Tuesday, January 20, 2009

External Pathology Factors

Wind, Cold, Heat, Dampness, Dryness and Fire are six pathologic factors from the outside. When these factors go inside the body they cause problems, each one has their own character.
Wind goes everywhere. Now is here, later on, moves to somewhere else. Like arthritis, today you may have shoulder pain, tomorrow maybe knee pain. It’s because wind goes inside the body to cause that moving pain.
Cold can easily damage the body yang. For example, if you enjoy eating cold food it will affect your spleen yang and making it deficient. Which would mean you would have a low appetite, easily feel full, stomachache, diarrhea and so on. The cold can also make you blood circulation slow. Another example is when you have cold in your muscles and joints you would feel stiffness especially in the morning. That’s why when there is movement the symptoms subside.
Heat; for example when one has a fever that definitely means that you have heat inside your body. Hot and spicy foods should entirely be avoided to not add any more heat in the body. And a lot of skin problems can be caused by heat.
Dampness is from humidity. In humid weather, these symptoms caused by dampness, which like feeling tired, sleepy and heavy can show up or get worse.
Dryness causes mouth, lips, hair, and skin to get dry. Dryness easily affects lung, which cause dry nose, dry cough, or with a little phlegm, or phlegm is very sticky and even with a little blood. We would use herbs to nourish the lung. If one suffers from chronic dry cough we would suggest eating pears, or pear, fritillary cooking with crystal sugar.
Fire is stronger than heat. Heart fire causes tongue ulcers, insomnia. Liver fire causes red eyes, emotion irritated, and migraines. Stomach fire causes teeth pain,swollen gums,easy to feel hungry.
When we have Qi sufficient, these external pathology factors won’t go inside body to cause problems. It’s like if a country is strong enough, there is no enemy can invade.

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