Endometriosis (?)

Chinese medicine has a lot to say about period pain. Practitioners take into consideration cycle length, regularity, ovulation symptoms, pre-menstrual symptoms, whether these abate with the bleed or continue into it, even the quality of menstrual blood. Compared to this Western medicine has little to say about period pain until it starts to manifest in a way that can be measured with the tools of Western medicine. Then it’s given names like endometriosis or PCOS or others.

This is not to say that these conditions don’t exist or to undermine the experiences of anyone living with them, but this can lead to a very scary binary treatment approach of ‘Just take a painkiller / the pill and stop complaining’ to ‘You need major surgery’, with nothing in between.

In my clinic I’m noticing more women, especially younger women, have a much better connection with their cycles these days. They know approximately where they are on their cycle and how they tend to feel and what signs and symptoms they tend to experience around that particular time. With this naturally comes a curiosity as to what may be behind symptoms they’re feeling, and sometimes a real worry when it comes to issues like period pain. When the only labels you have for this pain are frightening ones like endometriosis, and when the only mainstream treatments for this label are so invasive, this can naturally cause concern.

This video is more about general period pain than endometriosis specifically, which I will talk about in a future post. But before I made a video about that I wanted to widen the conversation about period pain to a broader scope than just these Western diagnoses. Chinese medicine views this condition as a spectrum with endometriosis on the far end. We have different tools for dealing with different manifestations and like all our treatments, these are based on the person and how they are presenting individually.