Yang Qi: Why You Feel Cold All The Time

So I have people that come in and see me all the time, and one of the symptoms that they often report as being interesting is that they feel cold all the time, or specifically, that their hands and feet feel cold all the time. Now, this seems like a very weird symptom just to comment on, put an entire video together for, but I think there's a very useful Chinese medicine physiology lesson here that can help you. Hey guys, Dr. Alex Hine, Chinese medicine doctor, acupuncturist, and author of the health book, Master of the Day on Amazon. I've included two very important links below this video. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally or online via telemedicine, there's a link below to my clinic and the easiest way to reach out to me. Now, the second thing is that there's a free guide, which is four daily rituals that can help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. Those are both below the video. So understanding this idea of immunity, vitality, and what Chinese medicine calls yang qi is very, very essential to understand why people feel certain temperatures. So in one of our most important herbal and physiological texts, it describes these six levels of progression from more superficial disease and superficial illness to very deep and very severe life-threatening illness and all the levels in between. And each of these levels is categorized by different symptoms and different locations of the symptoms. So getting a headache is different from having a stomachache is different from having a urinary tract infection. They all represent different states of vitality and different states of the location of the illness. Now, the reason why temperature is so essential to understand in conventional care, it doesn't mean very much, probably unless you're febrile, you have a fever, or if you're hypothyroid and you feel cold all the time. But in Chinese medicine, it's very useful and very diagnostic to know a person's body temperature. Now, what's essential to know is that generally speaking, the deeper you get into pathology, the lower the immune functioning, we could say, or the deeper the level of endocrine exhaustion, the colder somebody will feel. This is really, really important because generally speaking, the colder a person feels throughout their body, the lower the level of vitality, quote, unquote, meaning usually they have weaker immune systems. They're usually prone to getting sicker more often. That's usually a clear indicator of cardiovascular flow, so blood circulation is very important. And in Chinese medicine, generally speaking, the colder you feel, the worse of a prognostic sign that is. So that generally means that the deeper reserves have been depleted and it's almost like your body's been kind of frozen in ice and it's not able to really kickstart that fire that is the healing force that we view it as. So there are really two kinds of feeling cold. The two kinds are really what we call yang deficiency and the other one is called yang constraint. So if you imagine that yang, yang chi is a concept or conceptual framework to visualize the strength of your resources, the strength of your immune system, strength of your overall health, as well as your body's ability to regenerate and restore itself. You know, a young person that can heal quickly is different from an 85-year-old man that just is not healing and they just get progressively worse. That means that the inborn battery is so depleted it cannot even kickstart the healing reaction in the body. So the first, this idea of yang chi deficiency, yang is weak in the body, is where the person not only has cold hands and feet, it can come up to the wrist, you know, the fingers, the palm, the wrist, and they feel cold. Their body feels cold. The worst case is where they may be sleeping bundled up, like sleeping with gloves because they feel so cold. That means that that kind of, quote, unquote, the healing battery has been, again, frozen in this ice and it's not able to mobilize these reserves to activate the healing process. Now, usually this is more common in older people. There are younger people as well with this. Now, the second kind is what we call yang constraint. So this is where people have enough reserves and their body temperature feels warm, but their hands and feet are cold. So this is a better prognostic sign than someone who feels cold throughout their whole body, purely because if a person's body, their core is warm, like they feel hot, but their extremities are cold, it means they have a good deal of reserves. And it's just a circulatory issue where it's getting stuck in the center and it's not getting out to the periphery. So these two ideas, weak yang versus the yang is stuck, are very useful for us diagnostically to know what are the resources of this person? What is the prognosis? Is this just gonna be a few months of treatment to get the circulation going, the healing process kickstarted? Or is this a long-term depletion where the person's fundamental healing resources are weak and they may not be able to heal at all? So this idea of why you feel cold is very useful in Chinese medicine. It's very, very diagnostic. And so I thought I would share this because I see it clinically quite a lot. And it's very useful because it can describe the layers of pathology, physiology, and the resources of the actual person. So that's what I have for today for you guys. If you'd like to become a patient of mine locally or online via telemedicine, click the link below this video, which has info on my clinic and contacting me. And then beyond that, there's a free guide, which is four daily rituals that can help you have years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. Then before you go, I have two related videos over here. So I hope you guys enjoyed this video.