Be an Excellent TCM Herbalist

A little bit of qi and blood nourishing, some kidney tonification and some expelling of wind-dampness. What more could a girl want in a formula? Especially in a little cool damp fall weather with lots of 50 yearish old patients with aches and pains?

Prescribed this for someone with chronic lung deficiency since childhood with runny nose (all the time) and cold induced/exertion induced asthma. My instructor had me tell her it would help her shoulder pain and her runny nose! How cool is that?

Chinese medicine in very elegant.

I went to the co-op to get groceries and lo and behold there was indeed a patent that was modified Cang Er Zi San. I could pick up the bottle and read the ingredients and recognize that it included the herbs in Cang Er Zi San plus a bunch of things to help with the itching and burning symptoms. Several of the additions were ones I had thought about (Jing Jie, Fang Feng, Ju Hua) and the other ones made sense to me. Yay!

need today is a formula called Cang Er Zi San. It is for many kinds of severe nasal congestion. Ideally, I would probably need to modify it somewhat to deal with my itchy nose and eyes. But I have been blowing my nose constantly it feels like for about 30 hours. slept really poorly last night because it was so damn hard to breath even after taking a western decongestant which oddly made me sweat a bunch. Not sure what was in it that acted as a diaphoretic. I really didn’t need to sweat. Seems like a lot of work to go try and find that formula at the weird herbal store. Maybe, just maybe it is one of the formulas they carry at the co-op. I have to go do the grocery shopping there later today. I’m actually appalled at what the co-op carries, because some of the formulas they have on the shelf should really only be given out on a prescription.

So just for fun, what would I need to modify Cang Er Zi San with to take care of the itching?
Jing Jie
Fang Feng
both really good options and usually paired together
Ju Hua and Man Jing Zi maybe for my eyes or Mu Zei
maybe Chan Tui also to help with itching.

I was in Boston last week for an evidence based medicine training at Tufts and we were very near Chinatown. Before dinner on Friday I went on a walk with a colleague and we checked out this great little Chinese herb store. It was totally cool because I could pull stuff off the shelf and tell my colleague what the formula or the bag of raw herbs was for! The shop was pretty interesting complete with guy behind the counter folding up raw herb prescriptions into paper parcels tied off with string.

Somewhat bitter tasting formula right now. It has an herb called Huang Lian in it that is very bitter-coptis root in English. Strangely I sort of like the taste. Kind of like black coffee but less acidic. I think a lot of folks would hate the taste but it is really helping me out with this sort of ithcy burning rash/inflammation I have had at the corners of my mouth that just wouldn’t go away permanently. The formula has been modified a couple times depending on my results with it. It kept healing the problem only for it to return a week or two later. I think this most recent modification will finally take care of the problem. Yay! Plus I totally understand the reasoning behind the choice of herbs to modify the base formula. I’ll remember this.

In my head! Got 100% on my herb quiz this week. My instructor is awfully nice though. He could have made it much harder. But it was one of those quizzes with a lot of fill in the blanks so we really had to have the formula names completely memorized. But he asked about the most important ones. Those are in my head for some patterns, it is the variant ones and the ones for more complex patterns that I’m struggling with. My poor classmates though had a hard time with this quiz for some reason. They must be really tired.

I’ll be able to help people and maybe prevent people from getting sick. Most Americans have no idea how comprehensive and effective TCM herbal medicine is.

I’ve gotten a lot of help for both chronic and acute problems. For example, I had some kind of nasty viral GI infection last August. It started as a couple episodes of cramping and diarrhea and progressed to terrible chills and a wicked strong neck and head ache. I went home from work early and stayed home the next day. I went back for the next two days to work but I couldn’t seem to eat anything without triggering diarrhea an hour or two later. I begged a colleague for an herbal consult at the end of the day. We were about to all go away for 3 days for labor day weekend. Well, my colleague (an American) was a little too conservative and so his formula didn’t really help.

I went to urgent care on Labor Day at the insistence of my sweetie. By that point I had been sick for 7 days and could still only tolerate chicken broth and rice congee (rice cooked in a lot of water till it breaks down) That was a silly waste of time and money and energy. The MD I saw gave me the most cursory abdominal exam I have ever had. If I had had a bowel obstruction or enlarged liver he wouldn’t have found it. I was sitting up!! He told me it was viral (I figured that out myself) and told me to eat his version of the BRAT diet (bananas, rice,applesauce, and toast) and to go home since I wasn’t dehydrated. Oh, I’ve neglected to mention I only weigh 90lbs so going for 7 or more days without being able to take in much by way of calories is actually really a hardship. I was losing weight I can’t afford to lose. Anyway, the next day I was still getting worse and I think I was a little feverish. I called in sick to work and school and got into my school’s student acupuncture clinic. The acupuncture was really helpful and I got another prescription from a different American clinician (the supervisor for the student who treated me.) I took most of that prescription but was still feeling horrible the next day and went back in and made sure to see a student who was supervised by one of our Chinese instructors. I figure that they have a lot more clinical experience treating diarrhea anyway. Well, the long and the short of it is that the formula he prescribed was exactly right. I could feel it working with the first dose. I felt no change with the other two formulas. I think I took it for 3 or 4 days. I was feeling ever so much better within 24 hours.

My sweetie points out that this story doesn’t bode well for us poor Americans trying to become good TCM herbalists since it took 3 prescriptions to get it right and it was the Chinese doctor who got it right. The thing is though, he gave me a very basic formula for damp-heat diarrhea that we all learn plus some herbs for food stagnation. It wasn’t anything weird or esoteric. The doctor who got it right told me what symptom I had that the other herbalists missed. So, it is just a question of being a very good diagnostician and learning from experience, and not being afraid to use a somewhat stronger formula.

Anyway, I was very grateful for the efficacy of the care. I would have hated to have to end up dehydrated and losing a whole bunch of weight to get any kind of Western care.