Herbal Dosing

Yesterday we went over raw herb dosing (one bag per day is the full dose - on the West Coast that seems to be halved). Now let's go over extract powder dosing. Today's post is a little more technical and student-oriented, but if you're a patient it's important for you to understand these issues as well.

Concentrated herbal extracts have made herbs much easier to prepare and take. Instead of the hour-long process we saw in yesterday's video, you just take your special pre-measured spoon, measure out a few scoops, mix with boiling water et voila! Your herbs are ready in liquid form, as easy as instant coffee.

The herb powder is generally in a 5:1 concentration, meaning for every 1 gram of powder herbs, it should be the equivalent of getting 5 grams of raw herbs. So, how much powder should you take?

Many practitioners and students prescribe 3 scoops, 3 times per day no matter what the formula. This is a mistake! 3 scoops 3 grams a day is not the same as boiling a bag of herbs per day or even the same as boiling a bag of herbs every other day - because of the nature of concentrated granules, each dosage should be unique.

I'm going to show you how to dose concentrated herbal powder - a procedure I had no idea about until Fritz Hudnut (supervisor at the Yosan clinic) showed me how to do it.

1. Write your herbal prescription as normal, using standard raw dosages. As an example, let's use the following:
   Chai Hu 9
   Dang Gui 9
   Bai Shao 15
   Bai Zhu 9
   Fu Ling 12
   Shu Di 15
   Shan Zhu Yu 12
   Shan Yao 12
   Mu Dan Pi 9
   Ze Xie 9
   Sheng Jiang 6
   Bo He 3
   Gan Cao 3
   
2. Now, add up all the daily raw dosages: 123 grams. If you were taking a raw formula, this is how much herbs you would need to take.
   
3. Now divide by the concentration ratio of the herbs you use. Let's assume it's 5:1. 123/5 = 24.6. Let's round off to 24 grams - that's how much powdered herbs you should be using per day.
   
4. Using a standard 1 gram spoon and taking three doses a day, that works out to 8 spoons 3 times per day. It also means that, if you give your patient a 50 gram bottle of herbs, it will last all of two days.
   
5. Suppose you wanted to give them a half-dose: just divide your final result by two. 24/2 = 12 grams, or 4 spoons 3 times per day.

How To Cook Chinese Herbs

This instructional video is pretty good. The lighting isn't great, but all the basics are there.

A few things to remember:

• Soaking your herbs before hand is a good idea, but be careful you retain all the herbal material when tossing out your soaking water. If you have very small pieces of leaves or small seeds, be sure to use a fine strainer.
  
• Don't use a microwave to heat up your leftovers! In fact, most of the time you don't even need to refrigerate it. If you drink it all within 24-48 hours, leaving it on the counter and reheating on the stove should be fine.
  
• Dosing: be sure to follow your practitioner's instructions on how much to drink and how much to brew. For some reason, many practitioners in the United States prescribe half-doses - in other words, they have you brew one bag of herbs for every two days. In China, they use one bag of herbs per day. I've heard some practitioners say that Americans aren't used to the taste of herbs, and therefore can't take the higher concentrations of the regular dose. At my first TCM school, the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine - New York, we dosed one bag per day. All the private practitioners I saw did the same. Here on the West Coast, many people dose one bag for every two days.

No Drugs Down The Drain Week

It's official, folks. There is a week-long celebration in the state of California dedicated to NOT dumping your pharmaceutical drugs down the toilet. Your BCP's and Viagra now join the likes of pet alligators and paper towels.... Just don't do it.

Why is it so important? Why are we focusing for an entire week on Drugs Down the Drain, when there is only one day dedicated to all of the presidents of the United States combined? Because that stuff can end up in your drinking water, that's why!!

Forget about saving the environment, and all that stuff about polluting the rivers and killing innocent plants and animals.... think about your internal environment!! Pharmaceutical drugs are nasty, they are meant to be nasty. They are designed to be pervasive and work really well at what they do, which is destroy their target micro-organism/chemical pathway/physiological process. Because they are so good at what they do, they sometimes do things that drug-makers and researchers had no idea they would do until after they'd been in use for a while. The pharmaceutical drug industry is still very young, beginning with the advent of penicillin in the 1930's. This revolution in health care has saved a lot of lives, but it has also bred a lot of super drugs that now threaten our ability to utilize them as useful tools, as well as threaten our own immune systems with their potency.

