What Your Face Is Revealing About Your Health

 Your face says a lot about you. Much more than you might think.

To an acupuncture physician, diagnosis begins with simply looking at the patient’s face. Different areas relate to each of the internal organs, and different coloring can reveal what is really going on inside. Your face is essentially a map of your entire internal organ system.

Sound hard to believe? Next time you are in a social situation where people are consuming alcohol, look at the cheekbones underneath the eyes. You will notice redness in the area. In Chinese medicine theory, this area of the face links to the liver and gallbladder. Alcohol creates internal heat, which will be manifested in the liver area of the face as a red color. When the alcohol is no longer in the liver, the skin will return to its normal color.

By this same logic, longer lasting skin conditions can be treated by changing the functioning of the internal organs through various Complementary Alternative Medicine techniques.

Think of the term “hothead” in our American lexicon. The term refers to a person with an angry, irritable disposition. These people tend to run hot physically and have a reddish hue to their skin at all times. Acupuncture techniques would be used to “cool” down this person: lessening stress, reducing irritability and improving quality of sleep. The skin on the face will gradually return to a normal hue throughout the treatment process.

After being outdoors on a cold winter day, your skin will look more pale than usual. A few minutes by the fire and your complexion returns to normal. Conversely, for a patient with a more serious medical condition, his/her face may have a bluish or pale hue, particularly pronounced over the affected organ area (this is often directly under the eyes, in the kidney area). Traditional Chinese Medicine techniques, such as moxibustion and herbal medicine, would be used repeatedly for a period of time to “warm” the “cold” internal organ, thus returning the skin tone to a more vibrant quality.

When looking at the face, areas of the skin that are dry, oily, or acne-prone are the first diagnosis tips the acupuncture practitioner takes in when meeting with a patient. Further diagnosis includes ancient techniques such as tongue and pulse reading, in addition to modern medical analysis such as blood pressure reading, lab analysis and physical exam techniques.

Not only does acupuncture treat the root cause of various skin conditions, needles and homeopathic injection therapy can be used directly on the face to speed up aesthetic changes.

Next month I will be discussing acupuncture facelift techniques in more detail.

Todd Garrity, L.Ac.