Insights and Updates

The more medical and biological knowledge I learn, the more neutrally I regard everything in the world. What do I mean by neutral? Roughly, not wanting to make any moral or value judgment. I once had my own standards of right and wrong, good and…

Zhu Danxi was one of the Four Great Masters of the Jin-Yuan period and the founder of TCM’s yin-nourishing school, skilled at using yin-nourishing, fire-draining methods for refractory diseases. “Da Bu Wan” (also called Da Bu Yin Wan) in the Danxi Xinfa is one of…

When my son was in junior high, a classmate lived in the neighborhood next door. The boy got on well with my son, and his mother became close with my wife. The boy was always rather morose; from early childhood he was under great pressure…

The Chinese medicinal Sangzhi is the tender twig of Morus alba (mulberry family), best harvested in the second or third lunar month. It is produced across China, especially in the silk-producing regions of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, because mulberry leaves feed silkworms and these areas grow…

My whole life I have hated lecturing and disliked acting the expert, because I know I am neither deep nor noble enough to be anyone’s teacher, so I mostly prefer to hide my limitations. But now my profession requires me to counsel many people, which…

The Shi Jinmo Linchuang Jingyan Ji (Collected Clinical Experience of Shi Jinmo—one of the late “Four Great Physicians of Beijing”) records a case of Shi treating a lymphadenoma in a woman surnamed Ding. Ms. Ding, 19, had developed a tumor on the left side of…

In the Gu Jin Yi Tong Daquan there is a formula called Yangxin Tang, composed of: Angelicae Sinensis Radix (Danggui), Rehmanniae Radix (Shengdi), Rehmanniae preparata (Shudi), and Poriae Sclerotium Pararadicis (Fushen), each 1 qian (3 g); Ginseng and Ophiopogon, each 1.5 qian (4.5 g); Schisandrae…

I seem still to live before the age of ten; my ears often ring with the bursts of cheerful song and laughter I heard as a child laboring in the fields with my parents in our rural village. Epigenetics tells us that early-life experience is…

Fei yong (lung abscess) is a TCM disease name. TCM holds it usually arises when heat-toxin congeals and binds in the lung, so that the lung lobes develop sores; within the lung, flesh putrefies and blood decomposes to form an abscess, hence the name. Clinically…

“Counting sand grains in the sea, only to weary oneself in vain; / How often, before the wind and moon, does one knit one’s brow? / If you can rest now, then rest now— / There is no end to the seeking of an end.”…