Chinese Medical Palmistry: Your Health in Your Hand

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 204 pages
• Published by: Blue Poppy Press July 1995
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0936185643
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0936185644
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.8 inches
• Weighs: 14.1 ounces

Alternative Medicine, Oct/Nov. 1998
"In traditional Chinese medicine, examination of parts of the body, such as the tongue or fingernails, can provide valuable information about the health status of the whole individual. According to a venerated Chinese medical text, "if something happens in the interior of the body, it must be reflected in the exterior of the body."

While fingernail analysis is a complex and richly detailed diagnostic art, taking into account shape, size, color, appearance, and strength, Xiao-fan Zong and Gary Liscum, authors of Chinese Medical Palmistry: Your Health in Your Hand (Blue Poppy Press, 1995) offer the following self-help guidelines.

WHITE Fingernails: When the fingernail appears pale, white, and without luster, this can indicate anemia, or what acupuncturists call "blood vacuity". This denotes a lack of vitality and life force in the blood associated with specific organs, and sometimes literally a shortage of blood."

White, waxy fingernails can also indicate ulcerative bleeding or the presence of hookworm or other parasitic infestation, which produces a chronic loss of blood. Tiny white speckles appearing under the fingernails suggest a possible deficiency of calcium or zinc, the activity of intestinal parasites, chronic constipation, or a state of fatigue. A single horizontal white line crossing the nail is typically associated with lead or arsenic poisoning.

Book Description
This book is an introduction to Chinese medical diagnosis through inspecting the hands in general and the fingernails in particular. In Chinese medicine, it is believed that every part of the body is a hologram. This means that there is a map of the entire body on each part of the body and that changes in one area of the body can indicate disease processes in another area of the body. This book begins with a brief history of Chinese medical palmistry. This is followed two books. Book one discusses the basic anatomy of the hand and then the indications of various shapes of the hands, fingers, fingernails, palm, and mounds and lines on the palm. Book one ends with a discussion of chronology and the palm, i.e., when things did or will happen. Book two discusses one particular theory about diagnosis based on looking at just the fingernails. Various qi and blood signs are explained and then these are correlated with the ten fingernails and their indications. Book two ends with a discussion of specific diseases and their manifestations in the fingernails. In addition, there are two appendices. Appendix one discusses how to make palm prints, while appendix two discusses the eight trigrams and Chinese palmistry. There is general index which makes this book even easier to use, especially for busy clinicians.

Reader Reviews
In Chinese medical lore, every feature of the body is believed to contain a kind of hologram of the entire organism, just as Western medicine asserts that each cell contains the genetic code of the entire body. For centuries, Chinese medical practitioners believed that health and disease could be accurately diagnosed from an examination of the shape of the hand, the mounds and lines on the palm, and the fingernails. In Chinese Medical Palmistry, the authors have compiled a number of Chinese sourced information drawing from their extensive skills and experience as an American acupuncturist and a professional Chinese translator. Chinese Medical Palmistry is designed for use by professional health care practitioners (acupuncturists, chiropractors, naturopaths, and medical doctors) to aid them in their diagnosis of patients. It also has a great deal of value for non-specialist general readers with an interest in alternative medicine, their own constitutions, and curiosity as to their own health as reflected and revealed in their own hands. Comment | | (Report this)