When you visit your acupuncturist, it is likely they will ask to see your tongue and will feel your pulse. Why?

Chinese medicine says that anything that happens inside of your body may have some representation on the outside. If you haven’t slept enough last night, likely your observant colleagues will pick it up. Having a cold? This one can be even more obvious.

Even mild conditions will represent in the facial complexion, in the way we behave. Chinese medicine utilised these observations extensively. And they discovered that tongue and pulse can change a great deal. Therefore, when you come in for a treatment other than an injury or back pain, it is likely I will inspect your tongue and feel your pulse. I don’t base TCM diagnosis solely on this, but it helps me to get a more complete picture of your condition.

The pulse diagnosis is sometimes mystified in China and also in New Zealand. The further you go away from a Chinese Medicine university, further into a village, the more extraordinary stories about the pulse diagnosis you’ll hear from practitioners. Some claim to be able to diagnose cancer solely from the pulse. But the very principles of Chinese medicine command that, instead of relying solely on one diagnostic method, we need to integrate four main TCM diagnostic methods called inspection (observation), auscultation and olfaction, inquiring or questioning, and palpation (which includes pulse diagnosis).

It is far from uncommon for acupuncturists to insist on using traditional acupuncture. And their argument that because acupuncture is more than 2000 years old, why worry about the recent progress and discoveries?

Medicine evolves. The science of acupuncture evolves. In my practice, I integrate the wisdom of time-tested therapies with recent discoveries about acupuncture and about your condition. And this includes both diagnostic methods and therapeutic approaches.