Internal Wind vs. External Wind

🔊An earlier lesson in this unit described wind as an external excess — something that invades from outside, often riding in alongside cold or dampness, and behaving the way actual wind behaves: sudden, shifting, rarely alone. Chinese medicine also describes a second, entirely different kind of wind that has nothing to do with weather at all: internal wind, generated inside the body itself, usually as the result of some other imbalance reaching an extreme.

🔊Internal wind is most often linked to an excess of yang or a severe deficiency of yin in the liver, since the liver's smooth, upward-moving qi, when it runs completely unchecked, is said to stir into the same kind of sudden, shifting movement associated with wind generally. The symptoms traditionally linked to internal wind reflect this: dizziness, tremor, and in severe cases, sudden collapse or convulsion — movement-based, "wind-like" symptoms generated from within, rather than caught from without.

🔊The distinction matters because the two require completely different responses. External wind is addressed by expelling the invading excess before it settles in further. Internal wind is addressed by correcting the underlying imbalance — the excess yang or deficient yin — that's generating the wind-like movement in the first place. Treating them the same way, simply because both share the label "wind," would miss that one is an intruder to be removed and the other is a symptom of something already present that has gotten out of hand.