Here's a more eloquent quote from the book, The Lost Language of Plants, by Stephen Harrod Buhner:

Many excreted pharmaceuticals and their metabolites are not biodegradable and go on producing chemical effects forever. Most that do biodegrade are regularly replenished by the need for continual dosing or by new prescriptions for new people. As pharmaceuticals are excreted in pure and metabolized forms they also intermix in the waste streams that flow into the environment in ways that cannot be predicted, with effects that are not understood. Researchers have found that metabolites, chemicals produced as by-products of pharmaceutical interaction with the body, tend to be more persistent in the environment, and are sometimes more powerful in their actions, than the drugs from which they are derived.

The mixing of chemical compounds in the environment is like mixing your drinks; if you start the night with a fine wine and end it with plastic-bottle vodka and whisky, you're going to regret being alive the next morning. But unlike alcohol, which does metabolize and degrade in our bodies and in the environment, these synthetic compounds do not.

So, remember, when your hands reach for that bottle of pills you no longer need, and you feel the temptation of the shiny white porcelain, think of yourself for a minute. You don't want to drink that in your water later, do you?

You Are What You Eat

We picked up a copy of the Healthy Times Newspaper today while at a grocery store in Corona. Here's a fun feature article from their Sept/Oct issue:

A stupendous insight of civilizations past has now been confirmed by today's investigative, nutritional sciences. Research has shown that what was once called The Doctrine of Signatures was astoundingly correct. The doctrine contends that every whole food has a signature or pattern that resembles the human body organ or physiological function that most benefits from it.

Here is just a short list of examples of whole food signatures:

	A sliced carrot looks like the human eye. The pupil, iris, and radiating lines look just like the human eye…and YES science now shows that carrots greatly enhance blood flow to and function of the eyes.
	A tomato has four chambers and is red. The heart is red and has four chambers. All of the research shows tomatoes are indeed pure heart and blood food.
	Grapes hang in a cluster that has the shape of the heart. Each grape looks like a blood cell and all of the research today shows that grapes are also profound heart and blood vitalizing food.
	A walnut looks like a little brain, a left and right hemishpere, upper cerebrums, and lower cerebellums. Even the wrinkles or folds are on the nut just like the neo-cortex. We now know that walnuts help delvelp over 3 dozen neuron-transmitters for brain function.
	Kidney beans actually heal and help maintain kidney function and yes, they look exactly like the human kidneys.
	Celery, Bok Choy, Rhubarb and more look just like bones. These foods specifically target bone strength. Bones are 23 percent sodium. If you don’t have enough sodium in your diet, the body pulls it from the bones, making them weak. These foods replenish the skeletal needs of the body.
	Eggplant, avocados, and pears target the health and function of the womb and cervix of the female - they look like these organs. Today’s research shows that when a woman eats 1 avocado a week, it balances hormones, sheds unwanted birth weight, and prevents cervical cancers. And how profound is this?….It takes exactly 9 months to grown an avocado from blossom to ripened fruit. There are over 14,000 photolytic chemical constituents of nutrition in each one of these foods (modern science has only studied and named about 141 of them.)
	Figs are full of seeds and hang in twos when they grow. Figs increase the motility of male sperm and increase the number of sperm, a way to overcome male sterility.
	Sweet Potatoes look like the pancreas and actually balance the glycemic index of diabetics.
	Olives assist the health and functions of the ovaries.
	Grapefruit, oranges, and other Citrus fruits look just like the mammary glands of the female and actually assist the health of the breasts and the movement of lymph in and out of the breasts.
	Onions look like body cells. Today’s research shows that onions help clear waste materials from all of the body cells. They even produce tears which wash the epithelial layers of the eyes.

There was also a little table of the 12 Most and Least Contaminated Produce (conventionally grown fruits and vegetables contaminated by toxic pesticides):

12 Most Contaminated:

Peaches
Strawberries
Apples
Spinach
Nectarines
Celery
Pears
Cherries
Potatoes
Bell Peppers
Raspberries
Grapes

12 Least Contaminated:

Sweet Corn
Avocado
Pineapples
Cauliflower
Mangoes
Sweet Peas
Asparagus
Onions
Broccoli
Bananas
Kiwi Fruit
Papaya

The accompanying article discussed how children were more likely to suffer negative effects from pesticide exposure because of their lower body weight, their less developed immune systems, and the fact that they're still growing. For all of us, unsafe levels of pesticides have a wide variety of side effects on the endocrine, nervous and immune systems.

