Pulse Diagnosis Secrets: What Your Pulse Says About Your Health

One of the most absolutely interesting parts of Chinese medicine is one method of diagnosis that is pulse diagnosis. So by holding and feeling the radial pulse we diagnose a lot more than just the pulse rate for example. And this is where often a lot of these really interesting pseudo-mystical tales of Chinese doctors feeling your pulse and writing this prescription for your health come from. And it is based on a real thing and I thought that in this video I would talk about it a little bit more. Hey guys, Dr. Alex Hine, author of the health book Master the Day and acupuncturist. So before we jump into this video here today two very important links right below the video. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine you can reach out to my private practice right below this video. And there's also a free download there for you which is 4 Daily Rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine. So the first thing that your pulse really objectively shows is your state of your resources. For a lot of people when they get very run down and they're not sleeping enough and they're not sleeping well, for many people the pulse will get deeper and weaker. So I had a woman come in about two years ago when I was a student and she said you know I always feel so lazy and so tired and people think I'm just lazy and unmotivated all the time but I just don't feel that well. And she was on antidepressants and I felt her pulse and there was no pulse. It was so deep and so impalpable that Chinese medicine is what we call a faint pulse. She wasn't making that up. That was actually the state of her resources and that's commonly felt in depression pictures, in endocrine exhaustion, in Hashimoto's or hypothyroid or in chronic fatigue syndrome, right? This is a commonly felt pulse. A very faint, a very weak pulse where you have to apply pressure all the way to the bone on the radial artery to actually feel anything and sometimes you still get nothing. So the first thing is that in the state of deficiency as Chinese medicine calls it, in severe deficiency like hypothyroid or depression, severe depression, you'll feel a very deep and very faint pulse or even no pulse when you feel the person's pulse. Now on the other side of that, it'll show exactly what your resources are doing at the moment. So for example when you're manifesting an acute cold or an acute sinus infection or a severe migraine or COVID, your body will often show a pulse that is what we call floating, which just means that when you put your fingers just very lightly on the radial artery, you're going to feel the pulse right away. Almost like if you've ever had a fever and you could feel your heartbeat just going your pulse will often be floating at the surface and a strong pressure that you will feel with very little pressure of your fingertips which is the opposite pulse of what I just described in depression or endocrine exhaustion or hypothyroid or Hashimoto's for example. The second thing is that your pulse shows the state of your nervous system. The most obvious example being a very rapid pulse either in a sensitive person, an anxious person, someone who hasn't been sleeping well or hasn't been sleeping a lot and the pulse rate becomes more elevated and more rapid or someone who has acutely been stressed out from overwork and they're experiencing racing heart tachycardia, they may even be having palpitations or an irregular heart rhythm. Very common to see that's just the state at the base level of the nervous system. You take anyone and you deprive them of sleep and you overwork them, they're probably going to notice their heart more. That's a stress response, right? That's living in a state of sympathetic dominance where we are on all the time. The tempo, the rate of the pulse is one indicator of what's going on with the nervous system but it also goes the opposite way too because some people with chronic disease actually will show a very slow pulse, an abnormally slow pulse in the 40s or in the 50s and you know this is the kind of dynamic that we see going on when we feel the pulse. One common aspect of the pulse that I see is that the pulse will, let's just call it the general stress response, right? The Hans Selye general adaptation syndrome stress response. First what I see is exposed to stress, people will often begin to notice a bit of an elevated heart rate. So tachycardia. The pulse is a little bit elevated, it's beating more forceful and they notice their heartbeat a little bit more. They can feel their heart in their chest which ordinarily you're not supposed to. After that goes on for a while, this tachycardia goes on for a while and then sometimes it skips a beat. They begin experiencing palpitations. Also very common, usually not something terribly to worry about besides the sensation. And eventually after the palpitations go on long enough what I see if if that progresses to be more severe is really a chronically irregular heartbeat. In my experience those are all treatable with Chinese medicine and of course it depends on where they're coming from and how long they've been going on for. But this progression is what we call often heart yang deficiency. And I like to think of it as just one of the progressions of stress. For other people the stress is all primarily in their gut. But this kind of progression is useful because you can very objectively feel that in the pulse. It requires no training, you can feel that in one day. The third thing is that in Chinese medicine what's the most unique is that the pulse positions, we call them pulse positions, actually show the functioning or dysfunction of certain organs in the body. It shows the specific state of physiology. So the three pulse positions are the cun, this is the most distal so closest to your fingers. The cun is at the wrist crease. The guan is on that styloid process there, the little lump if you feel it, the bump. And the chun is just below that. Now on the left side the cun, the first position, is said to reflect the state of the heart and the small intestine. The second position on the left is the liver and gallbladder. The third position on the left is often the kidneys and bladder. And on the right side the first position is the lung and large intestine. The second position is the stomach and the spleen pancreas. And the third position on the right, depending on the system, is what we call the san jiao, the triple warmer, and the pericardium. So these pulse positions will often give us some clues as to generally what's going on with certain organ functions in the body. And it's very interesting sometimes both how specific they can be and both how vague they can be. Where sometimes you're experiencing someone who has severe digestive problems and the pulse clearly shows that in the right position. And sometimes it shows a more general picture that's a more nervous system picture or a more exhaustion kind of picture. So sometimes the pulse shows very general data from our perspective and sometimes very specific data. But that really relies on, you know, the expert diagnostician to suss out why the pulse is showing certain data and what that data, what that information actually means. So the pulse is a really cool, really unique aspect inherent to Chinese medicine and other Southeast Asian forms of medicine, East Asian medicine as well as Ayurveda, Tibetan medicine as well, I'm aware. I think also maybe in the Middle Ages, I think Persian medicine actually had been influenced specifically by East Asian medicine just via trade routes. So it's pretty cool to see how pulse diagnosis has made its way around the world. And it's incredible also what a skilled pulse diagnostician can tell you, especially if you go to your doctor and they say everything looks fine on their end. But from our end, the pulse very rarely looks fine. And it's often very interesting to see that my patients are very thrilled to hear that, that it's showing something. So that is the very basics of Chinese pulse diagnosis and what it means. Of course there could be 10 more videos on this, but I thought I would share a very basic overview of what that looks like. All right guys, before you go, I have two other related videos for you right over here.