Chinese Herbal Medicine ⁽⁴⁰⁾

Because patients and their family members are not professional Chinese medicine physicians, and because clinicians cannot monitor everything a patient does, unpredictable high-risk events frequently occur, sometimes even causing death. I have written this article to alert patients. The first point is that a vital…

The prescriptions I write are mostly inexpensive. This has to do with my peasant background; the patients I see are mostly among the urban poor. Sometimes, going home and seeing fellow villagers who cannot even afford cheap medicine, I teach them to identify wild herbs…

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…

A friend consulted me: a relative of his had chronic atrophic gastritis, and a TCM physician included Chuanlianzi (Fructus Toosendan) in the prescription for pain relief for two months, causing hepatotoxicity that landed the patient in the hospital as an emergency. Chuanlianzi has slight toxicity.

Some patients, once diagnosed with cancer, think of nothing else day and night. When taking Chinese herbs for cancer, they want to drink them all 365 days a year; missing even one dose leaves them uneasy. This belief is wrong. Even in treating cancer with…

The human body is subtle and unfathomable, the hardest thing in the world to fathom. Thus, although humanity has lived on earth for millions of years and science and technology have grown magnificent, physicians' understanding of the human body is still only partial, and the…

Introduction to Baqia The Chinese medicinal herb Baqia (Smilax china L., Chinaroot Greenbrier) is also known as Jinganggu, Jingangteng, Tie Lingjiao, Jingangtou, Jingangci, and by other names. It belongs to the genus Smilax of the family Liliaceae. Clinically the rhizome is most often used, though…

Mylabris (Banmao, the dried body of blister beetles such as Mylabris phalerata Pallas or Mylabris cichorii Linnaeus) is a pungent, hot, highly toxic Chinese herb that enters the liver, stomach, and large intestine channels. In TCM it has been used to break blood, disperse stasis,…

Many patients ask me how to take Chinese herbal medicine properly. Here are a few practical tips based on clinical experience. 1. Timing of the decoction. Most herbal decoctions are taken warm, divided into two doses a day, one in the morning and one in…