Insights and Updates

"Looking, listening-smelling, asking, and palpating" are the four examinations of TCM—the four common methods of diagnosing disease. Palpation includes pulse-taking and abdominal palpation. Pulse-taking, also called feeling the pulse, laying on the pulse, or reading the pulse, is the diagnostic method that best embodies the…

Zhenwu Tang is a classic famous formula from the Shanghan Lun (Treatise on Cold Damage). Its original name was Xuanwu Tang. When Lin Yi and others of the Northern Song proofread the Shanghan Lun, they renamed it Zhenwu Tang to avoid the naming taboo on…

Last night, on the Moments of my work WeChat, I launched a donation drive for an uncle whose whole family of three had cancer. Everyone responded enthusiastically; as of now, more than 20,000 yuan in charitable donations has been raised. Additionally, some friends hope to…

1. Wherever the body is, there the heart is at peace I used to think the saying "where the heart is at peace is where the body is at peace" made great sense, and so I searched everywhere for a "place of peace," looking for…

On May 2, 2018, I was to take a train from Hangzhou Station back to Beijing. A gastric cancer patient whom I had followed for nearly two years came to Hangzhou Station to see me. We found an empty seat at the KFC in Hangzhou…

I have written many articles over time. Although their quality is nothing to boast about, they have nevertheless accumulated some readers. Among these readers, some wish to befriend me, while others wish to study medicine—or something else—under me. I have refused many of these requests.

Since high school, loneliness has been the main theme of my life. I write furiously in solitude, I bury myself in books in solitude, I quietly observe the world in solitude, I think silently in solitude—I have grown accustomed to living in solitude. Perhaps this…

Nearly every patient or patient's relative who comes to see me says, on meeting me: "So young!" On one hand it is a fact: at the age of freedom from perplexity, though life is half over, for our people who believe doctors grow more experienced…

In Zhang Zhongjing's Shanghan Lun there is a very small formula, Shaoyao Gancao Tang (Peony-Licorice Decoction), with only two herbs: Shaoyao (Peony) and Gancao (Licorice), each four liang; in modern use each is generally 12 g. In the Shanghan Lun, Shaoyao Gancao Tang is used…

On September 12, I traveled from Beijing to Shaoxing to pay respects at the grave of a patient who was also my closest friend. He passed away in the United States at the end of last year. By the time I reached Xinchang, Shaoxing, it…