Still Freezing Cold, Aching Lower Back, Heart Racing After COVID? Doctor Luo Dalun: Watch Out for Blood Stasis (Yu Xue) After a COVID Infection

Opening: this illness is not as simple as we thought

Doctor Luo Dalun opens with the most heart-wrenching thing he has seen lately: everyone is treating this outbreak as an ordinary external-cold illness, so why have so many elderly people in Beijing suddenly developed white lungs? A CT scan shows the lungs turning white, patients slip straight into critical condition, and many elderly people simply pass away. And why do so many young people, once they feel better, suddenly collapse the moment they start exercising?

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Friends, this is exactly what I warned you about long ago — this pandemic produces pronounced blood stasis (yu xue). Today I want to explain the whole thing thoroughly.

How was this discovered? — the clues on the tongue

The discovery came during the lockdown period. Back then Doctor Luo could not see patients domestically, but many friends overseas asked him to help regulate their health — and they had all caught Omicron.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: When I was regulating their health abroad, they said they had recovered, they were fine. But when I looked at their tongues — the sublingual veins had turned thick, dark and swollen; some friends had a purplish-dark tongue body, and some even showed bruise-like spots. I thought, why is this so uniform? So many people have it. It suddenly made me alert: this illness may cause blood stasis. What really distinguishes it from the flu? It does seem to be special — it produces obvious blood stasis.

Where does the blood stasis come from? — the ‘battlefield debris’ left when upright qi fights the pathogen

Researchers are studying this now, including the severe-phase research materials from Wuhan, and a consensus is gradually forming:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: When an external pathogen enters the body, the body rises to fight it — the upright qi (zheng qi) fights back — and during this struggle pathological by-products form. If you let Western medicine look at it, you might see white blood cells clearing away the virus while a large particle clump forms in the middle — something like a protein cluster, quite big. These things travel everywhere with the blood and clog up the fine places, the capillaries. In our Chinese-medicine view, this is blood stasis — the blood flow is not smooth, the capillaries are all blocked.

So sometimes it seems strange: the external pathogen seems to travel along the body, wandering everywhere — where does it stop? Wherever I am weak, there it stops; wherever my body is deficient, there it settles.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: For example, someone says their lower back aches as if it is about to break — the pathogen settles where your qi and blood do not circulate well and triggers a stronger immune reaction there. So some people get lower-back pain, some get severe muscle pain, some get terrible headaches — the qi and blood in the head must be stagnant; some get joint pain; some develop skin rashes, big lumps like hives, even psoriasis-like patches — all of these are places where your circulation is poor, so it gathers there. These are pathological by-products, metabolic debris — the products of local struggle in the body.

Target number one: the heart — the heart governs the blood vessels

Doctor Luo has been watching three organs that are especially vulnerable, and the first is the heart.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Have you noticed that many people ultimately die of myocarditis or heart attack? People think they are better, their fever has broken, so they go exercise, they go running. The other day I read a comment: ‘Wow, two marathon runners of ours agreed to run together, and after the run both of them were gone.’ It was simply that their hearts could not take it — the illness attacks the heart.

Doctor Luo tells of a friend’s personal experience: one evening he felt his heart was not right, thought he was having a heart attack — chest tightness and pain, a feeling of imminent death — and rushed to the hospital. It turned out he had caught COVID. His main symptom was not fever but his heart could not take it.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Why the heart? Because the heart governs the blood vessels (xin zhu xue mai). People who are overweight or whose hearts are already in poor shape are prone to gathering and clotting there, which is why they are in danger. Middle-aged people are also at risk. Friends who usually have some chest tightness or pain — the moment they get infected, quickly take some blood-activating, channel-freeing medicine.

Recommended medicines: Tongxinluo capsules (Yiling Pharmaceutical; it contains many insect-based medicines and is quite good at freeing the channels); Buchang Naoxintong (its main ingredients are astragalus and earth dragon — also for freeing the channels); Xue Fu Zhu Yu Tang also works. On top of the medicine, add some san qi powder (notoginseng); adding a little American ginseng to supplement qi is also fine — just add whatever supplements qi according to the situation.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Pair it with something that activates blood and transforms stasis, to protect the heart. Such people must not do strenuous exercise — don’t say ‘I’m all better now, I’ll go running, I’ll go play ball, I’ll stay up late, I’ll work overtime.’ No strenuous exercise. Protect yourself.

Target number two: the lungs — why the elderly can pass away within minutes

The second target is the lungs. This time many elderly people were caught off guard: the family saw them looking fine at home, the fever broke, everything seemed normal — and then the elderly person was gone within a few minutes. At the hospital they found: the lungs had already turned white — on imaging they were simply white.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: It means the body has already produced a huge amount of inflammatory debris that cannot be expelled. The lungs are full of phlegm — pathological by-products stuck inside with no way out. I think everyone needs to be especially vigilant about this, especially if there are elderly people at home.

So what should be done? Intervene from the very beginning, preferably with Chinese medicine:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Don’t just use ibuprofen — what is that? It is a painkiller. It blocks the transmission of the pain signal — ibuprofen and acetaminophen both do this — so you feel less miserable and the body slowly toughs it out, and in a few days you’re fine on your own. But for elderly people, is the illness really under control? Chinese medicine regulates according to your body.

If you notice these problems in elderly people, give them timely treatment to resolve phlegm, clear heat, and free the lungs, even using methods that push the turbidity out:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: We have Qian Jin Wei Jing Tang (Thousand Gold Reed Rhizome Decoction) — add earth dragon (di long) to it and so on, to push the blood stasis and phlegm turbidity out — only when it can be pushed out can the person get better. At this point it is not just blood stasis — what else? Phlegm, and cold-heat, cold-dampness and so on, all mixed with blood stasis, forming pathological products stuck in the lungs. This is what we need to watch for.

