Closeout Deal of the Day: Ban Xia Xie Xin Pian 70% Off!

Regular price $10, sale price $3 per bottle! Buy 3 or more and get free shipping. 100 tablets per bottle. 100% pure Chinese herbs, no filler, no sugar, no coating. Activeherb is a very reliable company with an excellent reputation. They have been doing business in the United States for over fifteen years and are used by many Chinese medicine schools here in California.

Click here for ingredients, indications and actions.

This deal is valid only for today, Wednesday, February 29th, to order call 310-691-5226 or fax your order to 310-691-8073.

Closeout Deal of the Day: Zhu Li Da Tan Pian $3 Each!

$3 per bottle, buy 3 or more and get free shipping! 100 tablets per bottle. 100% pure Chinese herbs, no filler, no sugar, no coating. Activeherb is a very reliable company with an excellent reputation. They have been doing business in the United States for over fifteen years and are used by many Chinese medicine schools here in California.

Click here for ingredients, indications and actions.

This deal is valid only for today, Tuesday, February 28th, to order call 310-691-5226.

New Blog

Hey everybody, I'll no longer be posting over here on blogspot. I made the switch to tumblr, mainly because it's super super easy to use. Come check it out!

-Jonah

Chinese Herb Prices

You may have noticed that prices for Chinese medicinal herbs have gone through painful cost increases. We feel the pain too, and have done the best we can to make sure herbs are affordable for your patients. But the reality is that the days of cheap Chinese herbs are gone forever. However this increased cost comes with many benefits. The money goes to pay for:

• Higher standards for correct species identification, correct growing area, herb farms with Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) certification
  
• Herbs free of pesticides and preservatives, including sulfur, as well as testing and documentation.
  
• Exclusive contracts with growers and herbs grown to specification, which ensures fresher herbs. Other pharmacies may buy herbs from distributors with no exclusive contracts, which means they must buy herbs on the open market. The Chinese herb market is huge, and herbs may change hands many many times and sit in storage for months and years before they make their way to the U.S. Fat Turtle is at the tail end of a very short supply chain, from grower to processor to distributor to us and on to you and your patients.
  
• Higher wages and benefits for the workers who labor in the field to grow our herbs, and for the people who wash, slice, dry and package the raw herbs for pharmacy use. Many of us here in the U.S. are aware that our habits of buying and consumption have the potential to be ruinous to the health of our brothers and sisters on the other side of the globe. This awareness has led to the development of fair trade programs for products as diverse as coffee, chocolate, soap and cotton. Although there are not yet any fair trade certifications for Chinese herbs, you can be sure that part of your herb dollar goes to support healthy communities in the environments where they are grown and processed.
  

Chinese Herbal Pharmacy Terms of the Day: Chong Fu 冲服 and Rong Hua 溶化

Chong Fu (chōngfú 冲服) is an instruction typically added to written formulas to indicate that the herb in question should not be decocted, but ingested whole along with a swallow of the herbal decoction. Usually the herb is powdered to make this process easier, so the whole instruction might say yán mò chōngfú 研末冲服, which means "grind to powder and take drenched."

"Take drenched" is the translation from the World Health Organization term set, and it works for me even though it doesn't automatically conjure up an image. I like that we're using two words for two characters.

Herbs that are typically taken Chong Fu-style are expensive herbs like Lu Rong 鹿茸, Ge Jie 蛤蚧, Hai Ma 海马 and Dong Chong Xia Cao 冬虫夏草. (When dealing with an unfamiliar pharmacy or one in which you don't have complete confidence, a savvy herb customer should ask to see the herb in question before it is powdered. Of course, that assumes that you are somewhat familiar with how to differentiate authentic herbs and different quality levels - for more on these topics, keep an eye on Eric Brand's blog at the Blue Poppy website.)

A similar but very different instruction is Rong Hua (rónghuà 溶化), which simply translates as "melt" or "dissolve." An herb that is marked "Rong Hua" is added to the hot decoction after the cooking process has finished, but should dissolve completely when stirred in. Examples are the gelatins: Lu Jiao Jiao 鹿角胶, E Jiao 阿胶, Gui Ban Jiao 龟板胶. By contrast a powdered Lu Rong will never dissolve, and therefore must be ingested and chased with decoction for the best medicinal effect.

This is part of our ongoing series on Chinese pharmacy terms. Previously we've covered Hou Xia 后下, and we'll be covering more in the future. I would love to see more Chinese medicine doctors start appending these terms to their prescriptions. It makes your prescription more precise, it helps your herbal pharmacy, and it helps your patients!

ACTCM student Brenda Hatley on the U.S. Wushu Team

A student at the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine has won a spot on the U.S. Wushu team. Her name is Brenda Hatley and you can read all about her at this website.

The U.S. Wushu Team is not super well-funded, so if you can please make a donation so that Brenda can go compete at the Wushu World Games in Turkey this fall!

