Tongue Diagnosis

Tongue diagnosis, as well as pulse diagnosis, along with asking the ten questions, are all ways for your Chinese medicine practitioner to glean more information about your health, including the root cause of an imbalance. The tongue is the only muscle we can see inside of the body; therefore, it serves as an insightful roadmap of what’s happening inside your body and causing you to experience health ailments. 

There are several things that we look for when we’re examining your tongue. We look at the shape of the tongue, if it's swollen or puffy or quite thin and long, the color of the tongue, and the coating on the tongue. While the health and appearance of the tongue is not really a part of Western medicine, it serves as an invaluable tool for diagnosis from an Eastern Medicine perspective. 

If the tongue is very red, this is most likely caused by internal inflammation, which can often be a result of emotional disorders and repressed frustration, anger, or anxiety. If the tongue is pale- this is most often associated with both “blood deficiency” and digestive deficiencies in Chinese medicine, so it is similar to a diagnosis of anemia in Western medicine. If the tongue is very swollen and has a thicker appearance, it most often indicates phlegm and damp accumulation, which is a result of long-term digestive issues. 

We often look at the color of the tongue to see how well blood is circulating, and if the tongue looks purple, and the sublingual veins are very distended and swollen then it is indicative of blood circulation issues. If the stasis is severe, the sublingual veins will look as if they’re popping out, similar to engorged varicose veins. 

In Chinese medicine, we also look at the coating of the tongue to determine the state of the fluids in the body. This is another concept that isn’t so much talked about in Western medicine, but in Chinese medicine, we seek to have enough body fluids to help preserve our health and longevity. Like oil in a car, our body fluids help to lubricate and quell inflammation, so that everything can function properly. If there is too much of an accumulation of fluids- we call this dampness, and the tongue will have a thick coat such as in thrush. Oral thrush is a fungal infection that most commonly leaves a thick white or yellow coat on the tongue. Interestingly, issues caused by dampness are most often also associated with fungus, yeast, and microbial infections. If the body is lacking in fluids, the tongue will appear dry, it may have deep cracks, or have a geographic tongue coating. 

In summary, utilizing tongue diagnosis is another way in which we understand a patient’s health. As the only muscle we can see inside of the body, it gives us helpful information so we know how to treat the root cause with different acupuncture points, herbal therapy, or nutrition. 

This blog post was written by Samantha Kloss.