Blood level: Empty Wind agitating the Interior

What does Blood level ‘Empty Wind agitating the Interior’ mean?

As Blood, the foundation for your health and personality, becomes deficient, extraneous influences disrupt harmony.

Take an analogy! Earth dried and shrunk by drought cannot anchor a tree’s roots, so even someone walking past might cause its leaves to tremble.

So with Blood deficiency we easily develop tremors. Any fever is low but draining.

Main symptoms of Empty Wind Agitating the Interior

• Fever – low
• Limbs tremble or twitch
• Weight loss
• Flush over cheeks
• Listless, lacks direction and doesn’t care
• Tongue: dark red, no coating, dry
• Pulse: rapid and fine

What this means – the pathology of Empty Wind Agitating the Interior

Invading Heat from the pathogen dries and destroys our Blood, our Yin energy, leading to appearance of yang factors like twitching and dryness, but this is only because of yin deficiency.

This yin deficiency may have come from exhausting fevers (that drained and dried body fluids) produced by the body as it attempted to keep the invading pathogen at a distance, or from long hours, indeed long years, of over-endeavour at work. Or both. (For more, read that page on yin deficiency.)

Aims of treatment for Empty Wind agitating the Interior

Apart from clearing Heat, the urgent need is to nourish Blood, to support Kidney yin and Liver yin and clear the tendency to Wind.

Acupuncture aims mainly to nourish Liver Blood, but secondly to clear Wind and strengthen Yin. Give frequent treatments but with gentle stimulation.

When and if the patient can eat, good nutrition will be vital to nourish Blood and Yin factors. As Blood strengthens and Yin grows fuller, the low fevers and twitching will reduce.

What happens if you suppress symptoms at this level?

Western medicine would almost certainly aim to clear any suspected fever probably with antibiotics and this is where Chinese medicine might well diverge in its treatment aims.

Although the  invading pathogen is triggering the symptoms, from the Chinese perspective the symptoms are just as much from Blood deficiency.

Indeed, I think Chinese medicine might argue that Blood deficiency is the cause of many of the symptoms. Empty Wind agitates the Interior only because the Interior is yin deficient.

Put another way, a classful of young children stay quiet (well, moderately quiet!) for just so long as the teacher remains in the room. Take out the teacher – the older, steadier, calmer figure – and noise levels (ie wind) will soon rise, disturbing the school’s interior, its equilibrium.

So clearing or suppressing the low grade fever might destroy even the small amount of yang energy the body is producing – the Blood-Heat. That would be like getting rid of the children, which would leave the school with no yang, no future.

Suppressing like this might lead to Collapse of Yang.

Other responses at the Blood level

• Heat Victorious agitates Blood
• Heat Victorious stirring Wind
• Empty Wind agitating in the Interior – this page
• Collapse of Yin
• Collapse of Yang

Also Read:

Invasion of Cold – the Six Stages theory