TCM Chat ⁽⁹⁶⁾

When I was a child, my maternal aunt had a ganglion cyst on her wrist. The cyst was large and ached from time to time. She went to my village to be treated by my clansman, an older granduncle. My granduncle took out a long…

When I was in junior high, once my cousin and I rode our bicycles home from school for the weekend. Halfway there, we were stopped by a barking Shiba Inu. This dog, in a field of rape flowers, kept trying to attack us; the two…

Folk belief in China holds that radish neutralizes the medicinal effect, so many people have heard the saying: "Don't eat radish while taking Chinese medicine." Many have asked me about this. Is it actually appropriate to eat radish while on medication? I am writing this…

A patient with advanced liver cancer and severe ascites came to me for treatment over two years. During treatment he could not feel any therapeutic effect, because his daily life remained normal; to him it seemed the treatment was doing nothing. At first he did…

A sophomore student wanted to study TCM with me. Because my own learning is still shallow, I always felt unworthy of being someone's teacher, so I politely declined. But after declining several times, he was still very sincere in wanting to study medicine with me…

Pulse taking is the hallmark of TCM diagnosis. So just how important is pulse taking? Doctors and patients alike seem to regard TCM pulse diagnosis as very important, but Li Shizhen did not think so. Li Shizhen's Binhu Pulse Study (Binhu Maixue), Studies on the…

A patient was very interested to read in my case records that I often have patients brew Chinese medicinal herbs with boiling water and drink them as tea, and he asked me why I use this method. In fact, traditional Chinese medicine has always had…

A few years ago, a close friend recommended an acupuncturist to me and took me to his home for treatment. During the acupuncture, I noticed his needles were shared among different patients. A female patient before me had used needles that were not sterilized, and…

Nearly half or more of cancer patients ask me whether they should buy some Cordyceps (dongchong xiacao, caterpillar fungus) to tonify themselves, because they have heard so many merchants promoting its miraculous effects. Moreover, when friends and relatives learn they have cancer, they give them…

I chose TCM as my career purely out of fate and temperament. There was a Japanese TCM physician (in Japan called a Kampo doctor) named Otsuka Keisetsu; in the preface to his book Thirty Years of Kampo Medicine, he said much the same thing about…