Questions people ask · Headaches
日晡
Usually for plain reasons first: a missed or late lunch, too little water, five hours at a screen, caffeine wearing off, a neck held stiff since morning. Chinese medicine adds a second layer. The late afternoon is the yangming hour, when the stomach channel across the forehead is fullest, and it reads a headache that keeps that appointment by where it sits, how it feels, and what the day did.
答
Before the tradition says anything, the day should be asked. A headache that arrives between three and five is, more often than not, a lunch that was skipped or eaten at the desk, a bottle of water that was not drunk, a screen that was not looked away from, the morning’s coffee leaving, or a neck held at one angle since nine. Those are not Chinese medicine. They are the floor, and most afternoon headaches never get above it.
What the tradition adds is a way of reading the ones that do. The late afternoon is the hour it attaches to the yangming, the stomach and large intestine, whose channel runs across the forehead and behind the eyes. A headache that keeps that appointment is read by where it sits, how it feels and what the day did: the forehead after a heavy lunch, the temples after an argument, a dull ache over everything after a tired week, a heavy band after a wet one.
阳明
The hour has a name in the Shanghan Lun of the second century, in a line about fevers that return at the same time each day. The commentators attached it to the yangming, and every later book on headache inherited the attachment.
When the heat comes on at the late-afternoon hour, it belongs to the yangming.
The Suwen gives the general shape of a headache in four characters, which say that the pain in the head is fullness above and emptiness below, and that the physician looks down as well as up.
Headache and illness at the crown: emptiness below, fullness above.
And the Lingshu explains the afternoon itself. In the chapter that divides one day into four seasons, the body’s qi begins to decline at evening and whatever is wrong begins to rise, so that a complaint held down all morning comes up at four.
In the evening the person’s qi begins to decline and the harmful qi begins to rise, so it worsens.
辨证
Four pictures, once the plain causes are ruled out. Where it sits and what the day did usually decide.
起居
None of that is a promise, and we make none. It is the floor, and lunch is the plank.
食
It governs all wind: dizziness of the head, swelling and pain, eyes that feel as though they would fall out, tears that flow.
穴
On the back of the hand, in the web between thumb and forefinger, is Hegu, Large Intestine 4, 合谷, the Joining Valley, on the very yangming channel the hour belongs to. The old rhyme gives the face and mouth to it, and every headache manual since has kept it. Thumb pressure, a minute each side, at the first sign. It is avoided in pregnancy, and we mean that; if you are or might be, use Neiguan on the inner wrist instead.
慎
Questions
Two answers, and they are usually both true. The day does the same things at the same times: the lunch, the screen, the coffee leaving. And the tradition attaches the late afternoon to the yangming, the stomach channel over the forehead, so that a stomach with heat in it complains at its own hour. A headache with a fixed hour is a headache with a habit under it.
Often, in part. Ask the plain question first: how much water did you drink before two, and how much coffee. The tradition would add that a dry, hot person, with a red tongue and little coat, is thirstier by nature and headaches sooner, and that warm water sipped through the day does more for them than a pint gulped at four.
Because the head is fed from below. The Suwen’s line is fullness above and emptiness below, and a missed lunch is emptiness below in its plainest form: the qi and blood the head runs on were not made. The dull-everywhere picture is the one that skipped lunch, and it is answered at the table, not in the cup.
More questions
The longer read on this — the pictures in full, the sources, and the word you may have arrived with — is Headaches that keep coming back, in Common concerns.
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The reading
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