Cold feet Winter suffering or illness signs?

Heat balance plays a major role in Chinese medicine

08/12/2011

The same picture every year: Winter hardly comes in, but thick socks, cuddly blankets and hot water bottles are used inside again. Any remedy is right to warm cold toes and feet. Especially women often suffer from frosty soles - often even at normal temperatures. Conventional medicine usually attributes this to circulatory problems or low blood pressure and restricts their treatment to appropriate medication. From the point of view of Chinese medicine, however, chronic freezing on the feet indicates an imbalance in the heat balance. She attributes this disability to various causes and derives individual therapies.

„Chinese diagnostics distinguishes a variety of heat and cold conditions and always attaches great importance to the perception of temperature“, explains Dr. Christian Schmincke, TCM expert and head of the clinic at the Steigerwald. Numerous functions of our organism serve therefore to compensate for external and internal, cooling and warming influences, so that the body temperature remains constant. Permanent disturbances of this highly complex control system can therefore be an expression of a disease and should therefore be taken seriously. For example, a cold disorder sometimes conceals an accumulation of waste products in the lower parts of the body, a hidden cold or a disturbed tension regulation in nervous and stress-afflicted people. In some cases, however, cold issues are also a major starting point in Chinese diagnosis and therapy for migraine, rheumatism or intestinal inflammation.

In order to regulate body temperature and treat cold diseases, Chinese medicine relies on the power of plant components such as roots, barks or tubers, which patients - boiled up as so-called Dekokte - in small swallows distributed throughout the day. Each of the nearly 3,000 raw drugs the Chinese attributed certain warming or cooling effects. Therefore, experienced TCM experts, based on a comprehensive diagnosis including pulse surgeries and tongue analysis, put together an individualized formula for each affected person and continuously adjust them to the recovery process. In addition, they use moxibustion in the context of acupuncture and tuina massages as a heat-supplying measure in which they stimulate certain body points with the help of acupuncture needles and a mugwort cigar.

Kick the phenomenon „Eisfüße“ but actually only temporary and in the cold season, recommend TCM experts to take warming food and drinks. Foods such as oats, fennel, pumpkin, leek or certain spices such as cinnamon, ginger, cardamom or cloves stimulate the digestive organs and thus the production of natural heat. Local heat in the form of a hot water bottle or grain pillow is also suitable for stimulating natural temperature regulation. „In principle, however, self-produced heat is more sustainable. Therefore, better change baths than the hot tub and woolen clothes rather than direct heat“, advises Dr. Schmincke. (Pm)