peter's township and i really love coming to you and teaching different things about complementary medicine and complimentary health care one of the things i like to do the most is to combine western medicine and traditional health care with complimentary ideas and really teach you about different options that there are in health care because there are many and today i am thrilled and honored to be on belief to have make is my guest welcome doctor to the job was your to be here i'm so excited to have you talk with our viewers just to give you a little information dr ted has so many credentials which you'll see on your screen but just to go through them a little bit dr ted said because his p h d from the university of asian martial martial arts he is a doctor of natural pathic medicine and he is licensed in the district of columbia he has his doctorate of medical chee gong and might i add ladies and gentleman that how many doctors of medical she gone are there in the united states dr to there maybe thirty maybe thirty so we are truly blessed to have dr ted literally in our backyard also he is certified as a health and fitness professional from the medical college of sports medicine so that's what all these wonderful  medicine is the forerunner of all chinese medicine so there's four branches of chinese medicine most people when they hear chinese medicine i think of acupuncture because that's the esoteric branch you know you stick needles in the skin  miraculous things and cures pain and does those wonderful kinds of things president nixon actually seen a demonstration over in beijing where they did anesthesia just with acupuncture there was no anesthesia yes but the the anesthesia was done with needles and they did a full penda situs so the person was completely open and talking just with a few needles in his head and a couple in his hands and one in his feet and he was so impressed by this that he went back to the united states and went back to harvard and yale and says doctors you have to go see this this is incredible i've never seen anything like this and so began the beginnings the humble beginnings in this country of chinese medicine before that there was four branches and so acupuncture was one herbal medicine using not just herbs but food as medicine as well as well essential oils and all those kinds of different things that's another branch and then he had all the body work you had the chiropractic as it would be called today you had kind of soft tissue work anything that to occur manipulation of the muscles and also anything that we would call massage therapy today all worked into one and then the fourth and final branch which was considered the highest branch of chinese medicine is after you've worked through all of those other branches and you had gained expertise she didn't went into the energetics or the medical she going side of it and that was the complete understanding of the human body as an energy system and the way that it would communicate with the mind the brain and the spirit and the body and so these things were called meridians these pathways are energy connections or kind of like satellite towers if you want to think about that way and the satellite towers would talk to each other and if the satellite tower went down it was your job energetically whether it be by needle massage herbs food to bring the communication back up and so as you became a doctor a medic all the internal workings of the entire energy human body system not just the topical aspects but we get into the emotional the psychology and also the spiritual aspects because in ancient china there was no delineation between physician and priest they were one they were the educated person in the village and so that person became if you had any problem whatsoever if you were depressed or you broke your leg or you were questioning the existence of why i am here you went to one person and that person was called the zone you and i am one of the only song you use in the united states how did you get interested on this  first about what is training you actually got your training in china didn't the majority of my training actually came when i was a child i was a very severe asthmatic born with asthma and  was not expected to live and so what basically came about is they really didn't have anything to offer me there was really like today there was no rescue inhalators there was nothing they could really do i'd have an asthma attack basically it was just keep them quiet hope you can make it and see if you can pull through if i had an asthma attack for five days and then i was hospitalized here in pittsburgh and at the end of that five days they said you know what he's not going to make it it's heart's going to give out we have an experimental medicine we like to try and so they tried this experimental medicine on me which is commonly called corroboree today i don't know if you've ever heard of that drug bed it's actually a paralytic drug and s the overdose me by ten and they actually killed me i flatlined and everything stopped in the hospital i was five and everything stopped for fifteen minutes and then i came back and so the doctors the physicians the therapist the psychiatrist were very interested on what happens once you cross over and then you can back so they followed me around for years and years  see anything did he tell you anything that he he would question my parents would have ongoing meetings all the while i was still suffering with asthma and my father came up to me and we were having this long conversation about what are we going to do and he says pad he says i'm to tell you something he says god helps those who help themselves and that started it i said dad i want to take martial arts it's like what now this is in the sixty's ok so there's no there's no more towards schools on any corner block or anywhere you've got to really look hard to find a martial arts school so i found a guy who actually was over in actually in japan training and he had come back to the states after world war two and by chance i found him and he was also a chun buddhist so i grew up learning chinese buddhist meditation and then he also