If you’ve ever tried acupuncture before, undoubtedly you’ve had your pulse read. The general health condition of a person and a particular organ can be fully recognised from “taking a pulse” in Chinese Medicine. It is one of the four major assessment tools we use during an acupuncture consultation. Through pulse palpation each organ system is represented at one of the 6 points, and it also utilises the very traditional “8 Principle” Diagnosis.
The 8 principles are: Yin/Yang, Hot/Cold, Internal/External, and Excess/Deficiency. Looking at these four categories you can glean a lot of functional information to create a TCM diagnosis. For example, if the pulse is very rapid it would indicate heat in the body. Is the pulse feeling very deep or very superficial? These would indicate what depth the pathology has reached in the body, meaning is this newly acquired or a chronic situation?
We can feel these variations at different locations and depths under our finger tips. Each location palpated corresponds with a Chinese medicine organ system. See below:
More than 30 pulse conditions have been documented in Chinese medical texts. Some of them, for example, floating, rapid, string-like are single pulse condition which describes one aspect of a pulse condition. Others describe more than one aspect of a pulse condition which is called a compound pulse condition. For example, replete is the composite of forceful, long, large and stiff.
With so many pulse conditions, it takes years of practice to master pulse diagnosis. However, the effort is worth it to be able to quickly and correctly diagnose a client for treatment. For thousands of years, Chinese Medicine practitioners have observed the pulse to get a better understanding of what is happening internally. Used this way, the pulse is far more of a diagnostic tool than it is in Western medicine (where it is primarily used to observe the heart rate and regularity). Chinese pulse diagnosis provides insights about internal inflammation, stagnation, excesses, deficiencies, and more – even indicating the location of these conditions.
