A Simple Folk Remedy and a Dietary Recipe for Treating Ascites

Once, when I went to a pharmacy I often frequented to buy medicines, a pharmacist there told me of a very simple little remedy for ascites: take equal parts of fresh ginger and jujube (dazao), and make them into pills the size of a phoenix-tree seed, then take them orally. The elderly pharmacist told me this was a small prescription from a very famous local veteran TCM physician. A patient with ascites had come to have the prescription prepared several times; each time he told the old pharmacist that these ginger-jujube pills worked very well for him and that his ascites had been brought under control.

The other recipe is a dietary one: stew crucian carp with white radish. A liver cancer patient once told me that one of his fellow patients, after developing ascites, relied on this white radish stewed with crucian carp as a dietary therapy, and his ascites was resolved.

However, these two small recipes are probably only intended for patients with relatively mild ascites. For patients with severe ascites, such recipes can at most provide some relief; it is still very difficult to obtain a good result from them alone.