Heat: an external cause of disease

What is Heat?

In Chinese medicine Heat is an External Cause of Disease, that becomes internalised. It can occur on its own, or when one of the other syndromes (eg Wind, Cold, Damp etc) turns into Heat in the interior of your body. Here it often combines with an pre-existing Yin deficiency if there is one.

With global warming and our propensity to sit on hot beaches, or to get tanned before we sit on warm beaches, this syndrome is becoming more common. That means we’ll probably see more people with heat exhaustion, heat cramps, heat stress in the workplace, heat stroke and general signs of heat intolerance.

In fact, for heatstroke and sunstroke we’ve got a special page.

So what are the usual symptoms of Heat?

• Where it affects the body there is redness and inflammation
• Areas affected, (eg a joint) feel hot to the touch
• Area may be swollen if it combines with Damp
• The place affected may be sore to touch
• Skin often has a raised, hot, rash
• Movement is restricted
• Pain can be severe
• Often thirst, especially in acute cases
• Any fever continues despite sweating
• If your body has this Heat syndrome, you may find yourself getting a huge range of other ills. For example, you become sensitive to foods and situations that previously did not trouble you. These may range from catching ‘colds’ from the ‘air-conditioning’ in the plane on the way home, to going down with a fever some time after your return, for no obvious reason, or getting a much more severe illness than your friends.
• Pulse: rapid, slippery
• Tongue: red, may be swollen

Clearing Heat

As with Summer-Heat, one of the main ways the body has of clearing this syndrome is by purging. What does that mean?

Well, first a warning!

Suppression of this natural process is potentially dangerous from the point of view of Chinese medicine, and it needs careful treatment.

Purging means diarrhoea: the ‘shits’!

Holiday-makers returning from hot places who report that their offensive and urgent diarrhoea was successfully suppressed by Imodium (the brand name for Loperamide HCl and Simethicone) tend to worry practitioners of Chinese medicine.

This is not that we don’t want them to get better, but that the Heat that their bodies were purging, if suppressed by Imodium or similar, doesn’t just disappear. It goes somewhere else, sometimes into the Blood, meaning they get a rash, or into their Stomach, making them much hungrier and thirstier, indefinitely, probably with resultant weight-gain.

Or it goes and disturbs their Shen (roughly translatable as their personality), making them prone to signs of mental ‘inflammation’.

This causes a whole range of problems including mental instability, irritability and increasing intolerance.  Few of these symptoms are attributed to the original hot beach. Indeed – in my experience – none of them are ever connected to that hot beach holiday!

But you need to get that Heat out of you or it can cause many kinds of long term problems. 

Purging

Purging in this context does not mean that suggested by Wikipedia where purging is now often associated with Binge-eating and Bulaemia. (Of course, another meaning of purging is to eliminate political opposition or socially ‘undesirable’ elements. So purging here is more like that – getting rid of unwanted energies in your body!)

In the context of Chinese medicine, it means encouraging the body to eliminate unwanted matter, almost always by evacuating the bowels.

What is the benefit of purging? Purges clears out the offensive material taking heat with it. Your diarrhoea’s offensive smell comes from its heat. If you like, your body is doing its best to evacuate this, but not quite succeeding.

Purging, done right, helps it do the job better.

In effect, it means using methods in Chinese medicine/acupuncture that have a laxative effect. Various Chinese herbs have been found to do this but, as with everything in Chinese herbal medicine, they are seldom given alone. That’s because additional herbs are included to balance the primary herbs’ effects.

For instance a primary herb’s effect might be to clear the excess warmth, but at least one other herb would be added to tonify Qi.  Then there would be another to balance the moisture levels in the body.

Why all this, you ask? Because in their absence a strong laxative effect can be weakening and drying.

Of course, with purging you’ll need to take in fluids and balance your sugar-salt balance, as Western medicine now appreciates.

 

(Here is a picture of the famous Roman aqueduct in Segovia, Spain. Well worth a visit! – Segovia has much more to offer than just an aqueduct. There’s a huge palace not far away and an old town and Disney-like castle you should not miss. Aqueducts brought water to the town from the nearby hills.)

How your body deals with purging

The body has its own ways of clearing Heat and some of these are used by bulaemics, for instance vomiting. Diarrhoea – the hot smelly urgent kind – is another: the body knows how to do this!

Bleeding is another. Some children and teenagers (and others) get nose-bleeds for no obvious reason, though on questioning they may later admit to having felt recent dryness (a mild sign of Heat from lack of moisture) in their noses.

Some women get vaginal blood-spots or small haemorrhages at unexpected times of the month. Whilst these can be due to a variety of causes, if the blood is fresh and red, then one possible cause is Heat.

Unless they become frequent and heavy, they pose no great problem.

Of course if they do become frequent, persistent or heavy, the cause should be diagnosed and treated. Chinese medicine and acupuncture have an honourable reputation here.