trained in martial arts so that started at age five by five and a half and it just talk off from there so every day i trained every day i meditated every day that was my education and he brought it all to me how your ass not through all this it got to the point where i think control my asthma attacks just through my meditation wow and you know they never thought i was going to make it and actually i had my last rites five you know i had them again when i was twelve same thing happened and the folks he's here now yeah and now so you know that was that was really the catalyst for my training and i realized that i had to go deeper i had to learn more because i had to learn to help myself it's not that we didn't look there was nothing available and  parents were doing everything they possibly could but i realized if i was going to survive that i had to take control and so that's what i did and i did it through martial arts i did through meditation and what i didn't realize a lot of what i was learning was actually  comes by many names and it's it's cross cultural you'll see in every indigenous culture it's not just in china but you'll see it in south america you'll see it with the in you with you'll see it in latin america you'll see it in africa you'll see it  aborigines it's just called different names and so it's the energy workings of the body it's using the mind to control the energy of the body in other words if you want to call that stress or whatever you want to call it it's coming yourself down it's learning because you know i've walked the walk i've done this been there done that got the pink shirt you know obviously if you have to literally have a t shirt actually and so you know now it's just a matter of educating other people however i need to educate them however i need to get in front of them live on a beautiful country like setting unfortunately i have been there yet but i will get there someday so you have one location in leeds for us you a great amount of teaching   then we basically put down roots i was traveling a lot and decided that i want to stay in pittsburgh and people in pittsburgh needed this kind of an education as well and so we put down  roots i put on a clinic and an education center on thirty acres and the one up in leeds perhaps the one up at least brick so now people come you know they come to the mountain so to speak g s so ok i'm going to find out exactly where your clinic is because of course a very bar everybody knows where that is so wow you know you're only five minutes away from where i live ok check this out here so you don't have to go all the way to lee bergen other words to meet with dr ted he's right here in peter's township is that inner strength dot com it's in there hyphen strikes i find strength dot com i want to make sure i got that website in there  can i don't know how long your court is for your microphone but can you give us a short demonstration of anything i can show you a little bit of she gone ok that we actually teach asthmatic basically what you're going to do is ok basically what you're going to do is you're going to this is difficult to explain because the breathing is a big part of this and so what you want to do is we do a what we call a six directional breath and that is you breathe very deeply into the abdominal cavity but you also breathe in into the back and i'm going to get you to assist me for a moment because i want to show this kind of breathing most people here don't ever see this and probably have not seen this on t v ok so basically i want you to take a photograph of my back rather than my stomach because everybody knows how to belly breathe but very few people know how to breathe with their back and actually invigorated spinal column and this is part of the breathing technique that we use in daoism so basically if you can put your hand on my back right there and so people can see jones hands move as i breathe in deeply now ok so we've got the right angle here all right i'm going to take an inhalation and you're going to see her hand actually move with the breath most people think of breathing with the chest some people think of breathing with a belly i think this is the first time you're going to see someone breathe with their back so here we go ready here's an ladies and gentlemen dr ted hall body back is expanding i've never felt anything like this that's a whole body breath wow and believe it or not i've got your back now they got my think you got my back it yes actually this is how opera singers learn to sing this is how people who play when instruments learn to breathe this is how mark spitz learns to breathe with twins so it's not uncommon but what we really need to help now can join without there is movement and exercise so what you want to do is keep in mind as a form of breathing and then the next thing that we're going to do is basically we're going to bring our hands down to what we call the lower density and down here and then all you would do is repeat this exercise most people don't see breathing like that and what happens is it doesn't look fashionable because you're making your belly look big and making your back look big but really what you're doing jim massaging every internal organ within your body you're keeping your internal organs healthy you're getting a high amount of oxygen and basically you're allowing your body to become nourished with oxygen and pump blood at the same time so somebody who's even convalescent could do this wow i do this a lot with my cancer patients with people with m s people that are even paralyzed and so forth they can actually get a workout in and if you do this long enough you actually start to sweat i believe it i mean it's actually very very aerobics so what we can do is you can get people that normally would not have any movement whatsoever and you can get them to basically begin to move and to breathe and to oxygenate themselves and to calm down and so glad you're bringing this up because one of the things that i try and teach my clients is for people that have problems with their knees or they can't run or they can't go to the gym i explain that there are exercises there are things