Herbal quality : the Fuzi (aconite) dilemma
As you all know, herbs are my passion. More accurately, formulas are my passion. Formula science is my passion! :) But, I do have a strong affinity for the herbs as plants and study them as such. Further, I have a real desire to get as close as possible to the original way of prescribing the herbs in formulas, where “original” means Han dynasty or thereabouts. If you read the Shang Han Lun, there are very specific instructions for how herbs are prepared and how they should be processed. Many of these instructions appear to be ignored in contemporary times, and I can only imagine that this is having some effect with regards to our herbal effectiveness.
However, even if we prescribe and prepare the herbs exactly as indicated it means nothing if the quality of the herbs is terrible. Recently, in a class at NCNM, a professor allowed us to taste Fuzi from different sources. We had three samples of bulk Fuzi. One was from a popular herb company, the second was from China, specially prepared in the traditional way at the instruction of Heiner Fruehauf. The third was raw Fuzi - unprepared - from China.
We were asked to observe how the herb tasted, its texture, and how it made us feel. The first batch was - depressing. It was brittle, soft, had almost no flavor and absolutely no bodily sensation resulted from tasting it. This is similar to what is found in many clinics. We tasted the second batch a few minutes later, the differences were striking! There was an almost immediate pungency and quite a bit of numbness on the tongue. This numbness continued for quite a while. We have been told by several professors that we want to find this quality in the Fuzi we prescribe to our patients - it indicates that the living potency of the herb is retained.
The best fun happened when we tasted (just a bit) of fresh Fuzi. Oh boy! My THROAT was numb after that one. You could really feel the medicinal quality - it was incredible. The only thing I could think after this little taste test was, “How can we get more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff?” The consensus seems to be that the best quality Fuzi is not available in the states or really anywhere in the West. Further, the recent earthquake in China apparently did great damage to the areas where much of the high quality Fuzi is produced - creating even greater shortages.
The quality of the initial herb is only part of the problem - processing is the next piece of the puzzle. Fresh Fuzi is often brined, and then treated in various ways. Reports have indicated that industrial chemicals and harsh processes are used in the preparation of lots of commercial Fuzi. At the very least, you can tell that much of what’s available from the major herb companies is wildly over-brined. The brining process reduces the toxicity of the herb - but we have to remember that the “toxicity” of herbs (usually produced by alkaloid content) is a large part of why it is clinically effective! Skilled herbalists know how to exploit the positive nature of the herb while minimizing the potential for harm from the strong compounds contained within. When we overprocess herbs, we don’t do anyone any favors.
How can we, in the contemporary West, make up for these various deficiencies? How can we prescribe herbs in the way they are meant to be prescribed - full of their vital force and particular benefits? How can we know if an herb has been processed appropriately? These questions can easily be added to the ones I’ve had about using local species and other related conversations on Deepest Health. I’m looking forward to hearing what you think about this important issue. Please voice your thoughts and share your research with us in the comments! No registration is necessary.
Eric
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Tags: agriculture, formulas, health, herbs, quality, ScienceRelated posts
Beautiful video celebrating the health benefits of tea
I thought that Deepest Health readers might enjoy this video passed along to me by Pettygrove Classical Chinese Medicine clinic director, Beth French. She has submitted it as her application for the Calm-a-Sutra tea scholarship, so if you like it be sure to share it far and wide. It reminds me of one of my favorite health benefits of drinking tea - time to stop and breathe.
We’re going to have some great podcast interviews with Tea Monk Paul Rosenberg within the month - look for them coming soon.
Click on the video below to view it - feel free to share your reactions and favorite tea stories in the comments.
Eric
Tags: health, tea, videoRelated posts
The Year of Sagely Living - The Evolution
When we decided to move away from our original Year of Sagely Living idea, I knew I would run the risk of dropping the project entirely. While I had the intention to focus on my physical body, I didn’t really know what form that would take. I’ve struggled to keep closely to my focused program of physical improvement, mostly because I actually exercise better in the cooler months due to my intolerance of heat. I’ve honestly done pretty well - I’ve lost over 15 pounds and increased my overall strength.
I’ve been following a program of Qigong, lots of walking around beautiful neighborhoods, bike riding and strength training on my (cheap) home gym. The last element is the weakest, and the one I will be focusing most on improving in the coming months. I have a goal of reaching an ideal body weight and basic strength by the time my two best friends get married in early September. The process has taught me quite a bit about my body - fundamental among them being that my body really does well when pushed a bit. Given the conversation we had about exercise here on Deepest Health, I wasn’t sure what to think. But, experientially, I’d have to say that the level of physical activity I am doing most certainly seems to have an overall Qi and Yang boosting effect without damaging Yin or Blood, at least as far as any external or internal signifiers can tell me. So, interesting…
The Year of Sagely Living was always about more to both Mr. Stickley and myself. For me, it comes back to the essence of the following quote from the Confucian classic - the Greater Learning:
Only after the principle in things is fully apprehended does knowledge become complete; knowledge being complete, thoughts may become true; thoughts being true, the mind may become set in the right; the mind being so set, the person becomes cultivated; the person being cultivated, household harmony is established; household harmony established, the state becomes well governed; the state being well governed, the empire becomes tranquil.
