Insights and Updates

Patients seeing Western doctors assume that one disease has one drug, and that taking it faithfully to the end will cure them; they assume TCM works the same way. If treating disease were this simple in TCM, it would be ideal. Unfortunately, it is not:…

Da Qinglong Tang is a classical formula from Zhang Zhongjing's Shanghan Lun. The original formula: Mahuang six liang (nodes removed), Guizhi two liang (peel removed), Zhi Gancao (honey-fried licorice) two liang, Xingren forty pieces (tips and peel removed), Shengjiang three liang (sliced), Dazao ten pieces…

The world has entered the cancer age. Roughly a quarter of the global population will eventually die of malignant tumors, which have become the leading cause of death today. The incidence of common cancers—lung, liver, gastric, breast, colorectal, cervical—is rising at an unprecedented rate. At…

Face it, accept it, deal with it, let it go. — Master Sheng Yen In my senior year of high school, because an early romance was affecting my studies, I talked to an old classmate and poured out my troubles. He said to me: "If…

Hong Yi's wife: Master, tell me, what is love? Master Hong Yi: Love is compassion. — Lines from the film One Round of Bright Moon A Christian friend invited my whole family to his wedding, my first time at a Christian ceremony. In the sacred…

By "chronic wasting diseases" here I mean long-course conditions marked by progressive physical depletion—cancer, diabetes, pulmonary tuberculosis, and various chronic inflammations. Many such patients can be treated in TCM from the perspective of vacuity-warmth (xuwen). Applying the combined treatment principles of supplementation, dispersing, clearing and…

I have seen three cancer patients with concomitant pulmonary tuberculosis in clinic; two are patients I am currently treating, and the third was one I observed under the care of a well-known professor. Pulmonary tuberculosis is called feilao (lung consumption) in TCM, one of the…

In treating cancer, I have found that oncology knowledge alone is not enough; many cancer patients have a great number of complications. The most complicated case I have seen carried seventeen major conditions, including cancer, diabetes and pulmonary tuberculosis, and was dying, bedridden; the complexity…

Today is Qixi Festival, and it is also my mother's birthday; she has been gone for more than three years. These years I have been constantly negating myself, destroying all my former beliefs, and my outlook on life and values have utterly changed. Now I…

The maxim "Keep your original mind, and you will reach fulfillment"—whose original source can no longer be traced—became popular thanks to Steve Jobs's advocacy. The concept of "original mind" (chuxin) comes from the "initial aspiration" (chufa xin) repeatedly mentioned in the Buddhist Avatamsaka Sutra. Yet…