Waking Up at 3 a.m. Every Night? Vomiting Blood at Midnight? Your Channels Are Sending You a Warning — Doctor Ni Haixia on the Pi Bu Lun and the Jing Luo Lun of the Huang Di Nei Jing

Patient search terms: waking at 3 a.m. / waking in the middle of the night / can’t fall asleep around 1 a.m. / insomnia / liver disease / stomach cancer / vomiting blood at midnight / stomach disease / stomach pain / lower abdominal pain / hernia / sinew pain / joint pain / knee pain / cannot walk / muscle pain / bone pain / cannot lift heavy things / mania / epilepsy / convulsions / leprosy / falling eyebrows / tumor / hard lump / lump in the belly / moxa on Guan Yuan / Guan Yuan point / Yanglingquan / Yinlingquan / ah shi point / blood-letting / acupuncture / ice-cold fingers / Raynaud’s disease / channels / twelve double-hours / zi wu liu zhu / Pi Bu Lun / Jing Luo Lun / Huang Di Nei Jing

Corresponding topics (medical terms): the Su Wen chapters Pi Bu Lun (Skin Sections, Chapter Fifty-Six) and Jing Luo Lun (Channels and Collaterals, Chapter Fifty-Seven), plus the closing of Chang Ci Jie Lun (Long Needling Principles, Chapter Fifty-Five). Hard lumps: on the back, Jiaji EX-B2 (half a cun lateral to the Governor Vessel; the bladder channel lies one and a half cun out — needle straight in but not deep, do not use a one-and-a-half-cun needle), Pi Gen EX-B4 (extra point three and a half cun lateral to the thirteenth vertebra / first lumbar), guiding the abdominal qi so heat descends and the lower abdomen warms — every lump comes from cold, and only when heat arrives does the pain of the mass dissolve; moxa on Guan Yuan CV4 as daily health practice. Hernia: disease of the lower abdomen, abdominal pain with neither stool nor urine passing; all hernias come from cold; in the Jin Gui Yao Lue, severe cold hernia with white fluid spit out is cured by one herb alone (the great aconite decoction) — the heavier the disease, the fewer the herbs; acupuncture takes the tender points of the groin and the two thighs and around the fourteenth vertebra, needling the ah shi (tender) point, because the cold shifts position and the tender point moves with it. Bi syndromes: sinew bi (sinews contracted, joints painful, cannot walk — always the knee, unable to bend or straighten) — needle the sinew meeting point Yanglingquan GB34, piercing straight through to Yinlingquan SP9, one needle joining yin and yang (above the knee is yang, below is yin), never hit the bone; muscle bi (injury from cold-damp; the spleen governs flesh and the four limbs) — needle shallowly between the two bellies of the muscle, do not injure sinew or bone, retain until the needle feels hot; bone bi (bones heavy, cannot lift, marrow aches, cold qi arrives) — needle deep to the side of the bone until the bone feels hot. Mania: disease on the yang channels with alternating cold and heat — needle the yin channels to pour the yang down (when you needle the yin, yin rises and yang descends); extreme heat gives birth to cold, extreme cold gives birth to heat, so a fever at its peak may be broken by a hot herb. Epilepsy: untreated mania progresses from once a year to once a month to four or five times a month — acupuncture can treat all of it. Wind-cold-heat superficial disease: fever with sweating many times a day — disease in the collaterals, needle shallowly between the flesh collaterals once every three days, cured in ten. Great wind (leprosy): joints heavy, brows and hair falling — eat chicken flesh and bone marrow, sweat for a hundred days (with deep bone needling, two hundred days) until the hair and brows grow back. Pi Bu Lun: the skin has its sections, the vessels their rules, the sinews their binding collaterals, the bones their measures; the names of the six-channel yang and yin: hai fei (Yangming), shu chi (Shaoyang), guan shu (Taiyang), shu ru (Shaoyin), hai jian (Jueyin), guan zhe (Taiyin); collateral color diagnosis: much blue is pain, black is bi, yellow-red is heat, white is cold, all five colors together mean cold and heat mixed; the collaterals are diseased first, then the disease enters the channels; yang governs the exterior, yin the interior; blood-let any vessel with blood in it. Hourly flow of the twelve channels: Lung at yin (3-5 a.m.), Large Intestine at mao (5-7), Stomach at chen (7-9), Spleen at si (9-11), Heart at wu (11-13), Small Intestine at wei (13-15), Bladder at shen (15-17), Kidney at you (17-19), Pericardium at xu (19-21), San Jiao at hai (21-23), Gallbladder