Why Is My Child Pale-Blue Around the Nose and Mouth, Always Sick, and Hard to Calm Down? Chinese Color Diagnosis (Se Zhen) and the Hidden Role of Family Atmosphere

Opening: In Chinese medicine, observation comes first

Chinese medicine diagnoses through observation, listening, questioning and pulse-taking (wang wen wen qie) — and of the four, observation ranks first.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: There is an old saying in Chinese medicine: “One who sees and knows is a sage.” Seeing a person and knowing at once what is wrong with him — that is reaching the level of divine insight. The full saying goes: “One who sees and knows is a sage; one who hears and knows is a saint; one who asks and knows is a craftsman; one who feels the pulse and knows is a skilled hand.” The ancients placed observation at the very top. And it makes sense — the moment a patient walks in, you look at him: his spirit, his build, his color, his tongue. Today I want to talk specifically about reading the color of the face — this is called color diagnosis (se zhen).

Why do I know something about this? Because in Beijing there is a great master of Chinese medicine named Wang Hongmo, and he is a master of color diagnosis.

A master at a glance: Wang Hongmo reads everyone in the room

Back when I was working on my doctorate, I once attended a meeting where Mr. Wang served as a reviewer for the National Natural Science Foundation. When he spoke about his research on color, I found it fascinating.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Later I helped start the TV program Yang Sheng Tang — as many of you know, I was one of its founders and served as editor-in-chief. At the time I made a vow: I would invite real experts to explain Chinese medicine on television. Otherwise the first old man off the street who claims to teach health tips would mislead the public. We had to go back to the source. So I thought of many senior masters — such as Wang Qi and others I knew well — and among them was Wang Hongmo.

I remember the day we first brought Mr. Wang to the offices of Beijing Television. Six or seven young producers sat in the room, none of them with much knowledge of Chinese medicine. I said: “Mr. Wang, please take a look at everyone.”

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: I remember it vividly. Everyone sat in a circle, and Mr. Wang’s eyes swept across the faces — two or three seconds on each person. When he finished, he went around the room naming each person’s problem. He told one woman: “Your periods are irregular; you really need to regulate them.” The woman gasped: “Oh my goodness, that’s incredible — I really do have irregular periods.” Then he turned to a man, our deputy editor: “Drink less. You drink too much — damp-heat is building up in your body.” The man laughed and whispered in my ear: “Nobody knows I like to drink — how did he know?” He never drank during the day, but every night before bed he finished a bottle of beer. A true drinker. And Mr. Wang saw it all from a single glance at his face.

After I posted about this on Weibo, a producer from Beijing Television who had been in the room commented that she remembered the scene vividly — Mr. Wang was truly extraordinary. What does that tell you? His skill runs very deep.

A family craft: standing at the gate reading the faces of passersby

From then on Mr. Wang and I became close, and I often asked him: how did you learn this skill?

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: He said it isn’t mysterious at all. It is all written clearly in the Huang Di Nei Jing (Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine) — Chinese medicine just doesn’t pass it on much anymore. People no longer study it, that’s one reason. Second, part of this skill is training a kind of feeling that can only be understood by direct experience, not explained in words. So in the old days it was passed down strictly within the family. He told me that when he was five or six years old, his father took him to stand at their family gate and watch the people coming and going on the street: “Look at the color of that person’s face. Look at the color in that part of the face.” That is how he trained. Think about it — that is family transmission: generation after generation of Chinese medicine built up one small practice at a time. He told me that when he looks at a person now, everyone else sees a normal face, but he sees a “painted” face — this region reflects the small intestine, this region the large intestine, this region the lungs, this region the liver — each with its own color.

Mr. Wang was especially kind to me and often guided me. “Look at this person’s complexion, at this spot — is something there? Honestly, this really takes training.” That is how he inherited it. He says that atmosphere of family transmission no longer exists — now everyone studies in school, and the parts that can only be conveyed by direct experience are gradually being lost. Color diagnosis is very hard to pass down — that is the pity of it. That is why Mr. Wang writes books and appears on television programs (you can find many videos of him online): he wants to pass the tradition on.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: What moved me most is that Mr. Wang is a genuinely good person, kind to everyone — a model for us all. After he finished taping a show and left, we talked about him: the station leaders said, “Now that’s someone from a great family, a cultivated household — he carries an air of nobility.” He stands perfectly straight, he doesn’t fidget while talking to you, and when he says goodbye he stops, turns around and waves. His bearing and speech are utterly refined. There is much to learn from him.

The faint blue around a child’s nose and mouth: liver wood overpowering spleen earth

I benefited enormously from time with Mr. Wang. I never formally became his disciple, but a sentence or two of guidance from a master is worth a great deal. Let me give you a very typical example.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Once, before a lecture, a family heard I was coming and brought their child to see me. There were five or six family members, and they carried a little boy of three or four — terribly thin, skin and bones, clearly developing poorly. The grandmother held him in her arms and begged me to treat him on the spot — but I was about to go on stage and couldn’t. As I explained this to them, I noticed a striking feature on the child’s face: around his nose and mouth, the skin showed a faint ring of pale blue. His complexion was displaying a color that stood out from normal.

