You may be doubtful whether Chinese medicine can really treat long COVID. One of the reasons why it can is that Chinese medicine understands the existence of meridians, and many symptoms of long COVID are caused by damage to the meridians. You can measure by yourself to verify this claim. If you are a long COVID patient, send an email to [email protected] with your address (it can be the address of a pickup point), and we will send you a meridian measuring device for free(we plan to give 20 devices for now). You will find out that abnormal of waveforms show below does exist in you, but not on other healthy people. This will be an evidence that the understanding of long COVID by Chinese medicine is unique (Note that the software will upload the measurement result to our server, so you may need to find an old unused Android phone and format it before using our APP).
First, the following table shows the relation between the symptoms of long COVID and common injuries:
| Damage Type | Possible symptoms |
| Shaoyang meridian damage | Dizziness, migraine, hot flash, rib pain, bitter in mouth, poor appetite, nausea, easily agitated, fatigue, palpitations, POTS, insomnia |
| Lung damage | Fatigue, loss of smell, insomnia |
| Blood stasis | Insomnia, fatigue, fixed position pain, chest tightness (sense of pressure) |
Note that the same symptoms on the right side of this table may be caused by different causes. That is to say, you cannot tell which damage you are experiencing by simple look for the symptoms on the right. But generally speaking, if the measurement results show that you get the damage on the left, there is a high probability of having the symptoms on the right. In addition, if your symptoms can be relieved by taking antihistamines, there is a high probability that the Shaoyang meridian has been damaged.
Further, you can visit this patent application and this youtube link to get an overview of the meridian measuring device. The principle of the device can be simply expressed as: six meridians of a human pass through different finger sides. By placing an infrared temperature probe on the finger side and continuously recording the infrared temperature and body surface temperature, the changes in Qi in the corresponding meridians can be obtained, and this further reflects whether there is a problem with the internal organs or whether there is congestion on the meridians. In addition, the difference between infrared temperature and body surface temperature can reflect the strength of the Qi in the corresponding meridian (the greater the difference, the weaker the Qi).
According to our experience, the symptoms of long COVID patients are mainly caused by two problems: damage to the lungs and damage to the Shaoyang meridian(Note according to this paper the lung damage may not be detected by ordinary CT). Of course, for patients who have not received timely treatment for a long time, many other problems such as blood stasis, liver Qi stagnation, kidney yang deficiency/yin deficiency, etc. will also arise. However, for the sake of simplicity, only the waveforms of lung and Shaoyang meridian damages are given here.
1. Lung damage
If you have lung damage only, and it has not been long since the last time you had COVID-19, the measurement waveform will look like the picture below (the picture is from this paper). Note the value in the gray solid curve, which reflect the qi corresponding to the lung meridian, is constantly changing, and the shape of the gray curve are different from other meridians.
If your lung damage has lasted for a long time, there may no longer be Qi flowing in all meridians. At this time, the infrared temperature of multiple meridians will change synchronously with the body surface temperature (Consequently, the body surface can be calculated from the infrared temperature based on the emissivity value). For example, the picture below shows the measurement results of a long COVID patient after long-term lung damage:
2. Damage to Shaoyang meridian
If you have damage to the (hand) Shaoyang meridian, the measurement results will show rapid fluctuations in infrared temperature of multiple meridians, which is what Chinese medicine calls hot comes when cold leaves and vice versa. The picture below is the measurement waveform of the same long COVID patient who also has damage to the Shaoyang meridian:
It should be noted that if you encounter multiple damages at the same time, the symptoms will be more complicated. The patient in Figure 2 and figure 3 actually has both lung and Shaoyang meridian damage, but the rapid fluctuation (as in Figure 3) can only be seen after he got oxygen therapy for several weeks.
The last thing to note is that if you plan to measure healthy people for comparison, please select people who have not had COVID-19 in six(or more) months. Because people who just recovered from COVID-19 may already get various lung/meridian damages even though they may not have any symptoms(i.e. these damages may lead to symptoms in the future).