Look at your tongue

Adam Moes: Hello and welcome to mychineseherbalist web site and we are going to look at how to draw out what your tongue looks like. Your tongue diagnosis is very important in Chinese Herbology and it’s pretty simple, it's for you to do yourself. All you need is a mirror, a light and your tongue and it goes like this. Let’s see what it looks like, it’s not too bad today. You want to come in close, have a look. So it's kind of a pink, reddish pink and it's got a thin white coat in the back, lot of cracks in the center that’s just kind of my style.

For other examples of tongue say its colors and coatings, we are going to look at this wonderful little book called the Atlas of Chinese Tongue Diagnosis Volume 1 by Barbara Kirschbaum and this is available from Eastland press in Seattle.

So what does a pale tongue look like? That’s a pale tongue, this is a very pale and swollen tongue, see the shape of it, it is all puffy. This one is pale, swollen and on the edges you will notice little digits, little indentations that’s called teeth marks. Now over here we have some red tongues, see the difference, this is a brighter color of red and this one is an -- tongue is kind of slightly on the thin side, there isn't probably any coating on it. This one is red with red points, it’s also quite swollen. This is a red, another red tongue. These are the type of tongues in the heat condition something that you would see with deficiency and this is the type of the shape of a tongue, that’s a long narrow tongue as compared to this guy as we saw with the big old swollen tongue, that’s like a puffy sized tongue and this one is a narrow tongue.

The other figure to look for -- this book calls it blue but we usually call it purple, there is kind of a purplish tint to this tongue. This one is purple with purple spots, that’s sign of stagnation, some type of spaces in the body, we are going to here. Well now we are looking at the coating, this has got a very thick yellow coating so as this one. Sometimes the coating is white and only covers a portion of the tongue, sometimes it could be thicker and cover all of that like that. So they have some varieties of different sort of tongues, where does yours fit?


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