Insights and Updates

February 1, 2021, the twentieth day of the twelfth lunar month, the New Year at hand. Thinking of loved ones far away, my heart surges and I cannot contain it. In the afternoon, alone in my study, basking in the sun, I faced three small…

On the nineteenth day of the twelfth lunar month, under a bright sun, I walked the streets of Beijing thinking of a mountain hollow back in my hometown. In that hollow sits a Medicine King temple that few people now visit. The Medicine King temple…

On the weekend, after my midday nap, I walked along the Third Ring Road toward the Renmin University area, then followed South Zhongguancun Avenue to Zizhuyuan (Purple Bamboo Park), passing the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing Institute of Technology, Minzu University of China, and…

I previously introduced a case I had recently treated of a patient with persistently low platelets after chemotherapy; for details see my article An Account of My Experience Treating a Case of Thrombocytopenia After Chemotherapy. In that article I mentioned that this patient's platelets were…

This is an earlier article I wrote, reorganized and republished today. When I wrote it, my clinical experience was not as rich as it is now, and I inevitably leaned toward Chinese medicine while undervaluing Western medicine, so the article has its flaws. But my…

In 2020, the wealth of the world's billionaires grew by about 1.9 trillion US dollars, an annual increase of about 20%. Setting aside even a fraction of that sum would be enough to vaccinate every person on Earth against COVID and solve their food and…

Half of the Shanghan Lun (Treatise on Cold Damage) is about the sweating method. Among the eight traditional therapeutic methods of Chinese medicine, the sweating method comes first. Textbooks of Chinese medicinal formulas place the sweating and exterior-releasing method at the top; likewise, textbooks of…

Although the state upgraded the pangolin in 2020 from a second-class to a first-class protected animal and removed it from the pharmacopoeia and from textbooks of Chinese material medica starting that year, there are still quite a few people eating pangolins to fight cancer. Even…

Patients on chemotherapy often beg me to take them on, because chemotherapy really has become unbearable; the side effects are severe, their bodies have developed all kinds of serious discomforts, and the doctors giving them the chemotherapy are helpless against those side effects. To be…

My son recently took part in the selection contest for the national high-school math, physics, and chemistry Olympiad. He won first prize in math and chemistry and second prize in physics, advancing in all three subjects. Such results are rare at his school and rare…