at zi (23-1), Liver at chou (1-3); prediction: a liver patient could not sleep from 1 to 3 a.m. two years before the disease manifested; waking at 3-5 a.m. is a lung channel problem — the channel has disease while the organ has not yet broken, the superior doctor treats disease before it arises; the five-part division (chou, chen, wei, xu belong to earth; the twelve hours divided into five shares) is used for treating organ disease, not for prediction — for example stomach cancer: at shen hour (metal) earth generates metal, the phases hold level, so the stomach feels easiest at 3-5 p.m.; at xu hour it begins to be hard; after zi hour, at the second earth hour (chou, yin earth), yin governs blood, earth meets earth and cannot bear it — the patient vomits blood at midnight; daytime is qi, night is blood. Channel disease is needled at the ying-spring point (the master’s tradition; the Zhen Jiu Jia Yi Jing says the fish point — both work clinically); Zhongwan CV12 (upper ji) when a heart problem affects the stomach, Juque CV14 when chest pain has no stomach reaction (the collaterals connect in pairs); when there is no point, massage the lung channel with the finger as a needle (Zhongfu LU1, Yunmen LU2, push along the channel if the problem has lasted a month, against it if only two or three days or a week) — the sage is like a fine horse, the stubborn mind a bad horse that will not listen. The route of disease: body hair (the hairs stand on end, cou li opens) → collaterals (their color turns vivid and changes) → channels → fu organs (gallbladder, small intestine, stomach, large intestine, bladder) → zang organs; the Ci Nü Lun (Malaria chapter) finger-binding blood-letting can be used anytime; Raynaud’s disease — fingers ice-cold and blue-violet like five blocks of ice, disease in the collaterals, cured by blood-letting; if the person is already wasted and dry with no strength left, do not let blood. Cold and heat in sinew and bone: too much cold entering the sinews causes cramps (the ligament between the bones is the middle sinew; the knee is the house of the sinews); heat entering beside the bone dissolves it (osteoporosis), the sinews lose strength, the flesh withers, the skin ulcerates, the hair falls. Pi zhe mai zhi bu (the skin spreads the pulse): evil lodges in the skin, the interstices open, and the evil enters deeper step by step — collaterals, then channels, then fu, then zang; bu yu er sheng da bing — if you do not treat it in the skin section, major disease follows; treat it in the skin and no major disease arises; Western medicine knows exterior-interior and deficiency-excess (anatomy, laxatives, iron and magnesium, IV nutrition) but not cold-heat or yin-yang, so its actions often produce the opposite of a cure. Jing Luo Lun opening: the channels have fixed colors (the hand taiyin lung channel is metal-colored, the channels are long and their colors fixed), the collaterals change color and lie close to the body surface, and the color of the yin collaterals answers to their parent channel (the yang collaterals change with the four seasons).

Opening: finishing the needling method for hard lumps

Last lecture ended with needling a lump in the lower abdomen — the needle goes to the top of the hard mass, never piercing through it, with the back needles at the fourth intervertebral space. This time Doctor Ni Haixia completes the points on the front and the back:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: When you feel a hard lump, on the back at the two sides of the jia ji — the lowest fourth jia ji is half a cun lateral to the Governor Vessel. Half a cun out from the Governor Vessel is jia ji; one and a half cun out is the bladder channel. You may go straight in — it does not matter — but do not take a one-and-a-half-cun needle down there; needle onto the jia ji and that is enough.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: What comes later in the text, beside the hip bone, the iliac crest — that is this point: three and a half cun lateral to the thirteenth vertebra, the Pi Gen point. This is how you guide the qi of the abdomen — the heat travels down, and you feel the lower abdomen begin to warm. It is not that the heat comes out of the genitals; rather, the heat of the upper burner goes straight into the lower abdomen, and once the belly is warm, the pain of the tumor and the hard lump dissolves. This is how we needle a lump. Every single lump comes from cold, so you must get heat there.