I have always been a person who cares about my community, about the fate of the people of the world. When I was younger, I was politically agitated - I protested, I threw myself into various causes. It never seemed to get myself or anyone else into a better place. I still apply my public force in appropriate places, but now I’ve turned that agitation inwards. I would say the last 3-4 years have been about seeking. I’ve been searching for the appropriate set of practices and the appropriate mindset with which to turn myself into a person who can overcome anything, a person who can do great good in service of humanity, a person who does not say harsh things to others out of anger, a person who spends his life making the world a better place. A tall order, perhaps, but what other good in life can there possibly be? (That’s rhetorical, ok?)
I find that what generally happens is that I find the things that resonate with me strongly, I dive into them (as I used to dive into political causes) and then I withdraw. Usually, I have some kind of external excuse to do so (finals week, dental surgery, financial trouble) but those excuses are always JUST excuses. The fact is that, being an agitator, I have trouble resting and abiding in anything. Why am I telling you this? Because I suspect some of you have felt this way and might benefit from learning a little bit about my process.
Over the last year, the frequency of emergence of those “resonant” things has become higher and higher. What do I mean? You know when you’re feeling the pulse and immediately when you lay your hands on the person, you immediately get a sense of the problem? Then you let it go and delve deeper. But, for me, that initial instinct is almost always the strongest part of the case — there’s more there, but from an 80/20 rule perspective, my first thought was the best one. It’s the same for me with finding principles and practices that are going to lead me toward my life goals. When I first meet them, in whatever form, I have an immediate shocking sense that this is Truth. Then I ignore it, and it comes back around. I ignore it, it comes back around. I ignore it, it comes back around. If/when I finally fully recognize it, I realize that my initial impulse about it was correct. It’s maddening.
So - here’s the essence of this post. I’ve found the practices that will lead me toward my destiny. I hate to say that I’m done looking - because that’s always a statement of great silliness - but I can say I’m done seeking. Things may find me, and I may embrace them, but I’m done being agitated. So, my Year of Sagely Living has been a success - really - because in this focused, public seeking - I have found the end of seeking. Now, I can settle into what I think was the essential point of the YSL in the first place.
The work, now, is to implement the practices and principles I have settled on. This is really where Abdallah and I come together. He has always had the sense that the practices and principles that grow out of Islam are productive of the highest type of Chinese physician. For him, I think, there is also the sense that the rewilding movement and some other things he is interested in add to that set of practices and principles. For me, the practices and principles may be different - but the idea is the same. I don’t feel the need to talk about those principles here - but will do so at my personal blog soon. You can go sign up for updates there, if you’re interested.
The point for Deepest Health readers is a simple one: in our quest to know this medicine (whether as students, practitioners or even patients) we must know most deeply ourselves. We must come to reckon with the things that move us, sing to us, cajole us into action. We must rectify ourselves in the name of these principles and practices and dedicate ourselves to them wholeheartedly. Only then will “the principle in things be fully apprehended” and thus starting the chain reaction up to the healing of the Earth community itself. This may seem a thing far removed from Chinese medicine, but I would argue that nothing could be farther from the truth. Doing this work is the essence of the Great Physician - there can be nothing more important. Other than passing board exams, that is. ;)
Eric
PS: There’s a second part to this - along the lines of finding a “best practice” that is very relevant for students. Please find that article published tomorrow.
Tags: 80/20, community, focus, health, Learning, QiGong, student, students, unity, Year of Sagely LivingRelated posts
A year of blogging about Classical Chinese Medicine
We’re running up on the one year anniversary of Deepest Health!* Can you believe it? One year and we’re up to almost 250 daily subscribers (thank you!) and a very respectable daily traffic number that averages around 15,000 page views a month. We also recently reached a search engine benchmark - receiving Pagerank 5! All of this despite the toll that my busy schedule has taken on my posting frequency. I want to thank each and every one of my readers for interacting with me, teaching me, promoting the site and just generally being awesome. Thanks!
I’ve been doing some thinking about where I would like the site to be in another year. The fact is that I would like to see more readers, more subscribers, and more conversation going on. This requires MORE content creation on my part, and I recognize that. I’ve been getting plenty of emails from readers wishing I would go back to my super frequent posting schedule of last summer. I’ve been thinking about whether I want to make blogging a priority again.
My posting frequency has plummeted for a variety of reasons, but it comes down to three major problems.
