is that they use small quantities, only enough to savor the taste and appreciate it. I advised the patient that she should not deny herself of the energy in the foods she craved, but that she should follow the example of the French women, i.e. have them only in small quantities, just enough  to savor them but without over indulgence. This would help her keep her balance, and enable her metabolism to function in a normal way.

The patient then told me that her son also was diabetic and that his blood sugars were frequently in the 700-800 range. She also said that she’d understood everything I’d said, that no one had explained it to her that way before, and that now that she understood what was happening to her system, she would share the information with her son and other diabetics in the family.

The patient returned a week later for follow-up. She thanked me profusely, as her blood sugar control had become significantly easier. She also said that her son’s blood sugars, for the first time, were just over 100.

The insight here is two fold. The first is that because everything is connected, one change leads to another. So an adaptation in eating portions has an effect on our blood sugars, blood pressures etc. Our adaptation then becomes critically important, as this is something that only we control. The second insight is that it is important to know what is for us and what is not for us.

Discernment is important because what we are uniquely in the moment determines our experience in the moment. The lesson here is applied to diabetes, but it just as easily could be applied to most other things.