Phlegm In Chinese Medicine

Hello, I'm Jonathan Close to Murmott, and welcome to our acupuncture-points.org YouTube channel. So today we're talking about phlegm in Chinese medicine. It's a big subject, and it can be the cause of many kinds of problems. Fortunately, it's usually not difficult to understand. It's common. We get it in our noses, our mouths, our throats, our digestion, and even our bowel motions. And it comes on during colds and respiratory diseases, but for some, all the time, interfering with life and embarrassing them. And I get lots of questions from people around the world saying, I've eaten this, but I always have phlegm. What to do about it? Even if you can't see phlegm, it may be there interfering with your health. And in fact, whole books have been written about it, and even I wrote one of them. So I'm going to tell you about this. First of all, what leads to a diagnosis of phlegm, then its underlying causes, and then a bit about some of its different kinds of categories. There are a lot of them. It's a big subject, and we've got a big page on this on our website. And finally, what you can do about it. First of all, talking about diagnosis. You may think you know perfectly well when you got it, but in theory, there are three requisites. First of all, your tongue should have a coating which is greasy or slimy or viscid, and it may well be swollen. Secondly, your pulse should be slippery, and there's a technical term which acupuncturists understand, but probably you couldn't tell. But anyway, your pulse should be slippery or sometimes wary. Thirdly, the third prerequisite is that most people with phlegm have a feeling of heaviness, usually in the chest or the body, often with a feeling of thickness in the head and sometimes dizziness. Fourthly, well, nausea is quite common. Not always there, but quite common. Now, what about the underlying causes of phlegm? Well, basically, it's your digestion. We call it, in Chinese medicine, your spleen and stomach, but phlegm occurs because your spleen fails to clear it away and there are lots of subcategories, and you'll have to look at our webpage for more on this, but even so, it all boils down basically to your spleen and your digestion. Now, your spleen could be in trouble because of poor genes, but much more likely, it's your fault. That comes down to what you eat, and that means garbage in and garbage out. Bad eating habits could be, for example, the way you eat, in other words, how you eat. It could be when you eat, what you eat, how often you eat, and how well you allow yourself to digest what you eat. So all those things go into eating habits, and we haven't even got ready onto what the food is that you eat. We tend to focus on the second of these, which is what we eat, but when and how we eat are almost really as important. That's because bad eating habits, the when and the how, train our bodies to do the wrong thing, and the side effect of doing the wrong thing is, well, you guessed it, it's phlegm. So here are some six subcategories of phlegm. The first one is damp phlegm, and that's when you have lots of clear or white mucus, you often have nausea, your chest feels heavy, and there's fatigue. Second one is cold phlegm, and this is clear, sometimes stringy mucus with a wet cough and usually feeling cold. The third one is phlegm heat. Now what this is is much thicker, stickier, and greener, sometimes yellow, can contain blood. Fourth one is phlegm dryness. Here you get tenacious, thick, almost rubbery looking bits, maybe pellets, and it's often quite hard to get it up and get it out. A fifth category is what I call Qi stagnation phlegm, also called plumbstone phlegm, and that usually gets worse if you're upset or frustrated or tense. And the sixth one is what's called Qi deficiency phlegm, and that comes when you're tired, when your digestive system is just under power and you may be tired, and you find you're producing really just what's more mucus, clear, runny stuff. But there are many more subcategories, and including combinations of the ones I've described. And each type of phlegm has a different cause and a different solution. And some solutions are easy to understand and do something about, and others, well, not so easy. But they all need attention to what and how you eat. So what and how you eat are still really important, whatever kind of phlegm you have. Let's take cold phlegm. That usually occurs when you're cold and you eat cold or chilled food. It's easy to understand, it's easy to do something about. In other words, eat warm foods, get warm, avoid cooling foods, but you have to look at our website for pages listing these kinds of foods. We have pages on cold foods and hot foods. And we've also got a booklet available on our site all about this. So I've explained why phlegm occurs, some of the types of phlegm, and a strategy for helping yourself. Check out our flowchart booklet, read our webpage on phlegm, and for much, much more, get our book, Yuck Phlegm, which I'm glad to say has lots of good reviews on Amazon. Our channel is acupuncture-points.org, so please leave us a like or subscribe, and we'll send you more short videos to help you understand and use Chinese medicine for your health. And don't forget to turn the notifications on. And well, I'm Jonathan Clogston-Wilmot, and thanks for watching.