For the Love of Herbs!
It is no secret to those who know me that I love plants! Major plant lady over here. Oddly enough, when I was in school, I did not want to study them! I just wanted to study and practice acupuncture. But, that wasn't an option for me. So, day after day I would memorize functions and indications of different roots and tubers, flowers, dried ginger, fresh ginger, fried ginger, different parts of the cinnamon plant… oh my gosh, it was splitting hairs and drove me crazy! Little did I know, herbal medicine and prescribing formulas would become such an intuitive part of my practice that I LOVE. We don't always see the hand of God in the moment, especially when we are doing something hard, or tedious, but this was one of those times. The drudgery of memorization and learning became one of my biggest gifts and assets. Now, when someone needs a formula, I know in a split second what a person needs, if they need it, my soul just speaks it.
A little history of Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicine
Our most current written record of the use of Chinese Herbal Medicine was during the Han Dynasty around 25-220 CE. I am not a history buff and quite frankly when I start to hear numbers and years and facts, I completely zone out. I legit had to look up what CE even meant. Basically, we have been using herbs since the beginning of time, certainly before we had the capacity to write it out. But I am grateful to our classic texts such as the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic, Discussion of Cold Damage, and Essentials from the Golden Cabinet, Divine Husbandman’s Classic of Materia Medica. These are some of the texts that our few thousand paged Materia Medica were derived from. And, how beautiful are the names of those texts?! Like poetry to this herb nerd!
Clinical Examples of Chinese Herbal Medicines Excellence
Chinese Herbs are so unique. They truly have the ability to treat so many different symptoms and correct the imbalance in the body where the symptoms are arising from in the first place. Say for example, two children come in with a cough. One is dry and one is wet. They are both acute. Their herbal prescription will be different because likely the underlying cause is from two different sources. The child with the wet cough is dealing with more damp and phlegm so we would want to treat the reason for that dampness which is likely coming from an overtaxed spleen, not just the lungs. Here I would use herbs to treat the spleen, dry the dampness and descend the qi that is rebelling upwards. The child with the dry cough is likely dealing with an underlying lung and kidney energetic deficiency. So, in order to rid him of the dry cough, we would need to tonify or boost the energy of those organs using nourishing and supportive herbs.
Another example is headaches. The area which you are experiencing the headache is very telling. Is it the front of your forehead? It is likely being caused by the stomach energy. Is it on one side of your head only? We would look at the gallbladder energy. Is it behind the eye? We would want to support the bladder and kidney. Instead of taking Advil for a variety of types of headaches, we really get to the bottom of the cause and prevent them from happening as well as quelling the pain. Chinese Herbs have an untapped capacity here in the Western world to treat many chronic, stubborn diseases, and in some cases acute illnesses.
Thank you for reading my VERY first ever Blog post about something that I think is special, magical and capable of transforming many lives!! It would be amazing if our first action was to turn to herbs first and Western RX second. I think our bodies and world would appreciate it. :)