And how do you get the heat there? Moxa on Guan Yuan:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Of course you moxa Guan Yuan. Moxa on Guan Yuan is wonderful — how could it not be? You say, I have nothing wrong with me, can I still moxa it? Sure, moxa it whenever you like — nobody has ever died from moxa on Guan Yuan. Look at the monks: they sit in meditation every day, and when they meditate their intention settles on Guan Yuan. You moxa Guan Yuan, you have no disease at all — Guan Yuan becomes the secret of longevity, of living a hundred years.

Hernia: belly pain so bad you cannot pass stool or urine — it is all cold

The Chang Ci Jie Lun continues with disease of the lower abdomen: disease in the lower abdomen, abdominal pain such that neither stool nor urine can pass — the name of the disease is hernia, and hernia comes from cold.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Every hernia comes from cold. Of course there are several kinds of hernia — later in the Jin Gui (Essentials from the Golden Cabinet) it says that when cold hernia is very strong, the patient spits out white fluid, and the hernia belly hurts terribly — one single herb cures it. The heavier the disease, the fewer the herbs. I will teach you this later — it is not difficult.

And how does acupuncture treat hernia? Doctor Ni teaches a very practical point-selection method — the tender point:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: When needling between the lower abdomen and the two thighs, between the waist and the hip bones — when cold hernia is strong, the belly hurts so badly it turns hard. Then you press around Huantiao (GB30) — where does it hurt? If both sides hurt, needle both painful sides. We use the ah shi (tender) point, it is the most accurate; put the needle right on the tender point.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: This is between the lower abdomen and the two thighs. On the back you can also find a tender point between the lumbar bones — around the fourteenth vertebra, find the tender spot and needle it; needling by the tender point is the most standard method. Because the location of the cold is not always the same — it can shift up and down, so the tender point shifts a little too. So remember: we can cure hernia with acupuncture as well. You see, both diseases (lumps and hernia) are cold — that is why we must always keep the lower burner warm.

Sinew bi: knee that will not bend — one needle through Yanglingquan to Yinlingquan

Page 436, entering “disease in the sinews”: when the sinews are diseased, the sinews contract, the joints ache, and walking is impossible — this is called sinew bi.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Teacher, when you speak of the sinews, the first thing that comes to my mind is the sinew meeting point, Yangling — you are very sharp. What we call “cannot walk” — sinew disease always happens at the knee joint: the knee bends and will not straighten. This is the point we needle for sinew disease — Yanglingquan. Why Yanglingquan? Because the needle goes all the way through to Yinlingquan.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: When you pass the needle through, you know by feel that it is not on the bone — it is in the middle of the sinews, and the sinews are deep; the needle passes through, yin sinews and yang sinews both pierced. And if we speak of the leg: above the knee is qi jie, it is yang; below the knee is yin. When you pierce Yanglingquan through to Yinlingquan, yin and yang meet the moment the needle passes — so the patient recovers very fast. This is why needling one needle at Yinlingquan and one at Yanglingquan, both sides at once, is completely different in effect from a single through-needle — the reason is exactly this. But never hit the bone heavily; do not casually poke the bone.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: After the patient has been needled for a while, he feels the knee heat up — the whole channel at that point grows hot — and that is the cure; pull the needle out.