Why? In Chinese medicine we say the five organs correspond to five colors:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: The liver corresponds to blue-green, the heart to red, the lungs to white, the kidneys to black, and the spleen to yellow. When an organ changes, the surface of the skin shows the corresponding color. For example, a person whose spleen is very weak has a withered, sallow face — that dry yellow color tells you at a glance the spleen is deficient. If the face carries a faint, hidden blue-green, that corresponds to the liver and likely relates to emotion — the liver governs free flow (zhu shu xie), and constrained liver qi (gan qi bu shu) shows up on the face. If liver fire is blazing, the face turns red. What does blue-green mean? Liver qi stagnation — the emotion is not flowing, and this is how it appears.

And why does it gather around the nose and mouth?

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: The nose sits at the center of the face — the nose tip corresponds to the spleen and stomach. As for the mouth, the spleen opens into the mouth (pi kai qiao yu kou) — so the mouth area also belongs to the spleen-stomach system. That ring of faint blue around nose and mouth is liver wood overpowering spleen earth (gan mu ke pi tu): bad emotion is on the verge of injuring the digestion, and it has surrounded the spleen-stomach region. This is a very typical finding — especially typical in children.

So I told the family: “I can’t treat the child right now, but I can tell you this — the fact that he develops so poorly and keeps falling ill may well be connected to the atmosphere in your home. Go home and think it over carefully. Hold a family meeting. If you can improve the atmosphere at home, it will do enormous good for the child’s recovery. For any other illness, please see a local doctor.”

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Later that family went to another doctor. The moment they walked in they said, “Doctor Luo saw our child — he said our family atmosphere is bad.” The doctor asked: “Is your family atmosphere really that bad? Was Doctor Luo right?” It turned out the child’s parents fought every single day and were on the verge of divorce. That doctor posted about it on Weibo and tagged me. I knew at once — indeed, the family atmosphere was the problem. People may not realize it, but a child’s illness can be caused by all kinds of negative emotions inside the family, and it shows up on the face. The face is only the entry point; the final diagnosis is a psychological one — the conflicts inside the family. Some people find this spooky. People who are hostile to Chinese medicine may say: isn’t this fortune-telling? No — it is experience. I have seen far too many such cases.

The restaurant child who screamed and convulsed — and went quiet only while doing magic tricks

Let me give you another example. A parent kept emailing me, saying her child absolutely had to be seen — the child screamed strangely every day and could not fall asleep until late at night. She was at her wit’s end.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: The child had seen countless doctors and nothing helped. The emails kept coming, so finally I agreed to see him. It happened at a restaurant near my home in Beijing — it wasn’t meal time, so few people were there. The child came in and, every ten or twenty seconds, shook all over and screamed at the top of his lungs — wild shouts like Bruce Lee. It was terrifying. The few customers left in the restaurant all fled. What was wrong with him? Western medicine couldn’t treat it; Chinese medicine couldn’t treat it; nobody could. I couldn’t even take his pulse — he was completely out of control.

Then I noticed one thing: the mother said the boy loved magic tricks — when he was doing magic, he was calm. So I asked him to show me a trick. While he performed, he didn’t scream. The moment he finished, he started screaming again every ten seconds or so.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: I judged that this had little to do with the body — it was the emotion inside that was driving it. I also looked at his complexion: his face carried a faint hidden blue-green tinge. So I said this illness was connected to the family atmosphere, to the relationships inside the family. The mother didn’t say anything in front of the child, but afterward she emailed me: there was trouble at home — the couple had divorced, and she was raising the child alone. Her own emotions were probably shattered, and all that negativity had been transferred onto the child. When the child fell ill, she collapsed — she couldn’t work, she had no income, and in the end she asked me whether she should send the child to a welfare home. She simply couldn’t cope. As for how that child fared later, I never found out. Because even if I wrote a prescription, I felt this illness was not easy to treat — the root was too deep. It seemed an unsolvable problem. The divorce had already happened; the damage was enormous.

The sudden realization in a special light

There are so many cases like this. I remember a mother who brought her child to ask about a health problem that was genuinely hard to analyze — I could not find where the illness came from; there was very little diagnostic evidence.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: The child’s face was simply a bit pale — no more information than that. Then at one moment — in a certain angle of the light — I suddenly saw that the child’s face carried a faint blue-green tinge. The light went on: this is color diagnosis! Sometimes you only see it under special conditions. Standing together you’d say everyone’s face looks normal, but shift the angle, shift the light, and suddenly one person’s face reveals something abnormal — everyone else is normal, only he is not, which means it has diagnostic value. I felt at once: this is about emotion.

And what are children’s negative emotions tied to? First, academic pressure. Second, tension and conflict at home.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Let’s start with schoolwork. Many parents, hoping their child will excel, pile on the pressure — “you must rank in the top whatever,” “look how well so-and-so’s child does.” Some send their children to those experimental schools with brutal demands — I’ve heard of schools that hold a whole-grade exam every single week, and rank every student every single week. Some children aren’t strong students to begin with; the parents pull strings to force them in — compared with the children who got in on merit, their grades are bound to be at the bottom, and every week they rank dead last on the big board. How much pressure is that? Such children are not healthy. I’ve seen children like this. If you truly love your child, take him out of that school and put him in one where he can play and relax. That’s the first issue — schoolwork.

