The Microbiome and TCM
Tiana McGuire
The total destruction of bacteria that antibiotics cause could become a thing of the past. For every single human cell in the body there are 10 more microbes living on the surfaces of and within the body. It’s time to accept that the experience of being human is a symbiotic experience. The question is how long a human devoid of all microbial life would survive? If one goes so far as to consider that each of our cells hosts a mitochondria with its own DNA, which is not human DNA, than human life would be impossible without our symbiotes.
Which brings us to consider the human microbiome as a ecosystem whose health is directly tied to the health of the individual. The more that biochemists understand and map out the what’s and why’s of the major bacterial players in the microbiome, the more specific treatments can become. In the article The Body’s Ecosystem the author states that “anything we can do to restore more balance or more appropriate microbe composition in the skin, as in all the tissues, is extremely important.” In order to know how to bring balance back into the organism we must first understand what that individuals microbiome should look like. Companies such as the South San Francisco’s UBiome offer microbiome mapping of multiple locations on the body, such as internal organs, oral cavity, skin, nasal mucosa, and genital. This can allow an individual to have a reference of their baseline microbiome when they are healthy. (I have taken part of a study for Crohn's Disease and have been tracking my gut flora over the last three years. Being able to watch what does and what does not change over time is fascinating.) Then if they fall ill a comparison of their biome can be made, and an individualized plan of action to reinstate balance created. This is night and day compared to the scorched earth approach of antibiotics that have helped to create exceptionally hard to kill bacteria such as MRSA and CDAD.
Diversity is also key to a healthy microbiome. In the chapter on ‘Trillions of Mouths to Feed’ (The Good Gut, 2014) Sonnenburg discusses how the Western gut has come to be lacking diversity. They discuss that the combination of lacking exposure to food-borne microbes such as those found in fermented foods and lack of plant material, fiber, in the Western diet has led to our microbe diversity suffering. I find that there is an opportunity to draw a connection to the Chinese thought of the human body as a microcosm of the universal macrocosm here. As the Western diet has shifted to eating from the industrialized food industry, farmers have shifted to monoculture crops, foods are pasteurized and sterilized. So too we see has gut microbiome shifted towards its own monoculture/lack of diversity. And the same weakness that exist with monoculture crops can happen with our guts. Just as Panama Disease is killing off the world’s monoculture bananas, so too can C-difficile take over the microbiome of a individual after a heavy course of antibiotics. As above, so below.
One of the core theories in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is Yin Yang Theory. The unity of the body is based upon the balance of two opposing and complementary relationships. Pathology appears when the bodies systems are out of balance and TCM seeks to return the body to health via returning the body’s systems into a balanced state. This seems to be congruent with the idea of nurturing a healthy microbiome instead of eradicating all bacteria as though they all are pathogenic. There is hope that as western medicine begins to shift, we as humans may start to appreciate that promoting balance in our symbiotic human condition is a effective treatment that so too will the medicine open up to an integrated approach to wellness in cooperation with TCM.
References
Staff, The Scientist (August 2014) The Body’s Ecosystem
Justin Sonnenburg & Erica Sonnenburg (2015) The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-Term Health.
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