Muscle bi: muscle pain, the needle goes between the two bellies of the flesh

When the disease lies in the skin and flesh, and all the muscles ache, that is muscle bi. Doctor Ni first explains the root of the disease:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: The bi of the flesh — the bone is where the complaint lies, injured by cold-damp. Because the muscles are governed by the spleen — the spleen governs flesh and governs the four limbs, right? Dampness injures the spleen — heavy dampness injures the spleen — and on top of that it is cold. So in this case we needle between the great and small bellies of the flesh: put the needle between the two muscles, also in the middle of the flesh, not very deep, do not injure sinew or bone, do not touch the bone, and take heat as the goal — leave the needle there; when the patient feels heat at the needle, stop there and that is enough.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: If you injure the sinew or the bone — the disease is clearly in the muscle but you needle to the bone — then abscesses and swellings arise along the collaterals, and heat spreads through all the divisions. Why did people in the old days say needling went wrong like this? It was because the needles were not sterilized, and that produced all kinds of lesions. Now that the needles are sterilized, even if you go a little too far, it will not go that far wrong — besides, one’s mood sometimes rises and falls.

Speaking of “mood rises and falls,” Doctor Ni cannot resist telling about a patient every practitioner meets in clinic:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: That patient — you just told him his gallbladder… people with gallbladder disease are irresolute, right? You say, I prescribe herbs for your disease. I do not want to take herbs. Then I will needle you. I do not want needles. Then moxa? Seems I do not want moxa either. Fine, then I will give you pills. No, I cannot swallow pills. Then herbs? I cannot take those either. Then why did you come to see me? I lose my temper! He has to be given something after all. People with gallbladder disease are truly irresolute — it really makes you angry, it is very strange — a disease that was originally shallow gets needled deeper and deeper, one pass after another. This irresolution — you will meet it, all kinds of people exist.

Bone bi: cannot lift heavy things — the needle goes to the side of the bone

How do you know the disease is in the bone? Doctor Ni separates it in one sentence:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: How do you know his disease is in the bone? He cannot lift heavy things — because the reason we can lift weights is the bones. The marrow aches — this is cold qi arriving, and the name is bone bi. When needling, use sheng ci — deep needling, but do not injure the vessels or the flesh; go straight to the side of the bone, until the heat comes — the bone heats up beside the needle. The bone feels very hot; the place under the needle feels very hot — when we needle, the patient often feels heat or cold, depending on how your hand moves.

Mania: disease on the yang channels — needle the yin channels to pour the yang down

Next, “mania”: if the disease lies on the yang channels, and comes with both cold and heat, now cold now hot, we call this mania. Doctor Ni states the treatment very precisely:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: When the disease is on the yang channels, we needle the yin channels — for example, if the Yangming stomach channel is diseased, we needle the spleen channel. We use the responding needling: when yang flourishes, yin is emptied; we use the yin to pour the yang down. Because when you needle the yin channel, yin rises and yang descends. This is the normal circulation of yin and yang, so we often see — Chinese medicine is very wonderful, the human body is this circulation.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: We see a patient with acute heat — when the heat is ordinary, a little cold herb settles it. But some patients have acute, extreme heat; if we give a cold herb it does not work — we must give a hot herb. Because when heat reaches its extreme, the person turns back; it will not surge higher. At this point, you see how skilled the physician is. An ordinary doctor sees the heat will not come down, and you are still prescribing heat? Would that not scare people to death? Actually no — the moment it goes down, the heat turns back and immediately becomes cold. Extreme heat gives birth to cold, extreme cold gives birth to heat — acupuncture is the same.

Epilepsy: once a year → once a month → four or five times a month

When mania develops further, it becomes epilepsy. Doctor Ni lays out the course of the disease very clearly:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: When the disease first begins, while the yang of the yang channels is still in hyperarousal, it strikes once a year; if you do not cure it, it becomes once a month; if still not cured, four or five times a month — this is epilepsy. We can treat all of it with acupuncture.

Wind-cold-heat superficial disease: sweating many times a day — needle the collaterals

When the disease is wind, and cold, and heat, and the patient sweats the moment the heat comes — several times a day — this is disease in the collaterals, a superficial condition:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Having both cold and heat — the disease qi is transforming. When the disease advances, our defensive yang advances and we feel a little heat; when the disease retreats, the defensive yang retreats and we feel a little cold. And superficial sweating often appears — the exterior is deficient. When the disease is still very superficial, we needle the collaterals, between the flesh collaterals, very shallowly. Once every three days, and it is cured in ten days. Of course, this is for those who are not afraid of needles. We have acupuncture — we can cure alternating cold and heat, wind-cold colds — of course we can. And if you have learned prescriptions, truly you do not need to take one prescription and wait — perhaps in three hours it is done. If you take it at one or two in the afternoon, you can still go on a date in the evening; no cold at all. Very fast.

Great wind: eyebrows and hair all falling out — eat chicken meat and bone marrow

The Chang Ci Jie Lun closes with “the great wind disease” — this is leprosy:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: When the disease reaches great wind, the joints and bones are heavy, one cannot lift weights, and the eyebrows and hair fall out — this is severe; only leprosy makes the eyebrows fall and the nose fall too. So we eat chicken meat, and sweat for a hundred days; for the bones, we eat bone marrow, and sweat for a hundred days — in any case two hundred days, so that his hair and eyebrows grow back — he must eat both the flesh and the marrow. Because the great-wind patient has heavy joints and bones, we must needle to the side of the bone — sheng needling, quite deep — and needle for two hundred days.

The Pi Bu Lun: how does disease walk into your body step by step?

Now we reach Chapter Fifty-Six, the Pi Bu Lun (Skin Sections). It states the theme at once: the skin has its sections, the vessels have their rules, the sinews have their binding collaterals, and the bones have their measures; the diseases each gives rise to differ, and they begin respectively from above and below, from left and right, according to the location of yin and yang — the whole course of the disease from beginning to end.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: This is actually very simple for you — we have covered all of it before. The first one Qi Bo speaks of is the Yangming channel — on the position of the Yangming channel there are superficial collaterals, with stagnant blood on them, all of them Yangming collaterals; most are seen on the legs, the lower legs, the insteps. As said before: much blue is pain, black is bi (numbness), yellow-red is heat, white is cold — right? When all five colors appear, all five colors seen on the collaterals, that is cold and heat seen together. If the disease is in the collaterals and is severe, the disease enters the channels. On the channels, yang governs the exterior and yin governs the interior — this is the principle: the Yangming channel governs the exterior, the Taiyin channel governs the interior; yin and yang always support each other.

The “yang” and “yin” of the six channels each have their own name, and Doctor Ni recites them one by one:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: The yang of Yangming we call hai fei; the yang of Shaoyang is named shu chi; the yang of Taiyang we call guan shu. The yin of Shaoyin we call shu ru; the yin of Jueyin is named hai jian; the yin of Taiyin is named guan zhe. Each of these belongs to one channel — the principle is: when a channel is diseased, the collateral is diseased first, and then the collateral disease transmits to the channel; every channel shows a color, blue, yellow, white, black and so on, each with its different symptoms. Wherever there is blood in the vessels, let it out — that is the great principle.

The hourly flow of the twelve channels: Lung at yin, Large Intestine at mao, Stomach at chen

Page 444, the fourth line from the bottom — Doctor Ni says “what this chapter says from here on is very important,” and here he gives a definition of the twelve channels:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: All the collaterals of the twelve channels are the sections of the skin, and the birth of every disease must begin at the skin and body hair. Today we will give you a definition — the times of flow of the twelve channels, the double-hours of flow; we all read it when we studied acupuncture: Lung at yin, Large Intestine at mao, Stomach at chen; Spleen at si, Heart at wu, Small Intestine at wei; Bladder at shen, Kidney at you, Pericardium at xu; San Jiao at hai, Gallbladder at zi, Liver at chou. The lung channel opens at the yin hour, the large intestine channel at the mao hour, the stomach channel at the chen hour, the spleen channel at the si hour, the heart channel at the wu hour, the small intestine channel at the wei hour, the bladder channel at the shen hour, the kidney channel at the you hour, the pericardium channel at the xu hour, the san jiao channel at the hai hour, the gallbladder channel at the zi hour, and the liver channel at the chou hour.

