Category Archives: Chinese Medicine

Listen instead:

---

Ever wonder what people are wondering? I sure do. In answer to that question, I sometimes have a little fun with search engines. I type in an intro query without actually completing the search term. I want to see what suggestions pop up based on what other people have previously searched.

In general, what I find is that we want the search engine oracle to pronounce something good or bad, forever and ever, amen. This applies to all manner of things, and is especially true when it comes to health. We’re obsessed with placing value judgments on every health tactic, routine, and/or food under the sun. We want the magic wand, the silver bullet, the health hack, the shortcut, the easy way, the trapdoor, the smoke, the mirrors, the abracadabra of it all.

Today I’d like to make a case for not hacking up our lives in quest of magic bullets. And how (it probably goes without saying) that relates to Chinese medicine.

The Compounding Difficulty of Aggravated Evasion

Sometimes, running away is 100% a safe, sober, and sane move. But other times, running from something is just running toward it in another aspect of life. Let’s suss these out.

When it comes to predatory behavior, deals with the devil, and imitation vanilla extract, just get yourself away! In these cases, it’s often best to depart forthwith! Doing so may be called “running away,” but it’s the self-preservation type of running. Setting healthy boundaries, declaring no admittance to deal-breaking shenanigans and relationships is not avoidance. It is assertive assurance that you won’t have those things in your life, or at least that you’ll have them a lot less.

So when is running from something the quickest way to get more of that exact thing? When we quit a situation that’s not good for us without dealing with it. Avoiding dealing with deal-breaking shenanigans risks repeating that same pattern.

I’ve made up a term for this type of sustained avoidance; I call it generalized avoidance or aggravated evasion.¹ If we go through life solely operating on shortcuts and evasive maneuvers meant to avoid for avoidance’s sake, we lose resiliency, adaptability, and humanity. The more we avoid discomfort, the more uncomfortable it will be, and the more terrifying and derailing discomfort becomes.

The running from/avoidance spectrum shows up all over life, and it cannot be solved by a shower of magic bullets. Chinese medicine talks about such spectra as feedback loops — a dynamic interaction of interdependence. When we allow ourselves to experience life fully without trying to reduce it into tidy silos, we get a lot more out of it, and we’re far less fragile. What can I say? This is just science. You gotta feel it to heal it.

You Gotta Feel It to Heal It

Seeking “magic bullets” as an evasion tactic complicates things for us because following each new trend splits our understanding and learning capacity. IS coffee good? ARE blueberries good? IS weight-bearing exercise good? These questions reveal an assumption that an absolute value of goodness exists. Thinking in such terms is one of the ways we trip ourselves up. Those questions also beg another question: Good for what?

Around 20 years (or so) ago, I attended a small-town solo concert of a now famous musician who was playing his as-yet-unknown-to-the-world originals. When introducing one song, he said something that stuck firmly in my mind. It went along these lines, “This song’s about busted-up friendships: one of those things that’s good for songwriting, and bad for — well — just about everything else.”

Exactly! Good for one thing, bad for another.

If that musician had avoided or buried the discomfort of busted-up friendships — a pain we all experience at some point — he wouldn’t have written that song. Instead, he wrote about it, which not only processed his discomfort, but also turned it into art.² That’s how art is a healing process: It shows us the stuff of life.

Conclusion

The truth is, the stuff of life is nuanced, influenced by context, and more multi-faceted than many of us would like to believe.

Chinese medicine, however, revels in facets. As such, it excels at treating the individual who shows up in real time. And while health history is important, illuminating, and a strong contributor to any health picture, it’s not a complete predictor of where a person is, or where they’re heading. Aggravated evasiveness, or the absence of it, is a far greater predictor.

Regardless, though, what’s good or bad for any individual is going to vary, depending on lots of things.

Let’s take this back to the coffee question: Coffee might be good for concentration, but bad for the adrenals. The extent to which that matters depends highly upon the individual context. Part of being human is to use our intelligence, awareness, experiences, and relationships to help us discern the context of our lives. There are no true short-cuts or arrivals; the journey is always under our feet.

by Mary Beth Huwe

---

These writings are an exploration of what it means to be human – to be sick, to be well, and to heal – viewed through the lens of classical Chinese medicine. My words aren’t medical advice, and these essays don’t constitute a practitioner-client relationship. They also aren’t meant to be the final word on… well, anything. Rather, I hope they are the beginning of a conversation you have with someone in your life. Thanks for reading!

