Chinese Medical Diagnosis 101

If you see a traditional Chinese medicine doctor and you have them feel your pulse and look at your tongue and maybe touch your abdomen, you might wonder how do they actually use these tools, these diagnostics to come to a conclusion about what might be going on in your body. So I thought in this video, I would just demonstrate on a live patient and you could see how do we utilize these three sort of obscure pieces of information to come up with a pattern and a diagnosis. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hein, a leading doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine. So today we are here with Julie again, and we're gonna demonstrate what, based on what I see in her tongue, her pulse and her abdomen, what some common symptoms are that she may be experiencing. So I'm gonna have her start by very embarrassingly sticking her tongue out at the camera. So the first thing we're spotting is just look at the tongue body. You can see the scalloping on the tongue is very, very diagnostic. So you see that right here, that scallop shape is very often an issue with digestion, primarily usually with the spleen and the stomach. So very often people with this scalloping are prone to digestive bloating, can be prone to food sensitivities. Sometimes they're very prone to having food allergies in general. There are a lot of things that flare up their digestion. And very often it's even indicative of certain formulas or even certain herbs. If you guys have seen my video on fuling, the herb that we use for bloating and anxiety, this tongue is kind of like a fuling tongue in some ways. Now, the other part of her tongue is that the tip is a little bit on the redder side, but in general, slightly puffy. We see the scalloping and overall the color is somewhat in the middle. So in terms of what just jumps out, I'm not a tongue diagnosis specialist. I don't use a lot of tongue diagnosis in my practice, but I'm just thinking let's flag this as maybe she has some digestive problems, that kind of thing. So now I'm gonna feel her pulse and I'm just gonna start here. I don't normally feel it like this, but just for the sake of the video so you can see. So the overall pulse is regular. And the main finding that I'm picking up is that there's a difference in the change in quality on the middle position, which is the stomach and the spleen position. The quality in this one is that it's actually tight as opposed to a soft kind of pulse. So that tightness on that area of the spleen stomach, sometimes is what we call a wood overacting on earth pulse, which sometimes is indicative of things like abdominal pain and cramping. Now the main finding on the left pulse is also in the middle position. And this one is soft. So very commonly when there's pathology in the liver and gallbladder, or the gallbladder and the triple warmer, we tend to find it in this middle position. The pulse is soft, so almost always I'm assuming there's an issue with the earth organs, which are digestive. So that's just the first sort of thought that comes to mind based on those two things. So I'm gonna have Julie lay down now. We're just gonna look at the abdomen first, see if anything jumps out. So we're looking, does it look imbalanced in any way? Puffy, sunken, maybe a little bit in the epigastrium. You know, while we've been talking, I've noticed, for example, some digestive sounds. So there's some gurgling. Then we have to find out, did she just eat? Did she just drink? But the upper epigastric area feels a little bit sunken. And sometimes when it's sunken, or even as we go towards the umbilicus, there's areas of hardness. Very often these are issues related to what we call spleen sheet efficiency. So the issues often with bloating, gas, food baby, food sensitivities, that sort of thing. So I just noticed there's a sunken area in the epigastric area. Very often is a spleen or digestive finding. Then we can ask her more about her history and things like that. But based on the tongue, we've seen the scalloping, which is often a spleen stomach finding. Sometimes also people with long-term issues with spleen and digestion have issues with blood formation. So we tend to ask, you know, do you have issues with anemia? Do you have issues with anemia? I do, yeah. So she does have issues with anemia. And you can also look at her complexion and her body type too, to see maybe there's a constitutional pattern there as well. But long-term issues with the spleen, we say that the spleen generates the blood. So if there is long-term issues with digestion, sometimes there's a failure to generate blood. So some women will have scanty cycles or no cycles at all, for example. But we've taken three pieces of objective data, the tongue, the pulse, and the abdomen. The main area that jumps out just via superficial palpation was just the epigastric area. And it's a common area to find findings, but overall, we're seeing a lot of possible constitutional issues related to digestion. So then we can ask her more about her history, but we can tie the threads between the tongue, the pulse, and the abdomen just in about five minutes before even asking the patient any questions what might be going on in their body. So that's just a very, very, very quick way of looking at how diagnosis comes together in traditional Chinese medicine. And again, if you guys wanna learn more, check out more about my practice, as well as the free guide I've put together. There's two links right below this video. One is on the free guide for daily rituals that can possibly help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine.