A health question isn't read from a single palace. It has a cast of used-gods, and the reading is how they relate. Here the key ones were: the illness itself (天芮, the Illness Star); my father (the male-elder stem 丙); Western medicine (天心, the Doctor Star); the direction to seek care (the Yi 乙 "wonder" stem); and recovery (the Life Door 生门). Before judging anything, I had to find where each one sat.
The Illness Star (天芮) sat in Palace 9 (Li/离, South), on the outer plate. Li governs the head and face, the eyes, the heart and the blood vessels; on the outer plate it points to something external and visible. That matched his swollen face exactly. Paired with the stem Geng it read as a heavy, serious signal, with Obstruction Door suggesting blockage. In plain terms the chart was telling me: this is on the head and face, it is external, and it is not minor.
I couldn't tell what disease it was, but I could read severity and location, and that alone mattered, because my father wanted to brush the whole thing off as nothing.
The palace standing for Western medicine (天心, the Doctor Star) carried Black Tortoise (玄武) plus the Death Door (死门). Black Tortoise is the deity of murky, unreliable information; the chart's note was blunt: verify the truth of any medical information you're given. That line was proven the very next day.
Right next to his hometown stood a local hospital, extremely convenient by distance, but its equipment was only adequate and I didn't trust the doctors' judgment in the slightest. Still, my father insisted on going. From afar I could only agree to let him get basic blood work there while I decided the real direction. Sure enough, the next day that hospital diagnosed "allergic dermatitis," ran a battery of allergen tests, prescribed topical ointment, and sent him home. He was ready to treat it as nothing serious and told me not to rush back. I refused. The chart had already warned me not to trust the information, so I treated that label as a question, not an answer.
My first instinct was to bring him back south to the city where I live, where medical resources and transport are far better. But that direction on the chart carried the White Tiger (白虎) and the Destroyer Star (天柱), clear malefic signals. Obviously not the right move.
Fortunately the chart did point to one clearly favorable direction: due north (Kan Palace 1/坎一宫): the Yi 乙 wonder stem together with the Open Door (开门) and Nine Heaven (九天), no malefics, and Kan is water, which directly restrains the fire-illness sitting in the South. Going north meant going toward the force that could hold the illness in check. Due north of his hometown is the provincial capital. The signal was clear enough. I booked a flight immediately, flew straight there, and told him to meet me.
Three decisions, all from the chart: take it seriously (a heavy illness star on the head and face), don't blindly trust a diagnosis (murky information on the medicine palace), and go north (the one direction that restrained the illness and carried no malefics). The chart didn't diagnose anything, the doctors would do that. What it did was make the calls I was too anxious, and nearly 2,000 kilometers away, to make with any confidence on my own.