Why must you know the flow times of the twelve channels? Doctor Ni gives an extremely important clinical concept — prediction:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: The moment disease qi flows into the body, you detect it — it has not yet entered the organs! For example, a person with liver disease — two years earlier he began to be unable to sleep from one to three in the morning, because at that early stage you do not necessarily have liver disease. Then when we reach the five-part division that the Huang Di Nei Jing introduces — a student asked before, teacher, is there a contradiction? No contradiction, because these are different systems.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: According to the five-part division, we classify chou, chen, wei and xu as earth — that is earth. This is wood, these two are fire, this is metal, these two are water — we divide the twelve double-hours into five shares. But this speaks of the organs, the internal organs — different; it speaks of zang and fu. Diseases of the same nature — do they arise together? When phases generate each other, it is holding level. For example, take stomach cancer, stomach disease. Does metal (overcome) earth? No — the stomach belongs to earth, and the shen hour is metal: earth generates metal, generating means holding level. So from three to five in the afternoon (shen hour) the stomach feels most comfortable; ordinarily it is always hard, but from three to five in the afternoon the stomach feels very well. When the xu hour arrives, it begins to be hard — but the xu hour has not yet passed the hai hour, there is still yang qi present. After the zi hour, when the second earth hour arrives (chou), this earth is yin earth, and yin governs blood — earth meets earth, and at this time it cannot bear it, so blood is vomited out. That is why he vomits blood in the middle of the night! Daytime belongs to qi, night belongs to blood, and he vomits blood at midnight.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: You understand what I mean? These two (the channel flow method and the five-part division) are not quite the same. This one (the five-part division) we use when treating disease, when an organ disease breaks out. But for prediction, the disease announces itself two years ahead — for example, you see liver cancer now; why did you not come to me two years ago? What happened two years ago? Two or three years ago you could not sleep from one to three at night. How do I know? Because the beginning of every disease — all diseases start by entering through the channels, the skin, the superficial sections — this is the flow of the channels. Why must we know it? When something happens in the channel flow, the inside does not necessarily have disease yet, but the body already knows. Think about it: if we act at the level of the channels, is that not the superior doctor treating disease before it arises? Then how could the problem ever appear?

Waking at 3 a.m. or 5 a.m.: the channels are sending you a message

This passage is Doctor Ni’s signature clinical experience, and the most practical part of the lecture:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Westerners do not understand this — they do not care; their medicine is one same drug, that chemotherapy management, so they all die. We predict that a disease will break out — very accurate, very accurate. Sometimes you say: Teacher, strange — every night at three in the morning I wake up and cannot sleep until five. That does not necessarily mean your lung is diseased; it means your lung channel has a problem. Because the channel flow reaches there — there is a problem. The channel has a problem while the organ has not yet broken out, so waking at two or three is the omen. These two are separate.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: That is the first point. Second, when it reaches holding level, that is when we cry for help — a liver cancer patient vomits blood, or calls me, or whatever — that is all right. When the disease is rising is not the time to treat; we wait for the disease to retreat, that is the time to treat, when treating organ disease. When the channel has disease, that means we knew two or three years ago by prediction.

Channel disease is needled at the ying-spring point: the master’s tradition versus the Zhen Jiu Jia Yi Jing

When the channel is diseased, how do you place the needle? Doctor Ni explains the rules of his school:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Teacher, when the channel is diseased, according to what was handed down from our masters, we needle the ying-spring point; the Zhen Jiu Jia Yi Jing (The Systematic Classic of Acupuncture and Moxibustion) says to needle the fish point — it does not matter, really; both are good, and in the clinic I do both. And regarding the shang ji and zhong ji (upper and middle landmarks — the stomach duct) we will speak of later — what the Huang Di Nei Jing speaks of is Qi Bo’s Zhongwan (CV12) of the stomach. Why do I needle Juque (CV14)? Because the Zhongwan point of the stomach is connected with the heart — the collaterals link in pairs. When a febrile heart disease affects the stomach, I need to treat the stomach, so I needle the stomach (Zhongwan); when there is no stomach reaction — chest pain, heart disease without a stomach response — then needle Juque. Shang ji and zhong ji mean the same thing. Acupuncture is very alive.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: If you are rigid — Teacher, I must needle his ying-spring point — and you look and see the man’s ying-spring point is cleanly cut off, there is no ying-spring point. Why? He had a car accident on his toes, and the jing-well point is gone. You say, Teacher, he has no jing-well point, we cannot needle — this patient is really annoying, is he testing me? People must be flexible! Time can be adjusted — a person’s time can be set. This is how we fix it with acupuncture: the double-hour can be adjusted back. Of course we can also use herbs; we can also feed the channels.

