lv/sp continuum

[Guest guest]

At 8:14 PM +0000 1/7/01, wrote:

>I still don't see

>the relevance of calling the pattern liver qi xu. As for not waiting

>for symptoms to appear before making the dx, you are still basing

>selection upon a sign - some sort of pulse characteristic in this case.

>Perhaps it is my pulsetaking skills, but I have found pulse to be

>highly unreliable and teach my students to rely primarily on

>questioning and observation.

--

 

As Will has pointed out, there is the issue of prevention, and I

believe as he does that the pulse can give insights into otherwise

unmanifest imbalances and weaknesses. My interest in asking Will to

be more specific is in the hope that we may try to articulate an

area of Chinese medicine that is somewhat vague in the literature, in

my opinion. TCM syndromes tend to be descriptions of imbalance that

are quite far down the road to pathology, and are obvious, whereas

the state of physiological imbalance, or the state of latent or

hidden damage or disease is not. Pulse, tongue and other observations

are tools that we can use to gain insight to these potentials.

 

So if we say that someone has an underlying liver qi xu, even though

there is no manifest syndrome in terms of symptoms, it makes sense to

me because that person is at risk of certain types of pathological

processes we may be able to mitigate. My question is, how much and

what sort of evidence do we need to say liver qi xu? Can we base it

just on the left middle pulse position plus a suggestive history?

 

I have to admit I'm a little dissatisfied with the anecdotal

association of a empty/xu left guan with a history of pot smoking;

the causal inference here seems to be shaky. I'm also unsatisfied by

the association of an empty/xu quality in this position necessarily

with qi xu; given the nature of smoked cannabis that has been

described, I would assume that damage could occur to yin, yang, qi or

blood. I prefer to keep my options open in interpreting the empty

quality in this position, particularly with this history.

 

Rory