Heart Syndromes

This page is a list of ‘Heart Syndromes’! You’ll agree that your heart functions are important?

Heart Functions

The Heart ‘functions’ page describes what your Heart does – in Chinese medicine. (Click here for how Western medicine describes it.)

Much more could be written about it, including how it fits into the Fire phase. is supported by your Wood phase and in turn supports your Earth phase.

In youth and health, you don’t really notice your heart. Nor need you bother much about its health.

But as you age, or wither or diminish, its action becomes more pressing.

Of course, as in Western medicine, there are lifestyle and diet factors that can harm your Heart. For example, eat too many of the wrong foods or too often, and watch your heart get ill – and you!

One of the beauties of Chinese medicine is that it suggests factors that may cause Heart ill-health that Western medicine is cautious about mentioning. And it shows you how, untreated, a given syndrome may progress to something more serious that is harder to treat.

Fortunately Chinese medicine can often greatly help anyone with heart pathology back towards health. It does this after diagnosing your condition in terms of Chinese medicine – your pathology as described in these syndromes,- and by assessing the state of your acupuncture channel system, including your Heart channel.

Then it has ways to treat you (eg acupuncture and/or herbs) and vital advice for you to follow.

Heart Blood

In Chinese medicine, your Heart ‘governs’ your circulatory system and this page on Heart Blood goes into what it means. Very important! Worth reading!

Not least, because in Chinese medicine your Blood, especially your Heart Blood, is where you keep your Mind. (Your ‘Mind’ is different from your ‘brain’.)

Heart Syndromes

What happens when your Heart functions go wrong? This page lists the various pathologies or ‘Heart syndromes’  – in Chinese medicine – of your Heart!

• Heart Qi deficiency: more likely as you age
• Heart Yang deficiency: a more serious form of Heart Qi deficiency – its next stage  you might say
• Heart Yin deficiency
• Heart yin deficiency with Empty Heat
• Heart Blood deficiency
• Heart Qi stagnation: usually comes from continued stress, even if you were enjoying it!
• Heart Blood stagnation: nearly always follows on from Heart Qi stagnation, though there are other causes
• Heart and Gallbladder deficiency: this has more to do with character
• Heart and Kidney yang deficiency
• Heart and Kidney yin deficiency with Empty Heat
• Heart and Lung qi deficiency
• Heart and Spleen Blood deficiency
• Heart Fire: this is not desirable!
• Heart Phlegm Fire: this is even less desirable!
• Heart and Kidney not harmonised with Qi deficiency
• Heart and Kidney not in touch with Yin deficiency

Of course, you may read through the above list of heart syndromes and not find any one that precisely fits  your symptoms. That’s because everyone is different and almost certainly your condition is made up of several syndromes of the Heart and maybe with some others, eg of the Lung, or Spleen or Kidney. And there might be blocks along some of your acupuncture channels.

Chinese medicine is wonderful, and in most ways quite different to Western medicine.

Basically, however, Chinese medicine consists of three factors:

• The system of ‘zang-fu’ organ physiologies and their pathologies or ‘syndromes’
• The Five Phase system, also known as the Five Element system
• The enveloping web of the acupuncture channels

If you forgot to ask, what’s a syndrome?! Click here – Syndromes!