Footnotes:

1. I have no idea if generalized avoidance is already a recognized term in psychology, but it should be. Goin’ with it. Added aggravated evasion because it has a nice ring to it, and because it demonstrates the dogged premeditated intent of evasion that governs this kind of approach. ↩︎
2. Fifteen or so years later, he co-wrote his third number-one hit, a song about the importance of “cry[ing] when it hurts and laugh[ing] when it’s funny.” Pretty solid medical advice, really, and something that seems like an extension of learning what to do with the natural discomforts life brings. ↩︎

Listen instead:

---

When you go to an acupuncturist or Chinese herbalist, chances are the practitioner will ask you to stick out your tongue for their inspection. That’s because one of our diagnostic techniques is tongue diagnosis. We’re looking for the color, size, coating, moisture level, and any bumps, lines, cracks, or divots.

What the what, and why is your acupuncturist so interested in the looks of your tongue?

There are many reasons Chinese medicine practitioners are interested in their clients’ tongues, which I’ll tackle below. Moreover, odd though it may sound, you can inspect your own tongue. I’ll give you a tongue diagnosis chart so you can next-level your at-home self-care moves like a boss with all those hyphens. Let’s go down the rabbit hole!

Diagnosis in Pre-Modern Times

These days, if we want to know what’s going on inside our bodies, we have many modern options at our disposal.

Physicians can order a lipid panel, connect you up for a nerve conduction test, stick a camera into many a nook and cranny, check kidney and liver functions, pop you into an MRI tube, snap a quick X-ray, and/or choose from any other number of diagnostic tests. Not only can they do these things, they can do most of them before lunch on a Tuesday. NBD.

But what happened before these types of tests were available? Were people bumping around in dark caves, completely unaware of their insides right up until the moment Prometheus stole the liver panel tests from the gods? Of course not. Everything we have today was built incrementally — and, yes, sometimes exponentially — by the brilliant people who came before us.

As we’ve covered in a previous post, Chinese medicine is, to use a technical term, super-duper OLD. Ergo, its diagnostic tools developed without the convenient benefits modern imaging affords us. Let’s pause here for a moment to think about that.

The radical changes that modernity has wrought upon the human experience are staggering to try to conceive of. It’s like thinking about the formation of the Grand Canyon, or trying to understand the distance between the sun and Alpha Centauri.

If you, like me, were alive pre-internet, you have an experiential, practical memory of how different life was before that thing showed up. I’m not here to yap either way about the internet’s pros and cons; rather I want to point out that the internet was a sea change. Love, hate, or love/hate it, the internet redefined how we interact with ourselves, our minds, each other, and our collective. Humans had a lot more room for reflection and downtime before the internet made incessant productivity, busyness, and reachability not only available, but expected.

The internet is just one example of a radical shift brought by a technological innovation, but there are lots more: cars, faster cars, guns, machine guns, electricity, major home appliances, TV, and mobile phones — just to name a few. Imagining life on Earth before these things is challenging and beyond the scope of these words.

Safe to say, pre-modernity, people had a different relationship to time. On the one hand, we might think they had less time because so much was tied up in the labor of daily life: starting a fire, boiling the water, curing the meats, et cetera ad infinitum. On the other hand, we might think they had way more time because (a) they had fewer distractions and (b) they had fewer demands outside daily life.

For the purposes of this essay, I’m going with the tried-and-true idea that privileged people had more freedom of movement and schedule than the people toiling in manual and domestic labor. I’m also going with the idea that privileged people in those days had fewer distractions, and as a result were likely to either go stark-raving unpleasant, or to go stark-raving interesting.

What was it like, then, all those years ago, for the people of privilege who were developing Chinese medicine? Well, I don’t actually know. It’s easy to romanticize or disparage a time I can barely contextualize in reasonable terms.

My most neutral sense is that such folks had a lot more time on their hands to pay attention to stuff, and that their capacity for observation and contemplation was likely superior to ours. Because there were fewer distractions, they were well-practiced observers and contemplators. Also, shorter life spans and different types of health problems may have meant that cause and effect were more proximally related in days of yore.

