Dr Hongchun Yin

The founder of Modern Tongue Diagnosis and the architect of the tongue hologram, the Tongue Midline Theory and the Ten-Principle Differentiation system. Dr Yin has dedicated more than thirty years to the study of tongue diagnosis, developing a complete system that reads disease location, pathogenesis, herbal strategy and acupuncture direction directly from a single tongue.

He graduated from Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in 1988 and served as a deputy chief physician at Qingdao Hospital of TCM. For more than two decades he has practised at his own clinic in London, where he is President of the Association of Modern Tongue Diagnostics and a Distinguished Expert in Clinical TCM at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine.

His pivotal breakthrough came from revising the cardiac reflex zone on the tongue — and from it, mapping the whole body holographically onto the tongue surface, with the head at the tip, the limbs folded along the edges, and the lower body at the root. From this he developed the Tongue Midline Theory, which corresponds to the Governor vessel and the spine and governs the circulation of the Qi mechanism.

Dr Yin holds multiple tongue-diagnosis patents and is the author of Modern Tongue Diagnostics in Chinese Medicine. In 2025 his work was named a finalist in the World Health Organization's Health & Heritage Innovation (H2I) Global Open Call and presented at the WHO Traditional Medicine Global Summit. He has trained more than a thousand practitioners worldwide, and teaches with a generosity his students return to again and again — answering every question, and holding nothing back.