Furry cracked tongue

Well the tongue is merely the reflection of what is happening internally. The only way to “fix” the tongue is to fix the inside. When you say you’ve seen other acupuncturists - what, exactly, have you tried and for what duration. And what changes, if any, happened during your acupuncture sessions. Please be as specific as you can - what style of acupuncture they used, did you also do Chinese herbal medicine and if so, which formulas, how long did you see each person and what changed and what didn’t.

Is there anything on your western blood work at all - even if it is only marginally off.

What other symptoms do you have besides the bloating and dry mouth? Any medications that you take or other supplements - if so, for what, and for how long.

Well the first thing I would mention is that if you are going to pursue Chinese Medicine you need to be in it for the long haul and take both the treatments and your personal responsibility to follow their advice very seriously. While Chinese Medicine for certain cases can provide quick symptomatic relief, generally speaking healing conditions like this would take 3-18 months or longer. When you start adding up the true cost of all the random doctors tests, blood work, office visits, etc. seeing an Chinese Medicine practitioner every other week or so for a year pales in comparison to that cost and will very likely help you and possibly even provide a long term resolution to your issues. Doing random formulas for a week here and week there and a few treatments will not help you - it just doesn’t work like that. I’m not sure where you live, but there are often community clinics, school clinics, or even fairly generous practitioners that can offer treatment less expensively for patients that will stay the course.

All that said, da chai hu tang is probably not the right formula for you - it’s far too moving for what I see on your tongue and not tonifying enough. But you can only get so much without physical inspection, particularly in complicated cases. When you work with someone closely over time they can watch you closely, your reactions to treatments and to formulas - it’s all a moving target and the practitioner given enough time hones in one what your body really needs.

So I suggest you find someone and work closely with them and don’t evaluate anything until you’ve been under their care for 3 months at a minimum. Then see how you feel.

If you absolutely cannot see someone then you need to do it the long slow way which is eat a good diet with very little deviations from that. A good diet would be largely vegetarian, some yin tonifying foods like black beans/black bean soup on a regular basis and occasional meats to supplement your qi/yang. It would leave out sugars, dairy, particularly milk, too much cold and raw foods (salads, etc.) and alcohol. The generals are in my eat like a human diet article. Learn meditation and tai chi or qi gong to help your body rebuild the yin nature. Possibly work in some moxibustion particularly at ST 36 at least a few times a week or daily. Stick with that for a few years and you will improve. Utilizing proper Chinese herbs and acupuncture during this time will generally speed this process up within reason.

With regards to points, yes, they need to be used very precisely. There is the perfect anatomical position which must be memorized and then there is what we call the “live” point - which is the point that is found in that general area by touch. Most practitioners consider honing the touch development to find the “live” point is critical this comes from qigong and experience largely. A number of clinical studies have been done showing clinical differences between millimeters, so, yes, I do believe it matters.

Now with something like moxibustion, particularly with the moxa “stick” you will be stimulating a fairly large circular area, so you don’t need to be as precise.

As far as the herbs, yes, speak with your practitioner. But, anyone who talks about “toxins” being your problem either has no idea what they are talking about or is trying to simplify this discussion when they speak with you - or they have poor english (or native language) skills and cannot properly convey what they mean. Either way, I would get them to clarify exactly what they mean by this. It is critical to not get too tied to the idea that the “liver” in Chinese terms and your physical “liver” are the same - they are not. See “My Liver is What?” for more on that.

From my perspective you show too many signs of both yin deficiency/empty heat and spleen qi deficiency. With someone who is deficient you have to be careful using qi and blood moving herbs (nothing to do necessarily with your bowel movements).

Yes the site was recently changed considerably and some of the content was split out into different sub-sites which over the long term will help usability and maintainability. Most of the links that are missing now are to certain sections of our tcm diagnoses, which is the section that needs the most work. That section will change considerably over the next few weeks and then the links will be updated.

As for your overall diagnosis - yes, almost all people have layered diagnoses and are fairly far from textbook representations. Yin deficiency in particularly is somewhat complicated generally and even more so the longer it goes on.

Just going in with an update (and to partially answer some of your old quesitons)

I’ve worked with another TCM practicioner in the mean time and he evaluated it as a stomach issue - excessive heat.
And gave me a herbs supplement for that (unfortunatelly don’t have the exact name right now).
Didn’t do much. So he gave me this afterwards - Giovanni Maciocia Expel Toxic Heat T76. Which I think helped a very little bit with the dryness.

From what I’ve read (not sure how accurate this information is) I can conclude that the small side cracks indicate chronic spleen-yang deficiency.
Based on example 10, the stomach crack and white/yellow coating indicate disharmony in this case is in the Middle Burner with Stomach and Spleen Heat, Damp-Heat and Phlegm-Heat in the Stomach. The Blood stasis probably derives partly from the Heat and partly from the chronic retention of Phlegm.

But in another (non-TCM) I’ve read that the enlargement of papillae is due to increases acidity in the intestines

Based on my long-term observation on myself, I can say that the condition get’s much worse every time after drinking alcohol (for 2-3 days) and also when I am sick - maybe this has something to do with the acidity ?
There is also one occasion when it get’s better - when I have diarrhea. I am sure this must be indicating something, but it exceeds my knowledge…

Well now that you have had more treatment and a different herbal formula from your current practitioner, what type of changes have you had? Is there any change in the base skin symptoms and/or digestive issues at all? There should be some change, even if it’s worse, from the herbs and you will have to pay close attention to what these are to help your practitioners figure everything out.

All that said, many westerners are, as you are finding in yourself, a mix of deficiency and excess. The trick is to best figure out which one came first. In most cases of younger folks with skin issues it is excess first which over time challenges the yin. Fixing this is often complicated and has to be done in stages, at times and in some cases alternating back and forth between yin building and blood/heat clearing formulas until both imbalances are close enough together to be “balanced”.

I thought I’ll just make an update to this old topic… and my issue.

I’ve managed to reduce the dryness quite a bit (it’s still better on some days and worse on others, but in general)

I’ve now observed a pattern, which makes me think the ‘fur / hair’ coating is related purely to stomach

1. it always get’s better after I do moxibustion on ST36.
2. I’ve been sick recently, taking a lot of raw garlic - which I can imagine is quite harsh on the stomach lining… and the coating started to come off at a few spots. My theory is that the stomach lining got disrupted (burned) partially and this is how it’s reflected on the tongue ?

It also get’s better when I have mild diarrhea… not sure where the connection is there.

My goal is to get the whole tongue looking like that…

The question is, how ? I feel like moxibustion can have the most direct impact… I am doing it 3x a week for over 2 years and although I see some benefits, it’s nothing groundbreaking, or even systematic.

Hey Joe,

I’m sorry for the late response…

I did manage to improve it by a little bit… taking a greens supplement, Sanogel (a detoxifying gel) and coix.

I still do have the furry coating, which always gets worse after I drink alcohol. Which makes me think that there must be some kind of bacterial imbalance and the alcohol makes it worse.

Looks like this… honestly, I was only able to find it on a local site… not sure if you can get it in the US. But it’s excellent.

The coix I just buy whole and grind it up into a powder… mix with hot water and drink like tea. Supports the spleen apparently.