Balance is not a fixed state but a responsive process. This post weaves Western physiology (homeostasis, allostasis, allostatic load) with Chinese medicine (yin and yang, qi, blood, fluids) to explain why labs can look "normal" while the body feels off, and how to read signals, reduce load, and restore resilience.
After her treatment ended, Alice’s scans looked perfect. Her blood counts were stable. Her liver function had improved. On paper, she was healthy.
And yet she didn’t feel healthy at all.
She was exhausted, foggy, and unable to sleep. Her weight climbed as her energy plummeted. Her nerves burned, her thyroid failed, her liver flared, and new autoimmune symptoms emerged. Ten different specialists had weighed in — cardiology, endocrinology, rheumatology, dermatology, psychiatry, palliative care, and more — but no one could explain how all the pieces fit together.
This gap between what the tests show and what the body feels is where the journey to understanding balance begins.
Why Balance Matters
Many people, like Alice, know that something is amiss in their system long before a diagnosis is made. They experience the strain in the form of fatigue, poor sleep, digestive troubles, or brain fog. Conventional approaches may offer fragments of explanation — a borderline lab value, a diagnosis of stress, a suggestion to “watch and wait.” But the lived reality doesn’t add up.
Balance is the lens that helps make sense of this gap. But balance is not simple. Both the mechanistic precision of Western medicine and the pattern-based wisdom of Chinese medicine offer insights into how our bodies maintain equilibrium, adapt to stress, and recover from strain. Seen together, they create a more comprehensive picture of what health truly is.
Western Medicine’s Lens: Homeostasis, Allostasis, and Resilience
In the early 20th century, physiologist Walter Cannon coined the term "homeostasis" to describe how the body maintains a stable internal environment despite constant external changes. Body temperature, blood pressure, blood pH, and glucose are all regulated through intricate feedback loops.
A simple example: when you stand up quickly, blood momentarily pools in your legs, but your autonomic nervous system tightens vessels and increases heart rate to keep blood flowing to the brain. Without this adjustment, you’d faint.
But life is never static. Stressors — physical, emotional, environmental — constantly press on the system. Enter allostasis, a concept introduced in the 1980s, which describes stability through change. Allostasis recognizes that regulation is not about maintaining the body in a perfectly constant state, but rather about flexible adaptation. Cortisol rises in the morning to wake you, falls at night to let you sleep. Blood pressure increases during exertion and then returns to normal at rest. The immune system surges during an infection, then returns to its normal state.
This adaptability, however, comes at a cost. Repeated stress and continual adjustment create allostatic load, the accumulated wear and tear of living. Over time, the body may lose tolerance — sleep falters, fatigue deepens, irritability increases, and digestion becomes impaired. Labs may still look “normal,” but the system is running harder and harder to maintain equilibrium. If the strain continues, allostatic overload emerges, when compensatory mechanisms begin to fail and disease takes hold.
Alice’s story is a vivid example. Cancer treatment pushed her body into a relentless cycle of adaptation: chemotherapy stressing blood counts, immunotherapy igniting her immune system, steroids disrupting metabolism, radiation taxing her tissues. Each system strained to compensate until eventually her thyroid collapsed, her liver was inflamed, and her resilience was eroded.
From the Western perspective, she accumulated an overwhelming allostatic load.
Chinese Medicine’s Lens: Patterns of Imbalance
Where Western medicine quantifies physiological variables, Chinese medicine interprets patterns — ways the body mirrors the rhythms of the natural world. Health is understood as the harmonious flow of interdependent forces; imbalance is the disruption of those flows.
Yin and Yang: Dynamic Polarity
At the foundation are yin and yang, complementary forces of rest and activity, cool and warm, stillness and movement. Health depends not on maximizing one, but on their constant interplay. Too much yang: restlessness, heat, irritability. Too much yin: coldness, fatigue, stagnation. Alice’s profound exhaustion alongside heat flares and autoimmune activity reflected a breakdown in this polarity.