1. I’m way busy.
2. Getting more readers made me a little afraid to “speak my mind” especially when some of my readers are professors and quite active practitioners in the field.
3. I started to become unsure about what readers wanted.
These reasons are bad ones. To address number one - I’ll always be busy. I can’t let that get in my way. We’ve all had the experience of suddenly finding time for something we’re motivated to make a priority (new love, anyone?) just as we’ve all experienced the converse (taxes, anyone?) So, I guess that’s debunked. Number two is just crass fear. I’m a student. In a little more than a year, I’ll be a new practitioner. I’ve never claimed to be anything else, right? I know I’ve said this before. It scares me a little to know that my professors, my esteemed colleagues and practitioners with lots more experience are reading my words. However, the response has been overwhelmingly positive and it seems like folks want to see me writing more often - so I guess I’m going to have to consolidate my Kidneys and get on with it. T
To address the third issue - it is still a problem. Everyone seems to like something a little different. The most significant problem I have is the worry about writing for practitioners and dorky students (like me) and leaving average folks and brand new students without anything compelling to read. I’m just going to have to hope it works out. I’ve tried writing articles for new patients before, and it just didn’t move me very much. Every once in a while I feel like I put out something of interest to the general public, and those posts are rewarded with good traffic, but I don’t want that to be a focus.
In the end the greatest barrier is a combination of all of these. Because of my fear and lack of comprehension about what readers want has led to my spending WAAAAY too much time with each article. This has made it impossible for me to consider fitting posting regularly into my schedule. With these myths busted, hopefully I can get on with producing excellent content for all of you who are interested in reading it.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this public display of what is a private process. It’s like talking to yourself to work out a problem when you think nobody can hear, only I know you can hear. Such is the blogging life.
Eric
*Note: Deepest Health has actually been around in some form for almost 2 years, but I really began writing in earnest in June 2007
Tags: Blogging, content, focus, health, overwhelm, rest, students, summer, teaRelated posts
Does Chinese Medicine cure disease?
I’m writing an article for a class about using Chinese medicine to deal with common colds and flus. This is one of my passions (I know, weird) and something I feel the general public doesn’t really know about. In the past three years, I’ve suffered two external invasions, one more flu like and one more cold like. During the first two days of both, I went to the clinic. They both resolved the next day, with copious herb intake in the Shang Han Lun style. I’m a believer, you might say. Simply because of my personal experience? No, because of the countless people I’ve seen have similar experiences in clinic.
Everywhere I read about “finding a cure for the common cold” indicates that such a thing has not yet been achieved. The party line goes like this, “While there is no cure for the common cold, there are things you might be able to do to reduce its duration and severity.” Well… yeah. My question is this - how is that not a cure?
The dictionary definitions for cure are many, but the most relevant for our purposes recurrent themes:
A cure is a process
A cure does not indicate that the disease never occurs (that’s more like eradication)
A cure involves treatment
When people talk about “a cure for cancer” I don’t think they mean that cancer would never happen. While a vaccine for cancer (or the common cold) would be nice, usually that doesn’t seem to be what people are discussing. What we want is a way to avoid prolonged suffering and/or death at the hand of the disease process in question. We want, in essence, to reduce the illnesses duration and severity to minimal levels. We want to get better fast and suffer few lasting negative effects from our experience.
I think one other essential piece of the idea of curation involves the ability for the cure in question to be always and everywhere applicable. We wouldn’t call something a cure that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. That may be the info behind the claim that no “cure” for the common cold has been found. That being said, under the care of a competent Chinese medical practitioner, I do believe that rectification of cold and flu symptoms can be reliably achieved. If under such circumstances a person still suffers from their symptoms or, perhaps, even worsens (developing phlegm deep in the lungs, for example) this is likely due to some misunderstanding on the part of the practitioner about the pre-existing state of the patient’s body constitution. This is the case, I think, with any medical therapy and any disease. Consider any disorder we consider to be “cured” in modern medical practice. If a person displays with that illness and the therapy is inappropriately applied or some pre-existing condition of the patient renders the therapy ineffective, we don’t cast shadows on the ability of that therapy to be curative for that disease.
For Chinese Medicine, curing a disease simply involves a restoration of the body’s natural balance. Yin and Yang come into appropriate relationship with one another and all the seasons of the body come in their course with a typical expression. The body responds easily to normal daily stresses and no symptoms of blockage (pain, pathological products) exist. Chinese medical therapies, when applied consistently and competently, rectify the state of health for many conditions for many people. Wouldn’t you say?
What is your understanding of “cure”? What would it take for you to consider the common cold to be “cured”? I’ll be interested to read your thoughts in the comments.
Eric
Tags: chinese-herbs, cold, common cold, cure, cure for the common cold, disease, external invasion, flu, health
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