Foundations of Oriental Medicine
Build the framework first
Every Foundations item is asking you to map a clinical picture onto a system. Anchor on four frameworks: yin-yang, the five phases, zang-fu, and the eight principles. The six zang plus pericardium are yin, solid, and store; the six fu are yang, hollow, and transmit. Jing, qi, shen, blood, and body fluids are the substances, and exam stems usually test their relationships: qi commands and holds blood, blood houses shen, qi transforms and moves fluids.
Correspondences you need on reflex
Wood: liver/gallbladder, eye, sinew, anger, sour, green, shout. Fire: heart/small intestine, tongue, vessel, joy, bitter, red, laugh. Earth: spleen/stomach, mouth, flesh, pensiveness, sweet, yellow, sing. Metal: lung/large intestine, nose, skin/body hair, grief, pungent, white, weeping. Water: kidney/bladder, ear, bone, fear, salty, black, groan.
Traps that recur
Questions deliberately mix the generation (sheng) and control (ke) cycles. Control runs wood to earth, earth to water, water to fire, fire to metal, metal to wood, which is nearly the reverse of generation. Also keep six-stage (cold damage) progression separate from four-level (warm disease) progression, and do not assign the san jiao's transportation function to the pericardium.
Worked example
A stem offers insomnia, agitation, red tongue, rapid pulse. Ask which relationship is broken. Excess pattern: heart fire, full rapid pulse, red tongue with coating. Deficiency pattern: yin deficiency with empty heat, red peeled tongue, thin rapid pulse. The tongue coating is the discriminator, and exam writers rely on candidates ignoring it.