Zang Fu organs: Solid and hollow

An organ is a set of functions

臟腑 zàng fǔ

When Chinese medicine says «Spleen» it is not talking about the organ a surgeon removes: it means the capacity to transform food and to hold things in place. That is why someone without an anatomical spleen can have a perfectly working Spleen in this sense.

The name

a function, not a viscus

The territory

a tissue, an opening and an emotion

The channel

the road you reach it by

Common mistake: Arguing about whether the spleen «really» digests. The question is malformed: these are two different maps of the same body.

Two families with two jobs

The solid ones store pure substances and never empty completely; the hollow ones receive, transform and expel, and their virtue is not to retain. From that comes a large rule: solid organs are almost always tonified and hollow ones almost always unblocked.

Solid organs

store: qi, blood, essence, fluids

Hollow organs

transport: food, waste, fluids

Typical solid pathology

deficiency

Typical hollow pathology

obstruction

Common mistake: Tonifying a blocked hollow organ. What it needs is the way opened.

Sort each organ into its family.

• LiverSolidHollow
• GallbladderSolidHollow
• KidneySolidHollow
• BladderSolidHollow
• LungSolidHollow
• Large IntestineSolidHollow
• HeartSolidHollow
• StomachSolidHollow

Match each solid organ with its coupled hollow one.

What does an interior-exterior pairing actually let you do in practice?

1. It makes them share symptoms and so give the same diagnosis
2. It lets you treat one through the other's channel, which is usually more accessible
3. It lets one replace the other when it fails

The uterus, the marrow and the brain fit neither family. Why?

1. Because they have no channel of their own and so are not treated
2. Because they are modern organs added later
3. Because they are shaped like hollow organs but function like solid ones: they store pure substances without letting them through