Anthropological musings and realities aside, the people studying medicine made connections between the inside and outside, and these findings were based on their observations. And sure, many of them were probably wrong or bunk. But many were not, and held up to the tests of time and scrutiny.

One such diagnostic technique is tongue diagnosis.

Tongue Diagnosis: Straight From the Source’s Mouth

Tongue diagnosis shows up in some of the very old aspects of Chinese medicine. This article by Chen Ze-lin¹ says depictions of tongue diagnosis can be found on bones and tortoise shells from the Shang dynasty (circa 1600–1050 BCE).I can barely wrap my mind around walkie-talkies and ear crystals, so please excuse me if I simply goggle at that.

Sometime in the Qin and Han dynasties (221 BCE–220 CE), the Neijing, a medical classic of Chinese medicine, was written. The Neijing, as the Library of Congress succinctly states, is “a summation of Chinese medical knowledge up to the time of the Han dynasty.”

The Neijing mentions the tongue as a consideration in medicine, name-dropping it here and there in diagnostic terms. For example, “Patients… feel chilly, have cold limbs… the tongue has a yellow coating, and the patient is feverish.” This type of talk continues throughout various texts in the subsequent centuries, but without the full-on tongue diagnosis charts and detailed inspections we know today.

Sometime in the 13th century (Song or Yuan dynasty), a practitioner named Ao Shi made the first illustrated books about tongue inspection. These books, Golden Mirror Extracts and Every Point Is Golden, weren’t terribly popular, which I find somewhat baffling. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at tongue pictures, but they are fascinating.²

A little bit later on, another practitioner (Du Qing Bi) added more illustrations to Ao Shi’s. About 100 years or so after that, a practitioner named Xue Ji included the tongue pics in his own book, and they took off in popularity and recognition. So in comparison to the deep history of Chinese medicine, tongue inspection as a specific diagnostic tool is somewhat recent, having become more specifically studied and absorbed into the mainstream in the 1200s–1400s. Subsequent centuries have seen tongue diagnosis become even more enfolded into the medicine.

These days, as Dr. Nancy Holroyde-Downing³ states in her 264-page thesis about tongue diagnosis (bravo!), the inspection of the tongue is very prominent in Chinese medicine:

“The inspection of the tongue, initially associated with portents of impending death or with the presence of febrile illness known as shanghan 傷寒 (cold damage), is now a pervasive aspect of a traditional diagnosis, and, as noted above, it is a fundamental part of the curriculum in most colleges of Chinese medicine. It is discussed in diagrammatic and theoretical detail in contemporary Chinese medical textbooks and is a feature of the ‘signs and symptoms’ used in planning or discussing acupuncture and herbal medicine treatment.”

True story! And as with everything in Chinese medicine, there are lots of ways to understand it. You can run a search for “Chinese medicine tongue diagnosis chart” and find pretty different — and nonetheless correct — results.

Open Up and Say Ahhhhhh

The most circulated tongue diagnosis chart, taught in both TCM and classical Chinese medicine, looks something like this:

You’ll see that the tongue is a map, with areas of it linked to various internal organs. Over millennia and/or centuries of tongue observation as it relates to states of health, this is the generally accepted orientation guide of what to look for, and where. The heart is at the tip; just behind that is the lungs; in the center of the tongue is the stomach; the far back, or root, is the kidney area; the sides are the liver.

In our estimation, this chart is not useful for the lay person in terms of self-diagnosis. It’s easy to look at it and think either This is ridiculous! or Saints preserve us! I have a sore on my tongue! Is my heart diseased or is it my lungs? HELP.

Not helpful. Connecting the tongue to the internal landscape of the body is much more nuanced than the above italicized sentences suggest. There are many theoretical and clinical underpinnings the practitioner must learn and practice for tongue diagnosis to be meaningful and effective. In fact, it doesn’t even necessarily imply there’s involvement with your organs at all. It’s subtle and layered, which is pretty much another way of saying, it’s Chinese medicine.

So what is useful for you in terms of that at-home self-care I referenced way back at the beginning of this rabbit hole? If you examine your own tongue in the mirror, what would Chinese medicine suggest you look for, and what would it suggest you do about it?

