Examine Your Stool (3)

tutor

Dear Tutor,
„Deep yellow urine can indicate heat accumulation“.
So I think that urine of dark-yellow color would be present in cases with heat, fire and damp-heat interior syndromes. The darker the color of urine will be, the more severe these syndromes will be.
And in contrary: “when the urine turns clear in febrile illnesses, it indicates an individual will recover soon”.


Yes, of course, the combination of all four diagnostic methods is very important.
Only it seems for me, that it is very, very difficult (or, perhaps even impossible) to learn pulse diagnosis via internet only, without enough long direct contact with both the real patients and the experienced teacher who will show the real different pulses on practice, and give his advice, and correct mistakes of pulse diagnosis of the student.
So, without good command of pulse diagnosis, instead of four diagnostic methods in practical use I will have only three of them. To compensate this shortage, it seems for me that it would be logical to learn deeper about the rest of the diagnostic methods.
The principle “difficult points should be learned by heart” will work when learning theory about pulses, but in this situation, it seems to me, will not help to learn pulses in practice.




[quote="tutor"]
...Confucius used to say "Learning without reasoning leads to confusion (or unclear in the concept); thinking without learning is wasted effort" What do you think of this remark?

Tutor[/quote]


It would be not wise not to agree with such high authority as Confucius.
By my opinion, learning - perhaps - is the process, which goes not in a straight ascending line but rather in a line, which is zigzag, which first goes some distance forward and, when you learn something new, then you all the time need to return some distance back and, from the basis of the newly acquired knowledge to reevaluate knowledge, which was obtained earlier. And because of this reevaluation, when there are more then one variant of possible answers, between which the student (because of his limited knowledge of the subject) cannot choose the right one, then he sometimes asks questions, answers to which, got from his teacher, help student to get a right view to the things and to feel standing on the firm ground.

P. S. On that site with Chinese proverbs, I found one more proverb: “A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study”(Chinese Pinyin: Yu4 jun1 yi4 xi2 tan2, sheng4 du2 shi2 nian2 shu1 - I am not sure, is the translation good).
Who knows, who was the author of this proverb? May be he was also some high authority, whose name is forgotten now?

tutor

Dear Tutor:

To return to the question of what color the urine would be in case the stool is white - One of the posts above mentions that white stool is associated with cold in the Large Intestine meridian, so then I would expect the urine to be clear or light yellow, if it is a cold syndrome.

Thank you

Ed Austin

tutor

[quote="ed austin"]Dear Tutor:
To return to the question of what color the urine would be in case the stool is white - One of the posts above mentions that white stool is associated with cold in the Large Intestine meridian, so then I would expect the urine to be clear or light yellow, if it is a cold syndrome.
Thank you
Ed Austin[/quote]

Dear Ed Austin,
I found that information ("...pale, almost white stools indicate Cold in the Large intestine...") in a e-book written by one Italian author and I do not know how deep understanding of TCM he have. Many people in the West now write books on TCM by simply making compilations of various Chinese texbooks. And in these their compilations they often make a lot of mistakes.
So I do not even know, is it true or not what this Italian writes about.

tutor

Dear lit_hua_nia and Ed,
That's the reason I stressed the importance of combining all the four diagnostic methods, not only one method.
Possible the white-colored stool does mean the cold in large intestine, but we have to see all the other manifestations as well.
So the understanding of the deep yellow urine denoting the heat or damp heat syndrome is quite correct.

Yes, some books written by foreigners are not well translated or not well written, so there could be mistakes and that’s also why at the beginning the TCM practitioners in Europe or North America would think the traditional Chinese medicine in China is not in a traditional way, while they are doing the more traditional way of TCM, don’t you think it is a stupid idea?

To say the proverb, it is neither accurately translated, the original or the common understanding of this proverb is: “A conversation with you gentleman is better than ten years of study (education in school)”, of course the translation is not too bad, but not accurate.
This is usually the flattering way to highly evaluate the opinion of somebody who’s talking with you.
Ok, it’s not so easy to make good translation from one language to another.

Tutor

symplex

Dear Tutor,

thank you very much for sharing this information. Often when I'm drinking coffe I feel immediatley the need to go to toilet and my stool is often than loose and fishy. Sometimes I have the same in drinking other warm fluids like tea or cold mineral water too; or when I get from a warm place into cold place (like to get into a heavy climatised building in hot sumer days) So I'm not sure is due to spleen and liver disharmony, or are my intestines too much sensitive against heat and cold, or what ..?
By the way on coffee it doesn't mather if it's hot or cold, the result is always the same So I do have constipation maybe only a few days in a year, where I use only to drink coffee as treatment...

tutor

Dear Symplex, it seems you have spleen deficiency!