Blood level – Collapse of Yin

Jonathan Clogstoun-Willmott

April 17, 2023

At the Blood level – Collapse of Yin signifies that the invading pathogen has exhausted the body’s resources, so any symptoms are bound to be weak.

Main symptoms of ‘Blood level – Collapse of Yin’

Fever – low-grade
Night sweats
Mouth dry, with desire for small quantities of liquid to moisten it
Palms of hands, soles of feet, and chest feel hot
Malar flush
Emaciation – this syndrome is more common in people who have lost weight or are naturally very thin
Mental restless, despondency, inability to remember things or to concentrate
Tongue: dark-red, dry, no coating. (This lack of coating indicates lack of Stomach yin fluids to protect the walls of the stomach and to digest food.)
Pulse: rapid, fine, weak

What this means – its pathology

Collapse of Yin means lack of yin resources which means dryness, no resting place for the Mind. Even the small remaining amounts of yin leak out during sleep as perspiration.

You might think that the rapid pulse would indicate a strong response to the invading pathogen, and in a healthy body a strong pathogen would indeed produce a strong or over-flowing pulse, easy to palpate.

But this pulse isn’t easy to feel, being weak and thin, and indicates deficiency.

Because the fever is low and the mental and other symptoms are not extreme one might think this state was not serious. Actually the body is on its last legs!

Yin deficiency is a major problem for the world at the moment, with global warming and drought on the geophysical level, and overwork exhausting many of us individuals.

Collapse of yin means reserves are exhausted.

If this set of symptoms occurs after or during an invasion by a warm disease, it denotes an extremely low state of health, not far from death.

In countries with reliable, modern health services, the patient should be in hospital.

Aims of treatment of Collapse of Yin

Easily stated, much harder to achieve!

‘Rescue’ yin.
Rebuild consciousness and Spirit.

For this, you need good Digestion

Treat collapse of yin first by encouraging the digestion to produce better blood, which itself then builds yin energy. (As that improves, treatment can focus more on getting the body to concentrate on re-building its yin resources.)

Acupuncture points for digestion might include

Zusanli = Stomach 36
Liangqiu Stomach 34,
Shangjuxu Stomach 37,
Chongyang Stomach 42,
Xiangu Stomach 43:
Zhongwan Ren-12
but only one or two of them at a time – and not for too long or too strongly either.

Nutrition to help Collapse of Yin

Good digestion is useless without appropriate food, so good nutrition is crucial.

Because all the patient’s body systems are weakened, including the digestion, take care to give the patient only small quantities of easily digestible food, frequently.

Start with something like Clogstoun Congee, then move on to simple, nutritious soup, for example something vegetable-based, for example Borscht.

(Why, you ask, isn’t chicken soup indicated? – allegedly ‘good for the soul!’ Well, it would be, but for the fact the digestion is impaired and there is yin deficiency. Chicken soup is slightly warming and too much of it, or too often, just might produce heat, which is yang, which might further drain yin. However, as yin levels improve, then certainly chicken soup would become a good choice, periodically.)

By the way, don’t think that a lack of yin means you should eat cold food! Doing that could introduce other dangerous conditions, like Stomach Cold Invasion. NO! Your patient needs cooked food, eaten warm, but not very heating or hot foods. (That’s the trouble with extreme health conditions, choices are limited.)

From our list of Hot foods, choose the least warming vegetables, cooked and eaten warm of course. Any foods chosen from our list of Cold Foods should also be cooked and eaten warm, eventually with gentle warming herbs like marjoram, oregano, thyme, rosemary, even a little sage.

What happens if you suppress symptoms at this level?

One might argue that by ‘tonifying’ the yin, you are potentially also re-igniting the spark of the invading pathogen but I think, as mentioned, that Chinese medicine would seek to conserve underlying yin structure before dealing with the pathogen. Furthermore, that to suppress the low-grade fever would be to remove the force of life. So theory suggests that antibiotics would be harmful.

If treatment does re-ignite the pathogen, the patient is at least alive(!) so we can treat the pathogen according to whichever syndrome replaces collapse of yin.