And what if there is no needle at hand? Doctor Ni casually teaches a “finger acupuncture” technique:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Teacher, this man wakes up every night at three, at five — does he have some disease? Did he catch a chill, or did a membrane break? And there is no needle, right? Then massage his lung channel — Zhongfu (LU1), Yunmen (LU2), pressing down along the bone, pressing on the point as you sleep. Massage the lung channel, using the finger as the needle. Look how long the deficiency has lasted: if a month, push along the channel upward; if two or three days or a week, push against the channel downward. That is flexibility. When you have a weapon in your hand, you must use it flexibly — a person cannot be too rigid, understand? You cannot be rigid, insisting on exactly this and nothing else, holding your mind so stiffly. Later we will also speak of: what is a sage, what is a wise man — the clever ones are like two fine horses, easy to guide; the bad horses do not listen to you at all — the rigid mind, however you explain, will not open — that is a poor-quality horse.

The route of disease: body hair → collaterals → channels → fu organs → zang organs

From the Pi Bu Lun, Doctor Ni draws a map of how disease enters:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: From here we know: because all the channels are the beginning of every disease and the sections of the skin, any disease must arise at the skin and body hair. That is why acupuncture speaks of the twelve channels — acupuncture talks about the flow of qi and blood, after all; and the five-part division — for internal medicine disease, we use the five-part division. Now you understand? When evil strikes a person, the cou li (interstices) open, and the disease evil enters and lodges in the collaterals. When it has lodged in the collaterals — did we not speak of the Ci Nü Lun (Malaria chapter) before? You can take that malaria with alternating fever and chills of eighty days — we bind the fingers, and in the early morning — say he starts his malaria attack at seven; at six we bind them, and you see the collaterals bulging there; let out those blue vessels, squeeze the blood out, and it is done.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: You say, Teacher, nowadays (with technology) — never mind that; we are speaking of things several thousand years old, and of course they still work today! And if you have no herbs, what then? One day you go exploring in the mountains, no herbs at all, and suddenly a companion — right? — that companion is vomiting and purging, and at night at the fixed time he has chills and fever — you can do it: take a rope. No rope? Bind the hand with a vine! A person must be flexible. No rope at all? Teacher, I just cannot do it — then tear your clothes and throw them at him. Teacher, that is not a rope, I must have a rope. You are not — the mind must be used two ways; do not let them be rigid, be alive!

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Then, flowing but not leaving — if the disease in the collaterals is not cured, if you do not heal it, it moves onto the channels; flowing on the channels without leaving, and at that point it transmits into the fu organs. First it reaches the fu — the fu are our digestive system: the gallbladder, small intestine, stomach, large intestine, bladder. So a liver patient has periods of frequent vomiting, and at such times diarrhea, sometimes constipation — the large intestine is bad, the stomach is bad. If at the fu level you still do not meet a physician who treats you, it goes deeper — it enters the zang organs and runs inside them.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: So, the evil first enters at the skin — this character reads “li ran,” the body hair — that is, the fine hairs stand on end. Suddenly your body hairs stand to attention; that opens the cou li, and the evil enters the collaterals — we say the collaterals fill. When it enters the collaterals, we see the color of the collaterals turn especially vivid, changed. For example, there is a disease called Raynaud’s — the hands and feet, the fingertips and joints, all ice-cold, as if the fingers were set in ice; you touch them as if the fingers were in ice, the person cannot warm them at all, the whole thing is ice, and blue-violet — when those fingers touch you, they really are like five blocks of ice — this is disease on the collaterals, right? Then let the blood out.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: And if the person is already wasted and dry, without strength, do not let blood — when the disease is on the body it is like this, and so on. So this is the discrimination of the condition — we know it is in the collaterals, it enters the channels, and as it grows more and more severe, it runs into the organs.