At Huwe Acupuncture, we suggest looking for two main things: scallops and coat. We also find that small dietary changes can change the state of the tongue a good deal.

Scallops

The source: A scalloped tongue is the result of the tongue’s sides pushing against the teeth. Now, you might think that’s simply a result of tongue size. And you’d be sort of right — but the tongue’s size changes depending on what’s going on with your digestion.

The main takeaway: A scalloped tongue is typically an indication of sluggish or bogged down digestion. The body’s ability to transform food and drink into energy becomes compromised. We often suggest to clients that they incorporate fresh ginger and cooked scallions to aid in digestion and appetite.

Coat

The source: Tongue coat can indicate all kinds of things related to yin and yang — for example, is the situation primarily rooted in heat or cold? Absence of tongue coat is also informative.

The main takeaways:

1. Lack of coat or thin coat both suggest the need to build fluids. This can be achieved through fluids, probiotics, fermented foods, juicy foods like zucchini or okra, and soups.
2. Thick coat typically indicates food stagnation. Chinese medicine suggests diversifying the diet in these cases.
   
   For example, an overabundance of carbohydrates can be mitigated with sprouts. Too much protein can be leavened by a pineapple marinade, which helps break down protein. Excess fat can be aided by spices such as pepper. Or, digestive enzymes can handle any of the above.

Conclusion to Tongue Diagnosis Charts

Because Chinese medicine didn’t disappear with the advent and development of biomedicine, the diagnostic system of tongue inspection remains. While we do caution against oversimplification when applying this system to your own health, it can be helpful to familiarize yourself with your tongue.

Hilarious as it sounds, staring at your tongue in the mirror can help you gain an understanding of how it changes. Check it out when you’re feeling great (energized, well-rested, not stressed, happy, etc.), when you’re feeling not-so-great (hungry, hangry, sleep-deprived, stressed, hungover, etc.), and also whenever you feel like it.

Noticing the change in scallops and coat structure can give you insights into what you need. And knowing is half the battle.

by Mary Beth Huwe

---

These writings are an exploration of what it means to be human – to be sick, to be well, and to heal – viewed through the lens of classical Chinese medicine. My words aren’t medical advice, and these essays don’t constitute a practitioner-client relationship. They also aren’t meant to be the final word on… well, anything. Rather, I hope they are the beginning of a conversation you have with someone in your life. Thanks for reading!

Footnotes

1. Ze-lin, Chen 1987, “Brief history of tongue inspection,” Chinese Medical Journal, pp. 38-44, accessed December 2023 from https://mednexus.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/cmj.0366-6999.100.01.p38.01. ↩︎
2. Also gross! Have you ever looked up black hairy tongue (BHT)? ↩︎
3. Holroyde-Downing, Nancy 2017, “Tongues on fire: on the origins and transmission of a system of tongue diagnosis, a dissertation submitted to the faculty of University College London,” accessed December 2023 from https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10040369/1/Holroyde-Downing_10040369_thesis.pdf ↩︎

Listen instead:

---

As patients of biomedicine in the West, we’re accustomed to a certain kind of language. Diagnoses and terminology are generally based in Latin and/or Greek terms that only sometimes jangle the anglophone ear.

Insomnia,¹ for example, is the inability to experience somnolence (sleep) and is a pretty well-known term. Idiopathic hypersomnia,on the other hand — which means you’re real sleepy and we don’t know why —while decipherable for the word nerds² among us, is a little wonky.

This type of naming is somehow both very descriptive and not especially illuminating. If you go to the doctor because you’re unable sleep, and they tell you that you have something called inability to sleep, you may or may not be reassured.

It all reminds me of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis. The Dawn Treader is a boat and it’s on, you know, a sea voyage… in another world. As is to be expected under such circumstances, the protagonists meet all kinds of unexpected characters and happenings throughout the voyage. One such protagonist, Eustace, is speaking with one such character, Ramandu.

This part of their conversation is noteworthy:

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.” ³

Well, exactly. Language has the ability to deepen our understanding about the nature of a thing, and the nature of a thing is far more than its label.