that they can do sitting down right and my very very meager summited knowledge of type she even those movements are very slow you know work out with a very good workout yes so i have such limited knowledge about the martial arts and about chinese medicine but the knowledge that i mean compared to you i'm in kindergarten but they don't like to have it has been so helpful for sam many people it's really simple things it doesn't cost anything so and it's very easy to learn all you have to do is have consistency and persistence and anybody can learn to do this i teach this to eight year olds and i teach it to eighty year olds it makes no difference it doesn't matter if you're in a hospital bed it doesn't matter if first book that i wrote was co chair passages and what it was was basically a book about my lifelong journey struggling with asthma and allergies and some of the natural methods that i have found to ameliorate those who are to lead those but along the way if you're going to study asthma and allergies you're also going to study the immune system so it became psychoneuroimmunology it became an immunological kind of program it became diet it became exercise it became mindset it became meditation all of those things are in the book called air passages and the second book i wrote was kind of like a way to structure meditation food rember we look at food as medicine and then also movement so don't even use the word exercise because that's sometimes a bad word or a bad nasty word people don't want to hear so we use the word movement and how to incorporate those things daily into your life even if you're super super super busy so that was the second book and this is the third book which is a book about how to overcome your fear and how to manifest your own destiny overcome your fear and manifest  teach that in my practice i've overcome many fears throughout the years and thanks to his wonderful amazing life lou and i am manifesting my destiny so that's for sure you talk about food being medicine and i think that is such an important point and i know you all have heard this from me before and i will say it again healthy lifestyle and healthy eating really contribute to health overall health and wellness so put down that down a put down that sugar put down that white flour know the garbage in is garbage out know that your lifestyle now will predict your health and wellness in your later years it amazes me one of the things and i enjoy doing so much is exercising and going to the gym because i know that when i have a lot to do hopefully in the next fifty years and i want to have the flexibility i want to have the strength i want to have the enthusiasm so i'm doing a lot for myself as far as exercise and trying to eat the right things and keeping away as much as possible from sugar and processed foods and anything from i and all that stuff because i really want to be healthy as i get into my sixty's seventy's eighty's ninety's ok jack elaine move over the coming maybe i'll be the female so i'm so glad that you brought that up all these different options that people do have that they can combine with traditional medicine and this is not a substitute people  traditional medicine this is a compliment this is an adjunct but everything that you're able to add to the program that you and your doctor create to gether that will give you the best possible wellness and all these things that dr ted is describing to us today and we've been talking specifically about wellness and asthma because that's been his experience but everything that he teaches war add to overall wellness period what whatever it whatever your issue is or whatever you're working on trying to think of this wow this there's so much to talk about with this but all the classes that dr ted teache are so helpful to so if you ever have a chance i know here we are down in the south wales if you ever have a chance to journey on up to leech berg he has a wonderful set up up there so there are many different opportunities to learn various techniques of chinese medicine and breathing and meditation and whatever it is that you're interested in along those lines dr kent what would you like to tell our viewers anything in particular i wanted to hit on all the important parts there's so much to talk about the way we look at health is really that it needs to be simplistic you know you have some prerequisites and one of the things that i just wrote an article for an international magazine on sleep and the chinese have really studied sleep and that's one of the things that we're finding out as a nation that we're very sleep deprived so one of the things that makes perfect sense to everybody is we need more sleep we need more rest we need more downtime more time to decompress that has an enormous amount of impact on your immune system so if in fact you can get an extra hour or get that now that is so helpful for your overall health and that will help you to ward off colds and flus that are coming up in the upcoming winter months in the cold season but that's one of the things that i find with my clients who have compromised immune systems is they don't get enough sleep so you know for all of you out there who are pushing the envelope and burning the candle at both ends ciaran to get some sleep in just six you know for your overall general health it's just going to be one of the simplest things you can do and it doesn't cost anything and it feels really good i just came up with an idea for our viewers take a nap say because hey like that's one of the things i like to do on the weekends too is i come home and it's just ok give me an hour to where i can relax a little bit have some downtime my husband says how can you just fall asleep so easily i said then when i when i my body is ready to rest it lets me know and then i take a nap and then i feel so refreshing even if it's five minutes of meditation even if it's five minutes of no cell phones amazing but i wanted you all to meet dr ted i wanted you all to know the options that are available and that he does have a practice down here in the south hills and you can make an appointment to meet with him and learn these breathing