Too much cold injures the sinews, too much heat dissolves the bone

When the disease evil enters the sinews and bones, cold and heat each do their own damage:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: If it arises in the collaterals and lodges in the sinews — if it stops at cold and heat, too much cold — page 440, the last paragraph at the bottom, two characters: when cold is abundant, the cold qi, if it runs into the sinews, injures them and causes cramps, and the bones ache — sinews and bones are connected. The middle sinew — that is the ligament between our bones — the ligament, between the bones there are ligaments, and the ligament is our middle sinew; and the house of the middle sinew — we introduced it before (in the Mai Yao Jing Wei Lun): the knee is the house of the sinews. If heat transmits inward instead, the heat reaches beside the bone, beside the sinew and bone, and the sinews wither and the bone dissolves — the bone digests, is damaged; the bone becomes osteoporotic, not hard enough; the sinews have no strength; the flesh — the muscle withers and atrophies; the skin and flesh easily ulcerate; and the hair falls out.

Pi zhe mai zhi bu: if you do not treat it, major disease follows

Page 442, the Yellow Emperor asks: when the twelve sections of the skin (the twelve channels) are diseased, what happens? Qi Bo’s answer, Doctor Ni gives the finishing stroke of the whole chapter:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Any person’s disease comes gradually, gradually into the body. Pi zhe, mai zhi bu — the skin is the spread of the pulse. When the disease evil is at the skin, the interstices of the flesh open, opening the way for the evil, and it enters deeper. At first it lodges on the collaterals; when the collaterals are full, when the lodging evil fills them and has nowhere else to run, it moves into the channels; so step by step it eats into your body; when the channels are full, it shoots into the fu and zang organs. So the skin has its sections — bu yu er sheng da bing (if you do not treat it, major disease follows). What does “bu yu er sheng da bing” mean? It means: if from the skin section you do not cure it, and let it develop all the way, then major disease is born. The other way around: if you cure it at the skin, no major disease will arise — that is the meaning.

At this point, Doctor Ni, as usual, takes a knock at Western medicine:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Now that you understand where disease comes from, do you still want to defend him (the Western drug companies)? At least Western medicine people still do not know where disease comes from — they do not understand it. So I always laugh at the Western drug companies’ products — their theory: because they do not understand yin-yang, because they do not understand cold-heat; they understand exterior-interior, that is why they dissect; they understand exterior-interior, and they also understand deficiency-excess — and they have laxatives, and iron preparations, magnesium preparations, tonics, IV drips, nutrition — they know cold (heat?) and they know deficiency-excess. But because they do not know cold-heat, and do not know yin-yang, when you do not know cold-heat and do not know yin-yang, the actions you take turn out exactly opposite to curing the disease — you think you are treating it, but in fact you are doing the reverse.

Closing: the Jing Luo Lun opens — why the collaterals have five different colors

At the very end of this lecture, Doctor Ni opens Chapter Fifty-Seven, the Jing Luo Lun (Channels and Collaterals):

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: The Emperor asks: among the collaterals, their five colors all differ — at the extremities of the hands and feet; the collaterals are all at the extremities, you will not find a collateral on the body trunk — they are certainly at the four extremities, at the sides of the hands and feet. And the five colors differ — blue, yellow, white, black, red all differ — why? Qi Bo says: when the channels have fixed colors — the great channels: the hand taiyin lung channel belongs to (metal), the Yangming channel (belongs to) the large intestine; the channels are long, and their colors are fixed; the collaterals have no fixed color, they change color — the collaterals lie closer to the outside of the body. And as for yin and yang? The color of the yin collaterals answers to their (parent) channel — the color of the yang collaterals changes without fixity, following the four seasons.

Compiled from Doctor Ni Haixia’s Ren Ji (Human Records) lecture series on the Huang Di Nei Jing (Lecture 62), presented by Doctor Luo Dalun.