Bright Yang Stage Also called Yangming Stage

The Bright Yang stage (Yangming stage) of disease is when your body mounts a massive attack on an invader, such as an invasion by Wind-Cold or Cold.

… by the way … if you’ve arrived here, all innocent, from somewhere respectable, be prepared. There’s a lot of Chinese medicine theory on this page. Maybe not the best place if you’re wondering how Chinese medicine may help you! Why not limber up first with our page on yin and yang? … Otherwise, to carry on …

An Ancient theory

In this ancient theory, first set down in AD220, there are Six Stages your body can go through in its defence against Cold. The stage on this page is the third of them. Each stage shows the attacker getting closer to destroying the host, ie your body’s health.

But at this stage, your body has a huge ambush up its sleeve.

Another theory, developed to deal not with Wind-Cold but with invasion by Wind-Heat, found that your body used this same defence at its Qi level – see Four Levels.

Ideally, your body stops the invasion in its tracks at the outermost, or most Yang, level. Read more about that here.

If the body now manages to stop the disease at this Bright Yang stage – Yangming stage – it does it by producing a high fever, profuse sweat, great thirst and a pulse described as ‘overflowing’ – see below for more symptoms.

The fever can be so high that it leads to delirium. Worrying though these symptoms are, they are, for your body, highly effective. 

They stop the disease in its tracks. The fever is such that, although unpleasant for you, it’s a good deal more unpleasant for the disease process, the ‘cold’ invasion.

The ‘Cold’ that was trying to penetrate inwards is, in effect, burned out. Indeed, the fever is such that you may welcome cool things: quite different from your reaction at the Tai Yang stage, the first and outermost level or the alternating states in the second stage, the Lesser Yang stage.

But sometimes, your body hasn’t got the wherewithal to ambush the invader at this stage so the invader marches on to the next level, that of the Greater Yin Tai Yin level.

Why might your body skip this Bright Yang stage?

Here are some reasons why your body might allow the attacker past this Bright Yang stage without mounting a defence here:

• Can’t muster the energy for it. A high fever uses a lot of energy. If you put a pan of water on a fire, how long does it take before the water boils? While you wait, you can watch the fire burning away underneath as it tries to raise the temperature. Think how much energy is needed to raise your body, all 8 gallons or 30 litres of it, by just a few degrees.
• Doesn’t know how to do it. If your body was never allowed to produce a fever in childhood, perhaps to combat a childhood disease, you/it may fear what happens. So you may try to stop it by taking medicines that prevent fevers, or that can quickly ameliorate them. The kind of medicines that do this are pain-killers and antibiotics.

• Connected with the first reason above, your body might be weakened in some way, or its response might be compromised by the effect of other things going on, such as great stress, or taking other forms of medication eg for asthma.
• You might be doing something that prevents a good response. This could include taking a host of supplements that, in effect, finesse the situation away. On the face of it, these are great! But, in effect, they may suppress your body’s best way of dealing with the attacker. Read Suppression and the many ways there are to block a reaction. If you prevent your body from deploying its best defence, it has to fall back on its next-best defence.
• Connected with the last reason, you might be using cooling ploys so effectively that it prevents the proper fever. See below.

Or a history of Vaccination?

Or, connected with the reason just given, you may have been vaccinated as a child. Often vaccinations are given before your immune system is thought to have matured around two (2) years old. This may have prevented you developing such illnesses in the first place, but in so doing it prevents your parents and you from learning how to accept and deal with a high fever, confident in its successful outcome.

A Cooling Ploy for Bright Yang stage

Symptoms of Bright Yang stage

There are two types of Bright Yang stage (you can get both at the same time!):

• Channel type
• Organ type

1/ The ‘Channel’ type of Bright Yang stage

In this Bright Yang stage, the body confronts the attacking Cold with Heat: like bringing an icicle into your house and putting it into a hot oven until it evaporates.

So your body has allowed the invader in, but for a good reason. In a way, it knows it has the upper hand once it gets the Cold inside.

Another way of thinking about it is that your immune system and the invader are equally matched, so there is a tremendous struggle between them, generating a lot of heat. In this way of thinking, the invader has indeed pushed his way indoors, but you are putting up a huge fight to push him out. The heat is the sign of the struggle, so is very important.

Fever and Heat conditions

• Fever, usually high, usually worse in the afternoon. If neither you nor your parents had experience of this, you may worry about it, and admittedly where small children are concerned, they quite often get delirious and – very occasionally – some may even pass out or have a fit. This is rare in healthy children, and does not usually prevent a full recovery. So if you are the parent, keep calm! This reaction is fierce but beneficial. Also, if your child sees that you are alarmed, it will make your child more alarmed too. That adds to the anxiety all round, each feeding the other. If you have parents or grandparents who grew up in ‘undeveloped’ countries, they almost certainly experienced this condition. So too do people born before the mid-nineteen sixties when, increasingly, vaccination and pharmaceutical suppressive means began to be used in ‘developed’ countries.
• Perspiration – eventually, heavy – so make sure you have lots available to drink. Changes of clothes may be necessary.
• Thirst – considerable. Because of the Heat, you will almost certainly prefer cold or iced fluids. Usually Chinese medicine counsels against giving sick people cold drinks but here there is so much heat around that it probably doesn’t matter. Exceptions? Small children because their small bodies can ‘rev’ up very quickly, producing a splendid fever, (they have plenty of Yang, but at that stage of life, not much of a Yin body to counteract it) but can lose it again because they don’t have a body big enough to store the Yang heat. In other words, too much cold or iced water could extinguish the heat before it’s done its job.

Behavioural changes

• Emotional disturbance, meaning impatience, anger, agitation, easily annoyed.
• Sometimes delirium.
• Likes cold and cold conditions. This shows the pattern is no longer at the Great Yang stage where you are averse cold.
• Other signs of Heat include the sensation of heat, a red face and the pulse and tongue symptoms below.
• Tongue: colour is red, coating is yellow: these are both signs of heat
• Pulse: fast – rapid; over-flowing or ‘big’

Why is it called the ‘Bright Yang’ or ‘YangMing’ stage?

The above symptoms of great thirst, heat and redness, eg on face and tongue, show that the ‘disease-process’ is in the Stomach.

In Chinese medicine the Stomach and Large Intestine channels are called, when combined, the Yang Ming or Bright Yang channel.

Very often acupuncturists use points along the Large Intestine or Stomach channels to treat this Bright Yang stage syndrome.

What does your acupuncturist do for the Bright Yang stage?

If your body has successfully produced the above symptoms, you can be fairly confident that by the time you reach your acupuncturist the Cold will have been vanquished.

In that case, your acupuncturist will use points that help your body to clear Stomach-Heat. Some of these points will be along the Yangming or Bright Yang channels, and might include points like LI 11, St 21, 34, 43 and 44, Du 14, P 3.

He might also prescribe a herbal recipe containing at least one very ‘cold’ type herb, balanced with other herbs to prevent damage and to provide nutrition.

Examples of traditional recipes that might form the basis of the recipe for you include Bai Hu Tang.