What does Cold mean in Chinese Medicine?
Cold has both a broad and an in-depth understanding in Chinese Medicine. When it’s cold outside we tend to act accordingly and bundle up because it’s so cold, and that’s how we adapt to our environment. Everyone feels different in the cold weather. Some people hate it and move to warmer climates for the winter while others love it and can’t wait to be in their winter wonderland.
Cold (hán 寒) in Chinese Medicine is 1 of 6 external Qi that we come into contact with, and it’s one of the six external causes of externally contracted diseases. The ancient Chinese observed how the human body responds and how it’s influenced by environmental changes. The nature of cold outside is low temperature, decrease in activity, and congealing. The best example, always, is a frozen stream in winter. Now think about it in the summer and it’s the opposite of those cold qualities.
Cold causes the body to contract just like a stream that freezes in the winter. It is said that the blood vessels congeal and contract when exposed to cold. This is why some arthritis tends to get worse in the winter because it’s cold and blood circulation has decreased. Unlike a warm sunny day where the stream is in full force. In the body cold causes contraction, cramps, and spasms.
“Acute cooling of the body surface and inhaling of cold air causes reflex vasoconstriction in the nose and upper airways, and this vasoconstrictor response inhibits respiratory defense and promotes the onset of common cold symptoms by converting an asymptomatic subclinical viral infection into a symptomatic clinical infection. Researchers also found cooling of the feet led to cold symptoms onset in some subjects - pain from cold is marked by symptoms of chill, contraction, cramps, and spasms” (Nielsen 2013). “Cooling of the feet provokes symptomatic lower urinary tract infection in cystitis-prone women (Baerheim and Laerum 1992).” These are just some modern research examples of how cold affects our bodies.
In Chinese Medicine there is a distinction between the pathomechanisms of internal cold and external cold. Internal cold arises from the dynamics within the body (different organ qi dynamics and the constitution of a person) and external cold arises from response to the external environment (which also involves the constitution of a person - someone may be more robust than another and be able to withstand the elements to a different degree).
This idea of contracting a cold is even expressed in the common colloquial saying,“don’t go outside without a jacket or you’re going to catch a cold.”
Maybe you know the feeling when you’re about to catch a cold, like a day or two before then, and your energy is still present, you don’t feel like you need to recover and sometimes you may push yourself through activity. Pushing yourself to get stuff done usually causes the cold to get worse because you’ve been depleting your energy and your body eventually needs to compromise for that.
Roughly before 220 AD during the Han Dynasty in China a Medical book called the Shang Han Lun (The Treatise on Cold Damage Diseases) was composed by a man named Zhang Zhongjing. It’s a book that shows us how to identify certain externally contracted and internal diseases and how to treat them with Chinese Herbal Medicinals. It also uniquely orients the body so that we can have a total understanding of how the body works through this framework. These Medicinal Formulas are still used widely today for a variety of different diseases.
Zhang Zhongjing in his element
The mechanism of contracting a common cold can vary but one of the external cold diagnosis variations is called a Wind-Cold invasion. This is due to your body’s immune system being weakened and its response to the external, environmental qi - which in this case is cold.
A basic Wind-Cold Invasion may look like some or all of the following symptoms: fever and chills unrelieved by sweating, headache, sweating, body aches, aversion to cold and wind, nasal congestion, no thirst, stiff neck, and dry heaves. The pulse will be floating and the tongue will have a white and moist coating. Since this external disease is on the surface of the body and has not entered the internal organ system, someone with this type of presentation would be given a medicinal formula that is warm and acrid to resolve the exterior of the body which is helping their body’s energy overcome this common cold.
In this case the formula would be Gui Zhi Tang (Cinnamon Decoction) which is made up of Gui Zhi, Bai Shao, Sheng Jiang, Da Zao, and Zhi Gan Cao, one of Chinese Medicine’s well-known formulas that was sophisticatedly created by Zhang Zhongjing over 2,000 years ago.
The raw herbs in the photo are typically decocted in water and cooked down for almost an hour so that the medicine is strong.
Cold and Digestion
How does cold affect our digestion?
Well, if you understand that cold causes constriction and contraction then you may understand how drinking ice drinks and eating cold, raw foods may influence our digestive systems.
Our bodies use energy to break down and assimilate food, and if we are constantly eating cold foods and drinks then the body expends more energy to do this. This is called “dampening the digestive fire”.
In turn, this can, over time, potentially wreak havoc on your body causing digestive issues like bloating, diarrhea, and discomfort, especially if consumed in excess. It can also lead to feelings of pain and coldness in the hands and feet and general fatigue and exhaustion, and potentially be a driver for other problems in the body.
For some people, some of these symptoms defined above will go away by simply starting to drink and eat more hot foods.
Another analogy would be if you are washing dishes in the sink you would probably use hot water because it’s going to make it that much easier to scrub and clean the dishes. If you use cold water the food particles sometimes harden onto the plate especially if it’s a saucy dish. It will take a lot more energy for you to actually scrub off the food with cold water.
“Consuming too many cold foods can disrupt the balance of yin and yang in the body, leading to potential issues like poor digestion, sluggish circulation, and a feeling of coldness, as cold foods are considered "yin" and can dampen the body's "yang" energy, which is associated with warmth and vitality; essentially, eating too many cold foods can create a "yin" imbalance in the body.” These can all have impacts on your internal health to a certain degree.
Chinese Medicine is about balancing yin and yang in the body, so anything of an excess could be harmful. And yet an important part of this is moderation and not being too rigid about what you consume.
*The best advice I can give on this piece is to mainly add more warm, cooked food and drinks into your life. For example, drinking hot water first thing in the morning can be a wonderful way to soothe and start the digestion process for the day.
Ginger Tea is a great morning drink because it’s warming and it supports digestion while also releasing the exterior to protect the external, skin layer of the body .
Ice and healing from an Injury
Ice is for dead people is a common saying within the martial arts and Chinese Medicine world. This is because Ice is able to preserve well, but it does not heal injuries properly.
For all of the reasons that the nature of cold has on the human body, Ice also has these qualities because it’s cold. It congeals, hardens, and contracts blood and fluids at an injured site making it harder for that inflammatory response to do its job and heal itself.
Ice is fine for acute inflammation (hot, swollen, painful) because it stops blood circulation to the injured site to temporarily relieve pain and swelling, but ideally it should be avoided. Using Ice for anything but an inflamed acute injury can just prolong the recovery and make it harder for the tissues to repair.
Chinese Medicine offers a few other ways to treat acute injuries that don’t involve ice.
If need be use Ice for 10 minutes once every hour to help cut the pain and bring down the acute inflammation (Bisio 2004).
A Tooth From the Tiger’s Mouth by Tom Bisio is a great book about how to treat injuries with Chinese Medicine, and I would highly suggest owning a copy. It is a very accessible read and it explains how Chinese Medicine perceives injuries.
