 Whenever people see a traditional Chinese medicine doctor the most mysterious aspect is always the pulse diagnosis. Now in this video I thought I would share a little bit of a demo pulse diagnosis on a live patient as well as what we're actually seeing in the field of Chinese medicine. So today I have Julie here with me. We're gonna really show from nuts to bolts what we actually feel in the pulse because typically if you have your pulse felt the radial artery felt by a physician or a nurse they're mostly monitoring the pulse rate but in Chinese medicine that's just a very rudimentary level of diagnostic and I'm gonna show you the way that in my medical lineage we feel the pulse. So when we're talking about the radial artery there are three primary positions that we feel within the field of Chinese medicine right and again there's even Ayurvedic pulse diagnosis and Tibetan medical pulse diagnosis and even within those medical systems there's variation in the location of certain organs. So when we talk about the pulse positions in general there are three primary positions. We have the Tsun which is closest to the wrist, the Guan which is the middle position and the Chu which is the farthest from the finger position. When we feel the artery we're not just feeling for example the pulse rate that's one of the very very very basic objective levels of pulse diagnosis. We're typically feeling several key things. So the first thing is when we feel the actual artery itself the first thing we can feel that's objective you could train a kid to do this in five minutes is the pulse rate right. So I'm feeling the rate of her pulse and generally a healthy pulse rate is about three beats per inhalation and three beats per exhalation. This is going back about 2,000 years in one of our medical classics mentions this general number. So Julie's is a little bit slower than that. So if the pulse is below 60 the first thing with the rate I think is number one is she an athlete because athletes and athletic people tend to have lower resting heart rates so do you work out? Okay so now we know this is probably not pathological because some people may have resting heart rates that are 50, 40. I've seen upper 30s and those are obviously pathological meaning they're indicating there's an issue that we have to treat medically. So the pulse rate is the most objective. The second thing we feel is the depth. So the pulse depth is how hard do I have to push to actually feel the pulsation of the artery. So for some people the most superficial level we call a floating pulse. So if I just put very little tension can I feel the artery already? And for her I can a little bit. So when the pulse is floating the most common scenarios are two. The first is that the person is getting sick or is currently battling something. So that's almost you know they used to call the pulse the Mai Xiang the pulse image. So the pulse is almost a three-dimensional image of what's going on within the body. When someone's getting sick it's pushing the body's resources to the surface to fight this surface pathogen. So the pulse will actually show that very often. Sometimes it won't but when it does it's actually visualizing what's going on in the body in terms of the body's resources. It's pushing the soldiers towards the surface to matter of spots. Now the other scenario is that when the person's very unrested what often happens is that the pulse will also begin to float and then we call that either a yin deficiency or unrooted yang. So floating yang. Let's say you have insomnia for a week and you begin to feel anxious. It's that sort of sensation of the nervous system losing grounding. So a lot of people who tend to be nervous types the less they sleep the more nervous and anxious they get. A floating pulse is often a manifestation of that. So as we go deeper and I apply a little bit more pressure Julie's middle pulse the guan pulse is at the moderate depth which is a healthy depth. Some people you have to push all the way to the bone and you still can't even feel any pulsation of the radial artery. Now in the case of a weak or faint pulse as we call it you see it in severe exhaustion. You see it in Lyme disease, clinical depression, people have had insomnia for 10 years so it's a manifestation of exactly what they're usually coming in with. They feel exhausted, depressed. I mean it's literally like the person's resources. If vitality could be bottled and measured in some way it can in our field. That's exactly what the pulse is showing. A faint pulse means the actual resources are faint and weak in the person. So the actual healing force in the body has been impaired in some way. You also see it in people who are chronically sick and people who are just dealing with illness for a long time. So again Lyme disease being a good example over years and years and years the pulse will become more and more taxed because the body has this fight going over and over and over. It's like a small kingdom that's utilizing all their soldiers. They're just throwing them off to war and they keep dying and dying and eventually they have nothing but the villagers left. So we talked about the pulse rate, the pulse depth and the pulse strength. These are the three most objective diagnostics that you can learn within Chinese medicine and from there we have what we call the pulse quality. So the pulse quality ranges from wiry which is like a guitar string which is very taut which usually indicates sympathetic dominance of stress response is one manifestation. Often a lot of internal medicine conditions like bloating or GI issues will manifest with a wiry pulse. Stress will and in some people exhaustion and pain will often show a wiry pulse. Now that's contrasted to like let's say a soft pulse. Some people's artery you press and it just feels like you're pushing into a marshmallow or a soft pillow and that's indicative of can be many different things often digestive problems can be just general fatigue generally just feeling weak and run down can also be a soft pulse. And a final aspect of the pulse that we tend to see is what we call specific indications in the pulse positions. So each pulse location actually has three levels. So one side of the radial artery will actually have nine diagnostics. So we say for example you know the first position here we have the long and large intestine the stomach and spleen and then depending on the lineage you talk to could be the kidneys the triple warmer on the third position. So there's actually two organs indicated on each pulse position and they're different on the left side and on the right side. So when we go down the line and we have the depth the strength and the quality and the rate and then we go into what's going on individually with any pulse position. So we may for example have one in terms of digestion where the pulse overall feels moderate nothing jumps out but something is going on on the digestive side that either it's very weak or it's very wiry and very tight. So we think okay is there something going on with the digestion in this person. But in general pulse diagnosis is one of the most interesting and most refined aspects of Chinese medicine that's very very unique to this profession and unique to this part of the world and it goes far beyond just measuring the person's actual pulse rate. So that's an intro to pulse diagnosis 101. Again if you guys want to learn more about me in my practice you can learn more about becoming a patient locally or virtually via telemedicine in Los Angeles and I also have a free download which is four daily rituals that can help you in years to life. Those are both right below this video here.