Qi: Vital Energy and Regulation
Qi is the vital energy that animates life, responsible for movement, transformation, and defense. It fuels metabolism, drives circulation, supports immunity, and sustains clarity. Qi deficiency shows up as fatigue, weakness, and poor concentration. Qi stagnation produces irritability, tension, or pain. Alice’s post-treatment fatigue, brain fog, and sense of being “stuck” reflected both deficiency and stagnation.
Blood: Nourishment and Stability
Blood (xue) nourishes body and mind, grounding sleep, cognition, and emotion. Beyond red cells, it is the dense, nourishing manifestation of qi. Blood deficiency leads to dizziness, dry skin, and poor sleep; blood stagnation produces sharp pain or mood disturbance. Alice’s neuropathy, poor sleep, and emotional volatility can all be read through this lens.
Fluids: Moisture and Adaptability
Fluids (jin-ye) encompass sweat, saliva, lymph, synovial fluid, and cerebrospinal fluid. They cool, lubricate, and transport. Imbalance shows as dryness, constipation, swelling, phlegm, or heaviness. Alice’s swelling, oral plaques, and digestive discomfort reflect disturbances in fluid balance.
Zang-Fu Networks: Interconnected Systems
Chinese medicine conceives organs as functional networks rather than isolated parts. The Liver governs the smooth flow of qi and emotions; the Spleen, digestion and clarity; the Heart, consciousness and circulation. These networks interlink, each influencing the others. For Alice, the disrupted flow between networks manifested as a cascade of symptoms, with digestion, mood, immunity, energy, and sleep all intertwined.
Above all, Chinese medicine emphasizes that imbalance precedes disease. Subtle signals — such as disturbed sleep, fatigue, and mood changes — are seen as early warnings. In Alice’s case, many of these imbalances were present long before cancer appeared. The treatment that saved her life also exposed vulnerabilities in the system, deepening their understanding.
Braiding the Two Perspectives
Western and Chinese medicine use different languages, but both describe balance as dynamic, adaptive, and relational.
Regulation: Western homeostasis parallels the coordinating role of qi.
Adaptation: Allostasis resonates with yin-yang’s shifting interplay.
Resilience: Allostatic load mirrors the Chinese emphasis on excess, deficiency, and stagnation.
Early imbalance: Both recognize that dysfunction begins long before a diagnosable disease is present.
Alice’s thyroid failure can be seen as both autoimmune overload and qi deficiency. Her neuropathy is nerve damage, and the tissues are not receiving sufficient nourishment from the blood. Her autoimmune hepatitis is an inflammatory excess and disrupted flow. One lens highlights mechanisms, the other reveals patterns — together, they illuminate the whole.
The Ongoing Process of Balance
Balance is not a fixed state but an ongoing process — a dance of disruption and repair. Some days the system hums with ease; other days, stress tips it off-kilter. The goal is not perfection, but responsiveness: the ability to notice signals, restore rhythm, and return.
For Alice, learning to read her body’s signals — fatigue, flares, brain fog — is now as important as tracking her scans. Her story reminds us that balance is not found in a single test result but in the living process of adaptation and recovery.
What Comes Next
If balance is so central, why is it so hard to see in the clinic? Why did Alice’s ten specialists, each working diligently, struggle to connect her symptoms into a coherent whole?
Part of the reason lies in the field of medicine itself. We have built walls — between specialties, between traditions, between data and lived experience.
In the following essay, we’ll look at those walls and what it might take to move beyond them.
Convergence shows how three lenses describe the same body. Through Chinese medicine’s pattern language, systems medicine’s allostatic load, and network medicine’s connectivity maps, we read Alice’s symptoms as one system seeking balance. The post makes the “wall” permeable—keeping precision in service to pattern—so practitioners can coordinate care that restores flow, rebuilds reserves, and rewires healthier networks.
A concise introduction to Alice’s journey: cured of cancer but struggling with fragmented, post‑treatment fallout—pointing to the need for systems‑based, integrative care that restores rhythm, function, and confidence.
Alice’s post‑treatment story shows how fragmented care creates new problems—and how a systems‑based, integrative plan restores rhythm, function, and confidence.
