TCM Chat ⁽⁹⁶⁾

The Japanese say that the untransmitted secret of Chinese medicine lies in the dosage. Herbal dosage is indeed a problem, but is this secret really "untransmitted" or merely "hard to transmit"? In my view it is not that it is not transmitted, but that it…

Exploit the benefit while controlling the harm—this is a point to which particular attention must be paid when using Chinese herbs. In fact, it applies more broadly: a good Western physician must consider the same thing. For example, when using aspirin, one must fully take…

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:…

By "chronic wasting diseases" here I mean long-course conditions marked by progressive physical depletion—cancer, diabetes, pulmonary tuberculosis, and various chronic inflammations. Many such patients can be treated in TCM from the perspective of vacuity-warmth (xuwen). Applying the combined treatment principles of supplementation, dispersing, clearing and…

In Chinese society, whenever someone with a stubborn illness is treated successfully, people like to call the doctor a “divine healer” (shenyi). The title is meant as praise, but for a serious physician it is actually a warning. A real doctor does not rely on…