Another common naming style in biomedicine is eponymic. An eponym basically means that the thing thus named was named for a person, typically the person who “discovered” said thing.

This is my least favored type of naming, and I find it especially irksome in medical and anatomical terms. Bartholin glands, Haab’s reflex,and Abdallat-Davis-Farrage syndrome⁴ all tell us absolutely nothing about the thing they are allegedly describing. Also, labeling people’s body parts with one’s own surname is rude. Ew.

When used expansively in a medical context, language can help us understand ourselves and our health better. And in that way, language can augment our capacity to heal. Let’s see how that comes into play with the language of classical Chinese medicine.

The Medical Language of Chinese Medicine

Language in Chinese medicine is, as we say around here, a little different. Hat-tip to Port Wellness Acupuncture for this acupuncture glossary and explanation: “[A]n acupuncturist commonly uses words in an uncommon way.” Agreeeeeeed.

There are a couple of reasons for that. Naturally, Chinese medicine terms and diagnoses are all translated from Chinese into English. Additionally, the medicine has evolved over millennia, right alongside the people it treated. Furthermore, Chinese medicine is phenomenological in nature — it’s about being able to synthesize the myriad aspects of our lives.

As I don’t speak or read Chinese, I’m uncertain how anachronistic the medical language sounds to fluent speakers. But in my experience, the language of Chinese medicine more often than not connects us to the nature of the thing, rather than offering a surface description or the self-immortalization endemic to the eponym.

Chinese medicine terms include words like qi, phlegm, wind, cold, damp, heat,and fire. Examples of Chinese medicine diagnoses include Wind-Heat Invasion, Phlegm-Fire Harassing the Heart, and Wind-Damp-Phlegm Bi Obstruction.

These terms are delineations of the stuff of life, and these diagnoses describe the root cause of the issue — neither highlighting the resultant symptoms, nor the surname of the dude du jour.

Wind-Heat Invasion could be the common cold or a far more advanced infection. Phlegm-Fire Harassing the Heart could mean fierce anxiety or heart failure. This language isn’t a lack of precision, and it isn’t intended to sugarcoat a bad situation; instead, it’s a different way to calculate malfunction and our role within it.

Diagnosis: Problems, Reworked

A Chinese medicine diagnosis can offer glimmers of understanding into our disease processes, and give us the wiggle room to make small adjustments in our lives that amplify our healing capacity.

Let’s look at three fairly common and challenging diagnoses — insomnia, lupus, and cancer — and how they might be worded in Chinese medicine:

1. Insomnia in Chinese medicine is considered a consequence of other issues. Wind-Heat Invasion and Phlegm-Fire Harassing the Heart could both cause insomnia — and a slew of other unpleasant symptoms as well.
   
   Insomnia could be broken down into a variety of roots and branches: is it difficulty falling asleep? Staying asleep? Is it acute? Chronic? Episodic? Depending on the source of your insomnia, you could take different actions to reduce its occurrence and impact.
   
2. Lupus could be defined as Latent Heat, which is what happens when the body is no longer able to contain heat — or inflammation. This expression of disease can manifest in a variety of symptoms such as pain and swelling in the joints, low fever, headaches, and pain in the chest upon deep breathing.
   
   But Latent Heat could also show up as any number of other biomedical diagnoses, including — but nowhere near limited to — rheumatoid arthritis, myasthenia gravis, and Lyme disease. In other words, if you have Latent Heat, you don’t necessarily have what biomedicine would call lupus. But if you have what biomedicine calls lupus, you do have Latent Heat.
   
   Regardless of specific biomed labels, a person with Latent Heat can reduce their body’s inflammatory load with heat-clearing acupuncture, herbs, and other regenerative tactics prescribed by their Chinese medicine provider.
   
3. Cancer, typically considered by Chinese medicine to be Fire Toxins in the Essence, is one of the scariest diagnoses people in the United States face. The biomedical language surrounding it leads to a certain reductive precision that can be very helpful in determining type, stage, and treatment.
   
   But the language of Fire Toxins in the Essence — especially once unpacked with a practitioner — helps a person with cancer understand the mechanism of what’s happening. When the body is making cancer cells, which are by definition toxic, the repercussions are widespread and taxing. We’ve found that clients with cancer can move forward into the unknown with more steadiness when they focus on replenishing fluids, repairing damaged digestive processes, and thinking about ways to reduce the impact of the “fire.”