Then there’s family conflict. In some families the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law are locked in rivalry: at dinner the wife puts food on the son’s plate, and the mother-in-law thinks, “I raised my son all his life — how dare he let her feed him? I’m furious.” She can’t stand her daughter-in-law, the subtext drips from every sentence, and the wife quarrels with the son too. Bad mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relations causing children to fall ill — I see an enormous number of these cases.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Then there are couples in conflict — some families even wait until the child starts school to divorce, “just getting by” for now. Do you think the child doesn’t feel it? I used to think Chinese medicine didn’t address how sensitive children are to emotion. Traditionally, Chinese medicine regarded children as bodies of pure yang — fix the spleen and stomach, treat the colds and lung-channel problems, and that’s that. But now we see illnesses caused by emotion are more numerous. The child feels every bit of tension in the home. Do you think you hide it well? Every tone of your voice, every sideways glance — the child registers it all. Children are naturally joyful, but in that atmosphere they feel unwell — the more sensitive the child, the more easily wounded.

I often give lectures and write articles on this, and the comments section fills with people saying: “Now my body is a mess, and thinking back, it goes back to the atmosphere in my childhood home — my parents fighting, my father coming home drunk every night…” People reflect as adults, and yes — many of today’s physical problems trace back to the family environment of childhood.

Family: the cradle — or the pathogen

So I say: family can be the cradle that lets you grow up healthy and happy; and family can also brew the negative emotions that make you ill — a root, a giant pathogen.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: I’ve seen too many examples. I am currently working on a book that traces how the negative emotions a child suffers while growing up produce physical illness, and draws the connections. Because most doctors today — when treating children, they don’t recognize any of this; it’s already a lot if they can handle a cold. The modern medical system pays too little attention to children’s psychological problems, and has built almost no connection between childhood psychological problems and the physical illnesses they cause. One day people will understand — there are strange diseases beyond imagination. So let me draw the connection for you: when people ask me about a child’s illness, usually it’s a cold — but behind the cold there is often a reason. Why does this child always catch colds? There must be a reason, and digging can go very deep. Beyond colds, all kinds of strange diseases — my whole approach is to truly regulate the child’s body. You should know that almost every childhood illness traces back to the family — even food stagnation from overeating is tied to the habits of the household.

That’s why, when I see a child, I ask the whole family to come if possible — including the grandparents — so I can observe the relationships: everyone’s complexion, everyone’s tone of voice, then the child’s complexion. All of this is necessary for diagnosis.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Once the root of the problem is found, I ask the family to hold a meeting: do we really want what’s best for the child? If we do, what adjustment should each of us make? This is the essential step — adjust the heart (tiao xin). Why? People may not see the connection. Once you see it, you start reflecting on your own life: what is there that must be fought over? What is there that must be looked down on? Everyone has his own karma; everyone has a reason to exist. Since fate brought you together as a family, you should treasure that fate. Think about it — in the vast universe, light takes only 0.13 seconds to circle the Earth, and 12 billion light-years to reach the edge of the known universe. In that immensity, our Earth is less than a speck of dust. In billions of years of evolution, humanity is a tiny instant — and within that instant, your life and mine are an infinitesimal moment. That you have come together in this one moment is destiny — why fight? A mother-in-law and daughter-in-law should be hugging each other before it’s too late — she is already old, you are young, the time you overlap is short, and what a karma it is.

I keep explaining this principle from the Dao De Jing: treasure the karma, respect one another, send out kind intentions, and learn to repay resentment with kindness (bao yuan yi de). You hate me, I love you; you hate me, I love you — keep feeding kindness back, and slowly it becomes a cycle of love. Everyone must adjust — for the child’s sake, too. This is what a family must do to move forward. Do this, and you are happy, the family is happy, and the child is happy.

Color diagnosis is only a clue

Today we began with color diagnosis, but the real topic is the connection between a child’s physical illness and the atmosphere of the home. It’s a long chain — but the change in the face is only one small detail of the diagnosis, a single thread.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: In truth, the effects of family change on a child’s body appear in every aspect of the child — the tongue, the pulse, his movements, his expressions, his tone of voice, the way he lives. It all shows; no one has simply studied it. And in my telling, color diagnosis is only an entry point. What is the core of these lectures? This: the home environment has an enormous influence on children. To protect your child’s health, you must adjust the environment at home — and that environment is the relationships between the people in the house. Reading faces and voices can reveal far more about the body, and I will share more with you when the chance comes. The “one who sees and knows is a sage” tradition of observation is a vast territory with profound depth — I’ll share it piece by piece.

This article is adapted from Doctor Luo Dalun’s public lectures on Chinese medicine, covering color diagnosis (observation) and the relationship between childhood illness and the family atmosphere.