Dizziness: Causes, When to Worry, and the TCM View

Four things called dizziness

English uses one word for at least four different experiences, and Chinese does the same with 头晕. The distinction is the single most useful thing on this page, because each type points somewhere different — and two of the four are rarely a pattern question at all.

What the patterns describe

What the traditional account is describing most often is the fourth type: not spinning, not fainting, but a head that will not clear. It is worse in the morning, worse in humid weather, worse after skipping meals or after a long stretch of screen work. People describe it as being 'not quite here', and they are usually still able to work, which is why it gets tolerated for months.

Where a pattern is genuinely useful is in grouping the accompanying signs. If the head is heavy and the tongue coat is greasy, the tradition reads dampness. If the dizziness arrives on standing, with a pale face, palpitations and a light period, it reads blood deficiency. If it comes with a tight headache, irritability and rib-side tension that track stress, it reads liver constraint. If it comes with high-pitched tinnitus, a sore lower back and night heat, it reads kidney deficiency.

These groupings do not identify a cause in the Western sense, and they are not meant to. What they do is organise a set of complaints that otherwise get treated as one vague thing, and point at different lifestyle measures — which is the limit of what a website can responsibly offer.

Which patterns it belongs to

These are the patterns this symptom is conventionally grouped under. They are not competing diagnoses — most people meet one, and the point of the list is to show you which questions separate them.

The signs behind it

Each line below is one entry in the sign table — the same table the self-check draws its follow-up questions from. The tier says how strongly that sign points at the pattern: a defining sign is expected, a common one is usual, a supporting one is optional.

• Dizziness Blood deficiencydefining ·Liver yang risingdefining ·Phlegmcommon ·Kidney yin deficiencycommon ·Liver yin deficiencycommon ·Liver qi stagnationsupporting
• Dizziness or blurred vision on standing Blood deficiencydefining ·Qi deficiencycommon ·Kidney yang deficiencycommon ·Kidney yin deficiencysupporting ·Spleen yang deficiencysupporting ·Liver yang risingsupporting
• Dizziness with a sense of heaviness Phlegmdefining ·Dampnesscommon
• Head heavy, feet light, unsteady Liver yang risingdefining ·Liver yin deficiencysupporting

Not every sign listed here will apply to you — a sign only counts alongside the others. The self-check is the place to weigh them against your own answers.

Telling them apart

Four questions do most of the work. Each one splits the field in half, and after two or three the pattern is usually clear enough to act on — or clear enough to know that the answer is medical rather than traditional.

What you can do at home

None of this treats a named condition, and none of it replaces assessment. These are the ordinary measures attached to this symptom — low risk, and worth doing while you work out what is actually going on.

• Stand up in stages: sit on the edge of the bed for thirty seconds before rising, and avoid the sudden bend-and-straighten that produces most bathroom near-faints.
• Drink water through the day rather than in one go, and do not skip breakfast. A large share of 'dizzy in the morning' is simply low intake plus a long night.
• If head movement reliably triggers spinning, stop testing it. The manoeuvres that treat positional vertigo are specific and are done by a clinician; doing them from a video is a common way to make things worse.
• For the dull-head type, the traditional measures are ordinary: less raw and cold food, regular meals, twenty minutes of walking, a dehumidifier in a damp bedroom, and a consistent sleep time.
• Write down when it happens for two weeks — time of day, what you had eaten, what you were doing. This is more useful to any clinician, traditional or conventional, than a description from memory.

Classical sources

Quoted in the original, with our own translation and the chapter it comes from. We do not reproduce existing English translations — they are someone else's reading.

Later physicians — Zhu Danxi on phlegm, Zhang Jingyue on deficiency — are often quoted on dizziness in modern textbooks. They are named here as historical positions rather than quoted, because we have not yet checked the passages against a primary text.

Terms used on this page

One concept, several names. The standard term comes first; pinyin and characters are there so you can search and cross-check; older aliases are what you will meet in other people's writing.