Conclusion

Rather than removing us further from our symptoms and healing through confusing or obfuscating terminology, Chinese medicine diagnoses seek to connect people with their experiences.

As always, I’m not insinuating that you can think yourself well with magic words or Chinese medicine language around diagnosis. What I do put forward is that this type of linguistic approach can be a reframe of your experience, and can help you understand the nature of what you need.

And when you understand the nature of what you need, you can help yourself become more adaptive — which is another way of saying healable.

---

These writings are an exploration of what it means to be human – to be sick, to be well, and to heal – viewed through the lens of classical Chinese medicine. My words aren’t medical advice, and these essays don’t constitute a practitioner-client relationship. They also aren’t meant to be the final word on… well, anything. Rather, I hope they are the beginning of a conversation you have with someone in your life. Thanks for reading!

Footnotes

1. To be precise — which is what footnotes are all about — insomnia, according to Merriam-Webster, = in (without) + somnus (sleep). ↩︎
2. You — which is to say, we — are delightful people! ↩︎
3. Lewis, C.S. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, p. 209.New York, HarperCollins Children’s Books, 1952. ↩︎
4. A super fun site — which is the best kind of site — Whonamedit?, lists out medical eponyms. ↩︎

Listen instead:

---

We’re often asked, what does Chinese medicine treat? The answer requires some explanation, because Chinese medicine treats people, not diseases. That means no matter who you are or what you’re suffering from, classical Chinese medicine is an option for you — not just an alternative or a last-ditch effort, but an actual, serious, thoughtful medicine.

We’ve helped people aged one month to 92 years with conditions such as fatigue, headaches, menstrual problems, joint injuries, pain, HIV, digestive complaints, back aches, earaches, nose bleeds, infertility, nightmares, constipation, anxiety, cancer, insomnia, nausea, brain injury, neuropathy, pregnancy complications, depression, lupus, Parkinson’s, diabetes, and smoking.

Yeah, that’s a lot.

And each of those individuals received individualized care — because effective Chinese medicine is specifically tailored for an individual at a certain place in time. Encompassing the different modalities of acupuncture, moxibustion, body work (tui na and cupping), herbal medicine, meditation, and movement, Chinese medicine is deeply comprehensive.

We Treat People, Not Diseases

Let’s take the example of acupuncture. If five people came in today complaining of headaches, they wouldn’t all receive the same acupuncture treatment. Each individual’s point prescription would depend on that person’s detailed picture of pathology: the location of the headache, the type of pain, the time at which it occurs, the triggers, the pulse picture, and the tongue.

Each of these components is significant, both in its own right and in relationship to the others. Furthermore, if the same five people with headaches came again next week, they wouldn’t receive the same points they received today. Each individual is reevaluated each time, and though the treatment may remain targeted toward the same general channels and points, it wouldn’t necessarily do so.

Is Acupuncture for You?

Of course, we can’t legally guarantee that acupuncture will provide you with a cure, and we wouldn’t want to make such a claim even if we could. What we put forward is that even if acupuncture doesn’t cure your disease, save your life, or remove your symptoms, it will very likely change the way you feel about your disease, your life, and your symptoms.

In this way, acupuncture greatly and profoundly reduces suffering.

Some people wonder whether acupuncture is for them. The short answer is yes. Acupuncture is for anyone who wants it. Maybe you’re in the best shape of your life, or maybe you feel like you’re falling through the cracks of modern healthcare. Maybe you don’t notice your body unless it’s hurting you.

Maybe you have only a vague sense that something is lacking in your health, or maybe you’re very sick. Chinese medicine is multidimensional. It has something to offer every one of those maybes because it’s a medicine that takes the full constellation of the individual — of you — into account.

by Mary Beth Huwe

---

These writings are an exploration of what it means to be human – to be sick, to be well, and to heal – viewed through the lens of classical Chinese medicine. My words aren’t medical advice, and these essays don’t constitute a practitioner-client relationship. They also aren’t meant to be the final word on… well, anything. Rather, I hope they are the beginning of a conversation you have with someone in your life. Thanks for reading!