Diagnosis:
Body Scan
Written by Chris Eddy
Diagnosing a patient correctly, to me, is the most difficult thing in Chinese medicine. If you don’t get it right, how can you get the formula or points right? If you make a mistake with acupuncture points, most likely you will get away with it. Nothing gained, nothing lost.
What about herbal medicine? Well, that’s where you can get into trouble. If for example, you missed some dampness in the body and gave a very tonifying formula, they can feel so much worse.
And sometimes a patient comes in with a condition such as a ‘cough’. Your diagnosis flows easily from there:
How long have you had it? When did it start? What were you doing at that time? What was the weather like? Is it a dry/wet cough? You get the idea …
But what if the patient comes to you with a diagnosis already? Like, ‘infertility’.
You go through the ‘Ten Questions of TCM’ right?
- Hot, cold, fever, chills
- Sweating
- Head and face
- Pain
- Urine/Stool
- Thirst/Appetite/Taste
- Sleep
- Thorax/Abdomen
- Gynaecology
- History
And that’s great, but, personally I find the flow of this chart doesn’t help me. I used to put in my template and fill in the blanks. But I found it disjointed and disconnected. Putting the patient on paper in a way, and I started to get confused by all the symptoms on the paper just sitting there statically.
So what I decided to do was think of the natural flow in the body. Food, air and water go in the mouth and out the other end, top to bottom. Imperial fire from the heart becomes ministerial fire and descends to the kidneys. Things generally go in the top, and come out the bottom.
By holding these concepts in my mind, I found it easier to imagine asking the questions in this order as i am looking at the patient. I found I missed less prompts and details as I was scanning down the body and checking off my mental list.
So back to the fertility patient, you will start with the flow of questions related to fertility, how, what when etc, but then refer to the scan to pick up on things you missed.
Here is an image with question prompts. See if you find it useful and let me know.
