Kidney Yang Deficiency

Kidney Yang deficiency is common. Probably we all get it at some time, especially as we age or from chronic illness or physical strain. In Chinese medicine, it’s a syndrome.

If you are young or fit, you can soon get over it, because your supplies of Jing-Essence and Mingmen, and your lifestyle, give you the resources to recover.

Eventually, as these deep resources of your body and genetic inheritance erode, you take longer to recover and may find other processes in your body also wear out.

Good treatment can delay this if you take the right action. 

Do consider acupuncture and Chinese medicine! A huge amount of time, over thousands of years, has been spent thinking about how to slow this ageing process!

Kidney functions

The rest of this page will make much more sense if you read two other pages on this site:

• Kidney function
• Kidney syndromes

You will also benefit from understanding Kidney YIN. Kidney Yin and Kidney Yang work very closely together: like the accelerator and brake in a car, you need both.

You may also find Balancing Yin and Yang helpful.

Understanding the thinking behind it

First, think of your house. If you live in Scotland, you almost certainly have central heating, a source of warmth – YANG.

Summers are seldom intolerably hot here, so few people need air-conditioning, which is cooling – YIN.

If you live in a hot country – naturally hot, so providing free Yang – you probably don’t bother with central heating. On the few days when it’s cold, you light a fire and just wrap up a bit. But you would definitely like to have air-conditioning – Yin – to keep you cool the rest of the time.

Kidney Yang is how Chinese medicine explains the warming function in your body. (Actually, for geeks, that’s not quite right, but it’s good enough for the rest of us here.) 

Kidney Yang draws its energy from Mingmen and Jing Essence, as does Kidney Yin, but it applies it to make things warmer.

This warming process is mighty important! Animals who lack it, like snakes and lizards, depend on the sun to warm them up before they can get active. Mammals, such as humans, have mitochondria. How we acquired this is apparently due to a ‘virus-like’ bug that colonised our cells millions of years ago, and which produces heat.

I suppose that is where our Kidney Yang, or to be more accurate, our Mingmen energy, comes from.

Symptoms of Kidney Yang deficiency

So when Kidney Yang deficiency appears, what are its symptoms?

• Feeling of coldness; not good at keeping warm; always wearing lots of clothes; can’t easily get warm
• cold back (especially lumbar area, because that’s one of the areas of the body ‘ruled’ by the Kidneys)
• cold knees (another of the areas ‘ruled’ by the Kidneys)
• profuse urine: if your Kidney Yang can’t warm your body, fluids will pass through too fast and easily, since they haven’t been warmed and concentrated 
• clear, colourless, urine: your Kidney Yang hasn’t supplied the energy to concentrate it
• odourless urine: your Kidney Yang hasn’t the energy  to concentrate and heat it, hence no smell
• increasingly frequent urination at night. Here we get to another Kidney Yang function. This normally supports the Yang of other Energy Organs (‘zang-fu‘) in the body, like the Bladder and Spleen. If these lack Yang, they can’t keep things in place. So you need to urinate more often, even at night. and …
• … for the same reason, a tendency to incontinence, or to dribble even after you think your bladder is empty
• oedema of the lower part of your body, starting with your legs but if it worsens, rising up to your abdomen. Oedema means swelling from water retention: your legs swell up and, if pressed by your thumb, have ‘pitting’ oedema’. After letting go, the flesh takes a while to return to its normal shape. So here, your Kidney Yang hasn’t even been able to transform the liquids in your body into urine, so as it worsens you may get …
• … urinary retention, the inability to pee enough, though any urine would still be colourless.

Warming …

Because Kidney Yang warms things, when deficient it fails to warm and dry, so along with the coldness mentioned above, there are digestive weaknesses:

• stools are loose, runny, with little or no smell
• cold food (food that is uncooked/raw, or unheated when eaten, or chilled or frozen) may go straight through you, because Kidney Yang deficiency means that there is no ‘fire‘ to ‘cook’ what you eat
• with the accumulation of fluids, you may appear to be overweight, but because Kidney Yang deficiency leads to Spleen Yang deficiency, you cannot turn the food and liquids you consume into Blood, so your body lacks nourishment and your flesh lacks tone and firmness.

The next group of Kidney Yang deficiency symptoms relates more specifically to the function of the Kidney, so are shared with Kidney Yin deficiency symptoms.

Reproduction

Kidney Yang deficiency means difficulty re-producing because it cannot ‘warm’ the Jing-essence. We might call this the individual’s genetic code and the urge to re-produce. This causes:

• Lowered libido in both sexes
• Impotence in men (find out more under sexual impotence)
• Premature ejaculation in men
• Low sperm count in men, or the sperm is substandard
• Infertility in women

Pulse and Tongue in Kidney Yang deficiency

• Pulse: deep and weak
• Tongue: pale and very moist: may lack a coating if Kidney Yang deficiency has led on to Stomach Yang deficiency. The moisture of the tongue occurs because the body cannot get rid of fluids (hence the oedema), and is a sign of Yin-excess and cold.