Chinese Medicine

Yellow tongue is a common pathological tongue, which can be seen in some healthy people as well. Before a tongue diagnosis, please keep in mind that don’t clean your tongue coating with tongue scrapers or tongue cleaners even though you have yellow tongue bad breath or white tongue bad breath. Otherwise, it might mislead the doctors and probably give the opposite conclusion.

Yellow tongue diagnosis

Yellow tongue in healthy people is mostly with thin yellow tongue coating or thin yellow greasy tongue coating. The chance of suffering from thick yellow greasy tongue coating increases with increasing age.

Please take a look at the tongue photo. The colors of yellow tongue can be light yellow, tender yellow, deep yellow and brown yellow etc. The tongue coating locates mostly in the middle or root of the tongue and sometimes it can cover the whole tongue body.

Just as noted, yellow mixed with other colors such as white can be seen in a tongue at the same time. While in different cases, the coatings can be thick or thin, moist or dry, and greasy or putrid.

Ancient document about yellow tongue

It is believed that coated tongue are closely related to interior heat. The tongue coating turns yellow due to the scorch by pathogenic heat, in which light yellow indicates light heat, deep yellow indicates heavy heat, and brown yellow indicates knotted heat. So a lot of times yellow tongue, tongue sore and tongue ulcers can be seen at the same time. In addition, due to the heat inside, in many occasions yellow tongue can be the bad breath tongue and dry mouth tongue simultaneously. However, it is worthy to note that they do not necessarily show together always.

From Bai Jian Bian Zheng • Huang Tai Zhong Lun:

Usually yellow tongue is associated with excessive heat syndrome in superficies or interior, while it can not be seen in deficient cold syndrome in superficies or interior.

Yellow tongue

Tongue coating turning from white to yellow in exogenous diseases indicates superficies pathogens involving interior and transforming into heat, which belongs to Yang Ming in Shang Han, while Qifen in Wen Bing.

But it can be seen in superficies syndromes and deficient cold syndromes as well.

• Light yellow tongue mixed with thin white coating indicates that wind-heat superficies syndrome or superficies wind-cold transforming into heat.
• Light yellow tongue with thick coating or yellow hairy tongue indicates that dampness-heat in the thoracic cavity and Qi stagnation.
• Tender, enlarged yellow tongue with greasy moist coating indicates that Yang deficiency and internal stagnation of fluid-dampness.

Basically yellow tongue hosts interior, but it is not necessarily true.

The causes for yellow tongue and indicated diseases

Modern research about the causes of yellow tongue:

• Yellow tongue is associated with elevated body temperature;
• Yellow tongue is associated with inflammation and infection;
• Yellow tongue is associated with gastrointestinal dysfunction;
• Yellow tongue is associated with micro-organisms in tongue coating.

In short, the researchers believe that yellow tongue relates most with inflammation and infection, which leads to gastrointestinal dysfunction.

The elements including:

• Filiform papillae proliferation in local tongue;
• Reduction of salivary secretion;
• Tinting locally;
• The focal inflammatory exudation;
• Color producing micro-organisms.

Treatments for yellow tongue

Yellow tongue hosts gastrointestinal dysfunction, interior syndromes and heat syndromes.

But yellow tongue is usually accompanied with a lot of other symptoms, which can be seen in many diseases clinically. So the condition for patients with yellow tongue is very complex, which should be treated according to syndrome differentiation. Once again, before a tongue diagnosis, please don’t clean the tongue coating with a tongue cleaner or tongue scraper. Leaving it what it is will help a doctor to better understand what it is tipping off.