Insights and Updates

Li Yu (courtesy name Liweng), who lived between the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, wrote a book called Xianqing Ouji (Casual Expressions of Idle Feeling), a famous ancient Chinese work on wellness and leisure. It contains a dedicated "Planting Section," which discourses at length…

I often encounter patients or family members who ask me to evaluate the treatment plan devised by another doctor they have seen, and I always politely decline. This actually touches on a very serious issue: a doctor must not rashly evaluate another doctor's treatment plan,…

In the small hours of May 3, 2012, my mother departed this world. On April 5, 2019, Qingming Festival, I returned to my hometown to sweep my mother's grave. Seven years have passed. I, who cheekily call myself a disciple of Zhuangzi, have finally let…

The wild persimmon is a common plant, a large deciduous tree of the Ebenaceae family, genus Diospyros. It grows in central-southern China, in mountain natural forests or secondary forests, though I have also seen it often in Beijing, where some residential compounds cultivate it as…

The rain had passed and the sky had cleared, the blue sky washed spotless. That morning, standing at the bridgehead and gazing into the distance at the Western Hills, they seemed right before my eyes. The Western Hills reminded me of the place where my…

Fangji Huangqi Tang (Stephania and Astragalus Decoction) comes from Zhang Zhongjing's Jin Gui Yao Lue (Essential Prescriptions from the Golden Cabinet). It treats "wind-dampness with a floating pulse, heaviness of the body, sweating and aversion to wind." The original formula is: Fangji (Stephaniae Radix) 1…

1 During the winter break of 1997, my older brother was in his second year at Tongji University in Shanghai. At the time I was suffering badly from a urinary system disorder and had been seeking medical help everywhere. My brother took me to a…

A few days ago, a cancer patient's family member told me that his father, in the last twenty-plus days of his life, chose to give up treatment, neither eating nor drinking. The old man used this resolute way to end the suffering of his long-besetting…

At forty, I wrote down these sixteen characters as the life realm I aspire to: open and upright in bearing, broad in heart, frugal in life, and gentle in disposition. I was not born an honest, simple soul; when I was young, perhaps, because of…

The famous Jin-Yuan period physician Li Dongyuan is my idol. According to the Yanjian's Biography of the Elderly Man Dongyuan, in his later years, after returning to his hometown, one day he said to his friend Zhou Defu (also called Zhou Duyun): "I am old…