 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 did 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 Hain 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 the scalping 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. You guys have seen my video on fooling the herb that we use for bloating and anxiety this tongue is kind of like a fooling tongue in some ways. Now the other part of her tongue is that the tip is a little bit a little bit on the reticent but in general slightly puffy we see the scalloping and overall the 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 maybe she has some digestive problems that kind of thing. So now I'm going to feel her pulse and I'm just going to start here just 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 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 going to have Julie lay down now we're just going to 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 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 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 want to 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