Why are the elderly the majority? The north is more dangerous — in the cold northern season the elderly are already prone to pneumonia; it is the high-incidence season for pneumonia. Open a window for a moment and a gust of wind can give an elderly person with lowered overall function pneumonia. COVID is certainly a trigger and an important factor. The south fares better — the weather is warm, so a wind outside does not immediately turn into pneumonia. That is a climatic advantage.

Target number three: the kidneys — four or five patients dying every day in the dialysis ward

The third target is the kidneys. Why did it draw attention? Because during the Xinjiang outbreak, Doctor Luo exchanged notes with hospital colleagues:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Tumor-ward patients who caught the virus showed no symptoms at all — that is related to their lowered immunity; the body does not attack fiercely, so there is no strong immune reaction. But kidney patients in the dialysis ward could not hold on — four or five died every day, every single day, four or five people passing away each day.

Actually, ordinary colds and external infections can easily trigger nephritis: when the external pathogen arrives at the throat, the body’s struggle produces pathological by-products — infected emboli that travel with the blood: they easily enter the heart and cause myocarditis; they easily enter the joints and cause rheumatism; and very easily they enter the kidneys.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: So many kidney diseases and chronic nephritis are caused by external infections — this is what everyone overlooks. How many people in China have damaged kidneys? About 10% — one in ten people has kidney damage, over a hundred million people! Nobody pays attention to it. According to normal medical requirements, after a cold you should test a urine routine to see if there is anything abnormal in the urine — but nobody says that. Who, after recovering from a cold, goes to check their urine? Most people only discover it during a checkup for something else: ‘Why is there protein in my urine? Why are there red cells?’ — only then do they find the kidneys are damaged.

COVID causes blood stasis so readily that it naturally produces kidney disease — it deposits on the glomerular basement membrane, the body mistakes it for an invading pathogen and attacks, and the attack triggers an immune reaction.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: In Chinese-medicine terms, the external pathogen invades the kidneys, leading to blood stasis; the vessels inside are blocked and there is damp-heat at work — that is usually the pattern. So our treatment is almost always cooling the blood and activating the blood — most kidney patients are treated this way.

What to do? After testing positive, if you feel constant lower-back soreness, abnormal urine, aching weak lower back — go get a urine routine test: if the white blood cell count is high (possible infection), red cells high, or protein above normal, it means the kidneys are somewhat damaged — quickly look up the experience of Doctor Zhao Shaoqin, whom Doctor Luo has lectured about, for treating kidney disease, and use those formulas to resolve the toxin and transform the stasis — then there is no problem.

Despise the enemy strategically, take it seriously tactically

At this point Doctor Luo makes his attitude very clear — strategically you can despise it, tactically you must take it seriously:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: If you completely treat this as a cold, exactly the same as a cold, you are clearly underestimating it. This illness is not as frightening as imagined — most people tough it out in a few days. But tactically we must also respect the enemy: it really is a bit different — this feature of producing blood stasis is distinctly stronger than in other flus. Ordinary external infections do not have this. This is also a characteristic of plagues. After all, it is still a plague — the death rate is no longer that high, but it is extremely contagious; and when an elderly person truly encounters it, they do not get off lightly at all.

How to recognize blood stasis? — feeling extremely cold is not necessarily cold pathogen

To watch out for blood stasis, first learn to recognize it. Some people say they feel extremely cold after infection — everyone says the cold pathogen has arrived. Friends, there is indeed cold pathogen, but actually this cold is not entirely cold — what is it? It is stasis and blockage (yu du).

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: The blockage clogs your deep vessels and all the fine collaterals, so qi and blood cannot reach the body surface, cannot reach the four limbs and hundred bones — and you feel extremely cold. The other day I saw a Chinese-medicine doctor say that when he caught it himself, he was colder than he had ever been in his life. Is there really that much cold pathogen in the outside world? Is the outside temperature really that low? No — you feel cold once it enters the body; does that mean it must be cold pathogen? No. Everyone remember: this cold goes together with blood stasis. When a person’s qi and blood are about to fail, when they cannot circulate, you feel like you are in an ice cave — terribly cold, because the qi and blood can no longer move.

If you feel cold especially severely, you should highly suspect blood stasis. How to respond? Warm the channels and free the collaterals at the same time:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Of course if it is cold pathogen you must warm it — but if qi and blood cannot circulate, that also causes cold, so warming the channels and freeing the collaterals together is fine. Use some tao ren (peach kernel), hong hua (safflower), dan shen (salvia) — steep them or boil them in water — and put in something that disperses cold: some su ye (perilla leaf), some qiang huo and du huo, some bai zhi (angelica root) — all fine. Warming yang plus freeing the collaterals — the effect is much better. This is a method that can help you recover.

Tongue self-check for blood stasis: remember three points

Finally, Doctor Luo sums up the method for recognizing blood stasis into three tongue points that everyone can understand:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Everyone remember, this illness’s characteristic is that it causes blood stasis, and we must stay alert. How do you recognize blood stasis? The sublingual veins have thickened, the tongue color is somewhat purplish, and there are bruise-like spots on the tongue surface and edges — these are all signs of blood stasis.

It is like a cold, like an external infection — but it has its own features. Consider this a heads-up.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: That’s all for today. I talk a little about pandemic matters every day; thank you all for listening. Tomorrow we will continue. Thank you, and see you tomorrow!

Adapted from Doctor Luo Dalun’s pandemic health lecture (special topic: watch out for blood stasis).