Treating Winter Diseases in Summer and Dressing Appropriately in Spring and Autumn
Traditional Chinese medicine features an interesting method of health preservation and disease prevention: treating winter ailments in summer. That is, during summer—the peak of yang energy—treatment is conducted to boost internal yang and expel accumulated cold. This helps reduce or prevent the recurrence of conditions like asthma, chronic bronchitis in the elderly, arthritis, and stomach disorders during winter.
Traditional Chinese medicine also teaches people to dress warmly in spring and allow cold exposure in autumn. The author further explains, from a meteorological perspective, why, despite both being transitional seasons with fluctuating temperatures, spring requires warmth while autumn demands cold exposure.
The reason lies in the opposite temperature trends between spring and autumn: spring warms up, while autumn cools down. Due to China’s cold winters and hot summers, temperature changes in spring and autumn are extremely rapid. Indoor temperatures lag behind outdoor changes because of the thermal inertia of buildings, resulting in significant indoor-outdoor temperature differences. Thus, in spring, returning indoors from outdoors (especially from sunny warmth) without additional clothing (“spring dressing”) can lead to catching colds, especially among the elderly and weak. Conversely, in autumn, since indoor spaces are warm, entering indoors requires fewer clothes—this is “autumn cold exposure.”
In fact, ancient Chinese mansions could maintain considerable indoor-outdoor temperature differences even in summer. Entering a cool room from a hot environment easily leads to illness, historically known as “yin summer.” Symptoms such as headache, chills, stiffness, joint pain, and restlessness are quite distressing. Such illnesses rarely occur elsewhere in the world because extreme indoor-outdoor temperature differences are unique to China’s climate. Thus, the traditional Chinese medicine and health culture formed under China’s special climate has greatly enriched the depth of traditional Chinese medicine, and China’s TCM theories and practices have made significant contributions to global medicine.