Find your TCM body constitution

Constitution in Chinese medicine is your baseline: how you tend to respond to cold, heat, food and stress before illness arrives. It is not a diagnosis and it does not change every month, but it does describe the terrain you are working on.

The nine-type framework comes from the Chinese Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine's published classification, and it is the most widely used constitution scheme in the world. This test scores you across nine dimensions and returns both your dominant type and your secondary tendency, because most people are not a single type.

Everything here is a self-assessment. It cannot see your tongue, take your pulse, or know your history. Read the result as a description of your tendencies and a starting point for what to look at next — not as a verdict.

What the nine types actually mean

The nine types fall into three broad groups, and understanding the group is often more useful than remembering the individual names. Balanced is the reference point — no strong lean toward heat, cold, damp or deficiency. The remaining eight are biases in two directions: excess patterns (heat, damp, phlegm, stagnation, blood stasis) and deficiency patterns (low Qi, low Yin, low Yang).

That structure matters because the response differs. Deficiency patterns generally want support and rest. Excess patterns generally want clearing and movement. A result that says you lean damp-heat and Qi-deficient is not contradictory — it means the two are running together, which is common, and the two need opposite corrections.

How the scoring works

Each question asks about a tendency over the last month rather than a fixed trait, and answers run on a five-point scale from Never to Always. Questions are weighted toward the dimensions they relate to, and some carry a reverse weight — a statement like 'I catch colds often' is direct evidence for Qi deficiency and indirect evidence against a Balanced constitution.

Your score on each dimension is a weighted percentage, not a raw total. The dominant type is the highest scoring one above a 40 percent threshold; between 30 and 39 percent counts as a tendency rather than a definite result. If two dimensions clear the threshold, the second is reported as a secondary pattern rather than discarded. Questions you skip are excluded from the denominator rather than counted as a zero.

What you get, and what to do with it

The result gives you a radar profile across all nine dimensions, your primary and secondary type, a plain-language description of each, and a self-care plan covering food, acupressure points, movement and tea. Each recommendation links to the library entry it references, including the cautions attached to it.

If a dimension scores above 60 percent alongside your primary type, it is reported as a combined pattern — Qi deficiency with damp-heat is a frequent pair, and the recommendations reflect both rather than only the highest score.

Who should take it, and who should not

It suits people who recognise themselves in the type descriptions — the ones who feel cold all year, or run hot, or feel heavy after eating. Taking it again after two or three months of consistent change is how you use it well: constitution shifts, and the second reading is usually more informative than the first.

It is not suitable as a way to work out whether you have a condition, whether you should take herbs, or what to do about symptoms that are ongoing. If you are pregnant, taking medication, or managing a diagnosed illness, use this as general orientation and keep working with a qualified clinician. Nothing on this site is a diagnosis.

Questions people ask

Patterns this assessment connects to

Each pattern page below explains what the pattern is, the signs that suggest it, and which acupoints, foods and teas the library lists against it.

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