Pre-Historic Health Spa

Stonehenge has long been thought of as a burial site, where cremated remains and bodies have been found that date as far back as 3000 BCE. But the history of the land on which it rests dates back even farther: there were post holes for large wooden poles found in that location dated back to 8000 BCE. It seems as though this point on Earth has always held a certain significance, drawing different people and cultures to it throughout time. It should be no wonder then that as time passed, the purpose of the place could have changed in significance to those who visited it.

In the most recent excavation of the site - the first one in 44 years - two archaeologists have theorized that Stonehenge could have actually been used as a place of pilgrimage for those who were sick and dying, a veritable health spa of sorts.

There are bluestones placed in the inner ring of Stonehenge that were determined to have come from Preseli Mountains in Southwest Wales, 140 miles from Stonehenge. To give you an idea of how significant that is, the larger rocks of the more recognizably Stonehenge structure came from only 20 miles north of the site. Whoever was building Stonehenge at the time made it a point to bring those big bluestones in there.

Bluestones, named for the bluish color that appears when the stones get wet or cut, are recorded as having healing properties:

The stones are great;
And magic power they have;
Men that are sick;
Fare to that stone;
And they wash that stone;
And with that water bathe away their sickness.

The archaeologists also found that natural springheads, where water comes up from the ground, had been enhanced by the erection of small walls to dam the water that came up, creating little pools they proposed the sick would be able to sit in. Some of the springheads were "adorned with pre-historic art."

Bodies buried nearby that are contemporary to the time the bluestones were in place also support their theory. The remains of the buried show injuries that were possible causes of death, suggesting that these people had come to the site in hopes of being healed.

The full article about their new findings is printed in the October issue of the Smithsonian magazine.

太极图 Tai Ji Tu

The 太极图 Tai Ji Tu, or tai ji diagram, illustrates the everchanging nature of yin and yang. Yin and yang are mutually supportive, oppositional, dynamic, and so on. For every up, there is a down. For every inside, there is an outside. Not only that, for the concept of "inside" to exist there must be an "outside". If everything was "inside" there would be no need for the term "outside".

This philosophical argument becomes real when applied to medicine, fighting, art, sex or any other area of life. What starts as the common cold, affecting the yang or upper part of the body in the nose and sinuses, can become pneumonia, affecting the deep interior or yin parts of the body. When your opponent attacks high, you attack low. When he advances, you retreat. When he retreats, you advance. Tai Ji is the separation of the essential wholeness of the universe into two parts, yin and yang.

Yin and yang must work together harmoniously in your body and in relation to the "outside" world. When there is a disturbance, you get sick. When there is no disturbance, you have health. All we do in acupuncture is balance yin and yang. There are further divisions of yin and yang, complicated disease models and mechanisms, but it all comes back to yin and yang.

Acupuncture for Portland

Artist Adam Kuby performed a month-long, single point acupuncture treatment for the city of Portland last March. This project "explores the interface between art, regional planning, traditional Chinese medicine and the health of a city."

Chinese medicine has for thousands of years recognized the fractal theory, although they didn't name it as such. (A fractal is a geometric construction wherein each part of the total structure is an exact copy of the whole. There are many other attributes as well - see here for more information on fractals.) In essence, the entire universe is a fractal, with each part reflecting the structure and relationships of the whole. This is most clearly seen in the relationship between the human body and the planet earth. The human body has twelve main meridians; Earth has the Nile, the Yellow River, the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Rhine, and so on. Earth has storms, thunder and lightning; humans have their emotions. Earth has five continents (six if you count Antarctica); the human body has five major organs (six if you count the Pericardium).

The parallels go on and on. So, if humans have acupuncture points, what are their equivalents on earth? The character for an acumoxa point is 穴 xue. The meaning of this character, taken alone, is cave, den, or hole. Therefore, earth's acumoxa points are its caves.

Caves have particular significance to spiritual traditions the world over. The prophet Muhammad received the first revelation of the Koran after meditating in a cave. Jesus Christ was entombed in a cave for three days before being born again. Some qi gong masters live in special caves in order to connect more directly with the qi of the earth. Think about that - you can go live in one of the earth's acupuncture points! We're no more than mites feeding on the earth's crust.