TCM (weeks 6 & 7)!
Week 6
- Discuss your experience while checking out a few tongues. Discuss some of the tongues posted on the forum.
I did my draft on this page and when I pressed post to forum I got an error message and lost my work. There weren’t other posts when I started but will reply to posts for this part of the forum questions.
One thing I noticed this week in relation to the body clock and patterns of deficiency ( I see these in my tongue picture) is something I thought would be good to share. I spent yesterday conscious of breath, and imagining my lungs dispersing a fine mist to nurture my body (like an irrigation system in gardening). At around 3pm I noticed that my awareness had changed. I felt ‘dry’ and like the breathing exercises weren’t working efficiently. I checked the ‘tcm organ clock’ on my phone and saw this is an empty time (opposite time) for the lungs which is normally 3-5 am.
- Try to make some simple observations of your own tongue and document them.
My tongue is pale pink, and has cracks running through from the back forward, and branching outwards through each section (lower, middle, and upper burners). This can indicate dryness. It had a thing white coating. Muscle tone is normal. According to the 8 guiding principles on page 78 of BHE my tongue show signs of Yin which includes Cold, Deficient, and Internal syndromes. Underneath my tongue there a blue somewhat distended sublingual veins, which can be a indication of stasis somewhere. I recently had a blood count done at the GP and my red blood cells and leukocytes are a bit low. Not quite classified as ‘anaemic’ but very low.
- List some observations that you found when doing some Chinese facial diagnosis on yourself (this is part of the week 6 activity). You may want to discuss colour, skin texture and the relationship of the organs to the facial areas.
I could see that the patterns of organs on the face loosely fit into upper, middle, and lower burner sections from the picture and organ descriptions.
Overall: My skin colour is ‘sand beige’ with warm undertones and some freckling. I have redder cheeks and lips and broken capillaries around my nose (yin & heat). My skin is more transparent and has a few deep wrinkles these days.
Upper Burner: My forehead, in between eyebrows, and top of my nose has wrinkles. I have a couple of lines down the centre of my eyebrows (liver) and under my eyes are a bit sunken (Gallbladder) but not darker in tone than the rest of my face (Kidney)
Middle Burner: Tip of nose and cheeks to top of face: I have some redness in cheeks and under my nose with some obvious capillaries (kidney, larger, bladder, uterus) and larger pores which could indicate some heat in the middle burner and the larger pores may be connected to the lungs efforts to maintain balance? I do have stuffy dry sinuses at times.
Lower Burner: tip of nose, cheeks down to chin: I see that the kidney, bladder, larger intestine, legs, and feet area are consistent to the observations above. I do have larger pores and broken capillaries in my chin as well.
I can see there are patterns of the 5 climates and the 5 emotions, influencing the flow in my body. I feel like there is dry, damp, wind, heat, and cold. I see that the paler colours of my tongue indicate slower flow, tone, deficiencies, and more Yin. It will be interesting to work to make changes and see improvements in the future hopefully!
Week 7
- Discuss the importance of identifying patterns of disharmony according to the eight principles.
The body displays signs of imbalance via the 8 guiding principles: cold, heat, deficiency, excess, internal, external, yin and yang. If a condition is superficial or more acute it will only show externally as a temporary condition, for example a cold. If it is more serious, then it is affecting both the external and internal environment.
Working with presenting symptoms, a practitioner can understand where to start treatment to give the safest herbs and recommendations for the client. This might involve addressing different levels of illness over time.
- Explain how these principles could be used to formulate a working diagnosis for most conditions seen in the clinic.
The practitioner can observe the clients presentation including posture, face, eyes, tongue, smell, pulse, skin, and verbal description of their hea
Discuss the importance of identifying patterns of disharmony according to the eight principles.
The body displays signs of imbalance via the 8 guiding principles: cold, heat, deficiency, excess, internal, external, yin and yang. If a condition is superficial or more acute it will only show externally as a temporary condition, for example a cold. If it is more serious, then it is affecting both the external and internal environment.
Working with presenting symptoms, a practitioner can understand where to start treatment to give the safest herbs and recommendations for the client. This might involve addressing different levels of illness over time.
Explain how these principles could be used to formulate a working diagnosis for most conditions seen in the clinic.
The practitioner can observe the clients presentation including posture, face, eyes, tongue, smell, pulse, skin, and verbal description of their health concerns. These are all external cues as to what is happening both externally and internally for the client. The practitioner can ask the client about their experiences of problems, such as are their sharp pains, or dull aches; is their mucus, what colour is it; Do you feel hot or cold; How are your energy levels, what kinds of foods do you eat? The 8 principles help to form a working diagnosis for treatments such as cooling, warming, drying, hydrating, nourishing, dispersing, and tonifying, herbs, along with short term and longer term lifestyle changes. Further to this a practitioner may utilise acupuncture with the five phase theory as a guide to assist and clear affected organ channels in the body.
Teacher Feedback:
‘Yes, inspection is a very important techniques in TCM diagnosis. In TCM, we said the best practitioner will know what’s the condition of one person by inspection. So in Chinese, going to clinic is called “kan bing”, “kan” means “looking, inspecting, observing’
‘But how to collect the information and how the analyse what information, there are a lot of different schools in TCM histories. So it’s hard to give comments just based on the description of other people’.
Other Teacher Feedback:
‘Based on your discussion, I can see you understand the Eight principle very well. But this is just the basic knowledge about Eight Principle. In clinics, it’s not often to see the case with pure cold/heat, pure exterior/interior, pure excessive/deficiency condition. The common conditions are: combined cold and heat, combined exterior and interior, combine deficiency and excessive. Or even combiner exterior cold with internal heat, etc. The more difficult conditions can be false cold real heat, or false deficiency real excessive, etc. So if you are interested in, you may have further exploring in this area’.
‘Eight Principles pattern differentiation is like the compass. It will tell you the general direction. But it can’t tell you how to arrive at the the target. Other pattern differentiation need to be combined with Eight Principles to support the treatment. For example, if you only know it’s cold syndrome, you need use warm treatment. But where where you will treat? So many warm herbs, which one you should select? you don’t know. If you combine Eight Principle with Internal Organ differentiation methods together, and give a diagnosis as stomach pain caused by cold attack stomach. then your treatment principle will be very clear’.