TCM Chat ⁽⁹⁶⁾

People often ask me whether there are still masters like Sun Bingyan, who fought poison with poison. My answer is always no. The reason is simple: under current health law, a doctor who practiced the way old Master Sun did would be imprisoned before long.

In his retirement, my father likes to study all kinds of social phenomena. For a while he got a whim and set up long-term observation beside several TCM clinics in our county town, watching each for at least a week and carefully recording the number…

Recently my wife developed various uncomfortable symptoms, probably from using fans and air conditioning too much in summer. She became averse to cold and wind, and after a whole night’s sleep still felt utterly fatigued in the morning, with aching joints, peri-shoulder pain, a stiff…

Yesterday evening, the son-in-law of a patient with reflux esophagitis came to me to adjust the prescription for his father-in-law. I had previously prescribed five doses of Chinese herbs for the old man, and they heard the effects were quite good; only the problem of…

This is an earlier article I wrote, reorganized and republished today. When I wrote it, my clinical experience was not as rich as it is now, and I inevitably leaned toward Chinese medicine while undervaluing Western medicine, so the article has its flaws. But my…

Although the state upgraded the pangolin in 2020 from a second-class to a first-class protected animal and removed it from the pharmacopoeia and from textbooks of Chinese material medica starting that year, there are still quite a few people eating pangolins to fight cancer. Even…

I grew up in the countryside. During the busy farming season I had to work the fields with my parents; rural children have followed the same path for thousands of years. The hardest work we did as children was probably transplanting rice seedlings. It required…

Whenever I have an empirical formula that I have applied with great maturity, I write it up as an article and publish it without reservation. There are other formulas that I have not yet applied maturely, or that I am still constantly improving; I will…

What prompted me to think about this question were some recent books I have been reading on the grand history of the rise and fall of "Huaxia/Chinese" civilization. Traditional Chinese medicine is a medical system that exists attached to the "Huaxia/Chinese" civilization; its origins and…

The history of Chinese medicine is extraordinarily long, and to this day it remains flourishing within the former Confucian cultural sphere, even spreading to the whole world and winning the welcome of many patients. The reason is simple: it has definite clinical efficacy. As a…