A Rural Folk Method for Treating Uncontrolled Bleeding from Adenomyosis
A gallbladder-cancer patient I treated also suffered from endometriosis and uterine adenomyosis, with perennial vaginal bleeding. She had received both Chinese and Western medical treatment for years with little effect. I also tried various internal formulas on this patient, but none worked well.
The patient first came to me in April 2018 to treat her gallbladder cancer, and at the same time asked me to also resolve her gynecological bleeding. From the first visit I had been trying to find a way for her, but not until 2019, although my treatment helped her gallbladder cancer, it had not properly resolved her gynecological bleeding. Truly at my wits' end, I recalled that women in my rural hometown, during their postpartum confinement, often sitz-bathed and soaked their feet in mugwort (Ai) leaf decoction, so I suggested the patient try this folk method.
On July 1, 2021, the patient told me that, since the follow-up visit in 2019 when she took my advice, she had persistently sitz-bathed and soaked her feet in mugwort-leaf water. Her gynecological bleeding gradually improved, more effectively than the internal Chinese and Western medical treatment; now the amount and frequency of bleeding had decreased, and the bleeding no longer had the foul odor it used to. But she also said the method only works if persisted with: when bleeding, she sitz-bathed and foot-soaked in mugwort water every day; when not bleeding, she did it every other day. Seeing that she had finally found an effective way to control her gynecological bleeding, she hoped I would recommend this method to other patients.
Mugwort leaf (Aiye) is a Chinese herb that warms the meridians and stops bleeding. Qichun County in the Huanggang region (ancient Qizhou) is the authentic origin of "Qi Ai" (Qichun mugwort). In the Huanggang region, folk people not only use Qi Ai to ward off evil at the Dragon Boat Festival but also have the custom of letting postpartum women sitz-bathe in Qi Ai; this folk method can stop bleeding and sterilize. This medicinal experience is rarely found in Chinese-medicine classics but is very popular in the folk culture of eastern Hubei. The main symptom of uterine adenomyosis in women is continuous vaginal bleeding, which Chinese medicine calls beng-lou (metrorrhagia and metrostaxis). When treating this patient, I had looked through various formulas for beng-lou in Chinese-medicine classics and prescribed them for internal use, but none worked well.
The mugwort-leaf decoction for external washing recorded in Chinese-medicine textbooks is mainly used to treat itchy skin diseases such as eczema, genital itching, scabies, and tinea. But modern pharmacological research has found that mugwort leaf has hemostatic, analgesic, and anti-inflammatory effects, so it is not surprising that mugwort-leaf decoction can stop bleeding. In addition, I once successfully used mugwort-leaf sitz baths to treat intractable diarrhea caused by ulcerative colitis. Whether this method can simultaneously resolve both the diarrhea and the bloody stool caused by ulcerative colitis still requires further verification.