There is a lot of cross-over between the worlds of martial art and Chinese medicine. Both developed from the same philosophical framework of Yin and Yang, the five phases, bagua, and so on. Many famous martial arts masters were also Chinese medicine doctors. Two that come to mind are Wong Fei Hung and Wang Ziping.

Wong Fei Hung has been portrayed extensively in film and television but is most famous in the U.S. from the Once Upon a time in China film series starring Jet Li. The movies are a lot of fun to geek out to if you are a fan of both martial arts and Chinese medicine - Wong is seen doing martial arts heroics and saving lives with acupuncture. There is even a scene where he educates Western doctors in acupuncture.

Wang Ziping (1881-1973) of Cangzhou in Hebei province, and was an expert in several martial arts including bajiquan, piguaquan and xingyiquan. He was also an expert bone-setter and traumatologist. You can learn more about him at this website. His daughter Wang Jurong also became a well-known martial artist, and his granddaughters are also continuing the family tradition.

My martial arts teacher, Dr. Alex Feng, is also a Chinese medicine doctor, and was my original inspiration for going into the Chinese medicine field. Tom Bisio and Frank Butler are both martial artists with successful Chinese medicine practices, and Tom Bisio wrote a popular book on how to treat martial arts and other sports injuries using Chinese medicine. The list goes on and on.

As a practical matter, knowledge of the body and how it moves is essential in both martial arts and medicine. Observation, timing and sensitivity are all skills that are strengthened and reinforced by cross-training in martial arts and Chinese medicine. If you're studying one, consider studying the other as well.

One of the coolest things we saw at Mayway's facility in Hebei, China -

- the complete process of how a whole herb gets from the field to us here at Fat Turtle. Keep in mind this is leaving out the whole process of quality control in the field, which we'll cover in another blog post. There is a whole host of site visits, macroscopic examination (which essentially means having a master herbalist/agronomist examine the herbs and see if they have the correct morphology), microscopic examination, testing and et cetera to make sure the herbs are the correct species and fall well under the limits for heavy metals, pesticide residue, et cetera.

(We weren't allowed to take pictures inside the facility, which is too bad, because they had some very cool-looking equipment in there - I'll be supplementing with pictures from the internet.)

Once a batch of herbs has been accepted, it goes something like this:

• Herbs are washed with water from Mayway's on-site well, which is quite deep, although I don't remember if they ever told us exactly how deep.
  
• When we were there, they had uncut Ze Xie 泽泻 (alisma) banging around in a stainless steel washer that looked something like a concrete mixer that was open at both ends - roughly cylindrical, with jets of water shooting in.
  
• The next step is soaking - most herbs have to be thoroughly soaked to make slicing possible.
  
• From there it's on to the slicing. Each herb has a particular way it has to be cut. When we were in there blue-suited workers were feeding long uncut pieces of Sang Bai Pi into a machine that looked quite similar to this one. A blade at the end comes down at regular intervals and turns it into the familiar-looking orange and white piece we use at the pharmacy.
  
• From there it's on to drying. Just as there are several different slicing machines for different herbs, there are a few different drying machines. Some can be dried relatively quickly at high heat without any damage - this machine looks something like a huge industrial bread toaster, similar to this thing. Others, like Ju Hua 菊花 (chrysanthemum) and other flowers, have to be dried gently at relatively low temperatures. These herbs are dried on racks in temperature- and humidity-controlled cabinets that look like this.
  
• After that it's off to sorting. We walked in on a roomful of blue-suited workers hand-sorting Bai Zi Ren 柏子仁 (biotae)... huge piles of tiny seeds on stainless steel tables. If they saw one that was off-color, they threw it out. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
  
• Next, weighing and packaging. There are at minimum three people involved in packaging any one half-kilo package of raw herb. One person scoops an approximate amount into a bag. The next one weighs it and adjusts it to half a kilo. The third http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifperson takes the correct-weight bag and seals it, usually in a vacuum process that sucks all the air out. Mayway then takes another step and double-bags, injecting nitrogen into the space between the two bags. This is to cushion the herbs during transport.
  
  Then the herbs get taken downstairs, where they wait until they've accumulated a shipping container full. The herbs are then trucked to Tianjin, the nearest port city, and it's off to Oakland...

What does all this mean? For one, now we understand why Chinese herbs are relatively expensive. It's only because of the low cost of labor that herbs don't cost more than they already do.

It also has important ramifications for the domestic herb industry. High Falls Garden in upstate New York and the Chinese Medicinal Herb Farm in Northern California are producing small amounts of Chinese herbs every year, and at some point we'll need a facility that can process the herbs. Just as the growth of clinical Chinese medicine pushes the growth of the Chinese pharmacy industry, people who farm or gather Chinese herbs will spur an herb-processing industry.

Just as ranchers need slaughterhouses if they raise cattle on any kind of large scale, the U.S. herb industry will need processing facilities if they hope to grow to a sustainable size. What will these facilities look like? Will herb farming ever become a large enough industry to support such a venture? Maybe the answer is vertical integration - a farm with a processing facility on site, owned by the same people. These are important things to think about for the future. If you have any ideas, please share!