Everyday Chinese Medicine

Achieve vibrant health in every season with the holistic techniques of traditional Chinese medicine. This friendly guide to a 2,000-year-old lineage of healing wisdom integrates both the Five Element theory and the practices of traditional Chinese medicine to uncover what your body needs for balance and optimal health. Everyday Chinese Medicine demystifies, simplifies, and reveals patterns to help you take control of your own well-being from the comfort of your own home and kitchen. Mindi Counts—a holistic medical practitioner, acupuncturist, and herbalist—walks you through the seasons, elements, and organ systems to help you understand your unique constitution and how to achieve energetic and physical balance. With simple recipes, self-care practices, and time-tested herbal remedies, Everyday Chinese Medicine is the perfect companion on your path to complete wellness.

Take a holistic approach to your health and discover the ancient art of Chinese medicine. Over 3,000 years old, traditional Chinese medicine continues to be effective today. Unlike orthodox Western medicine, with its symptom-oriented treatments, Chinese medicine aims to cure diseases by focusing on the person and cause, and identifying a range of highly detailed syndromes with specific treatment programmes.

The groundbreaking work exploring how ancient Chinese medicine can be an integral part of our lives today - now in a 20th anniversary edition. Wood Becomes Water uses the five elements of Chinese cosmology -- wood, fire, earth, metal, and water -- to introduce readers to the connection between the physical, emotional, and spiritual forces in their lives. Practical, accessible, and wise, the book shows how the centuries-old techniques and philosophies of Chinese medicine can be applied to everyday issues of health and well-being in the modern world.

Discover a self-care approach for treating specific ailments and enhancing wellness. This book shares the foundational concepts of Chinese medicine and shows you how to integrate acupressure, herbalism, Qigong, diet, and lifestyle so that you can achieve optimal health outcomes. The ancient wisdom and practical techniques in this guide will help prevent the onset of disease, improve your day-to-day wellness, and promote longevity. Chinese medical physician Steven Cardoza provides integrated healing prescriptions for dozens of common conditions, including: Pain Insomnia Arthritis Common Cold Headache Poor Memory Angina Impotence Motion Sickness Asthma Flu Menstrual Disorders Abscesses Hemorrhoids Dry Skin Hepatitis Allergies Fatigue Bronchitis Morning Sickness Hernia Poor Appetite Prostatitis Eczema High Blood Pressure Nausea Hives Praise: "The conceptual basis of Chinese medicine isn't simple, but it has availed countless people over the course of centuries. If you want to employ TCM as a potent tool in your own health arsenal, Chinese Holistic Medicine in Your Daily Life can help."—Energy Times

The first book to exclusively use Chinese medical theories and terminology to guide practitioners of Chinese medicine in the use of Western herbs • Written entirely according to the theory, diagnosis, and treatment paradigm of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) • Explains how to combine and modify the standard TCM formulas to non-Chinese herbs suitable for Western practitioners • Includes 58 monographs of common Western healing herbs, detailing how each plant is used clinically The ever-growing number of Chinese medicine practitioners in the West has brought about an amalgamation of many styles of Chinese medicine and various other forms of medicine from around the world. This book addresses the increasing demand for knowledge of how to integrate plants from outside the standard Chinese materia medica into the fold of Chinese medical practices in the West. It is the first in-depth guide to using Western herbs exclusively according to the theories, diagnoses, and treatments of traditional Chinese medicine that harmonizes the unique terminology and theories of TCM with other botanical medicines. The book contains 58 monographs, illustrated with full-color photographs, of herbs commonly used by Western herbalists. Each herb is grouped by the basic categorization for medicinals in Chinese medicine, such as Herbs that Resolve the Exterior and Herbs that Regulate Blood. The monographs detail the energetics, function and indication, channels entered, dosage and preparation, and contraindications of each plant. The author also explains how to use the herbs to modify standard formulas used in everyday Chinese herbal medicine, based on his own clinical experience. An appendix of Western Analogs for Chinese Herbs further highlights 40 Chinese medicinals that have related species growing in the West.

Traditional Chinese medicine is often portrayed as an enduring system of therapeutic knowledge that has become globalized in recent decades. In Other-Worldly, Mei Zhan argues that the discourses and practices called “traditional Chinese medicine” are made through, rather than prior to, translocal encounters and entanglements. Zhan spent a decade following practitioners, teachers, and advocates of Chinese medicine through clinics, hospitals, schools, and grassroots organizations in Shanghai and the San Francisco Bay Area. Drawing on that ethnographic research, she demonstrates that the everyday practice of Chinese medicine is about much more than writing herbal prescriptions and inserting acupuncture needles. “Traditional Chinese medicine” is also made and remade through efforts to create a preventive medicine for the “proletariat world,” reinvent it for cosmopolitan middle-class aspirations, produce clinical “miracles,” translate knowledge and authority, and negotiate marketing strategies and medical ethics. Whether discussing the presentation of Chinese medicine at a health fair sponsored by a Silicon Valley corporation, or how the inclusion of a traditional Chinese medicine clinic authenticates the “California” appeal of an upscale residential neighborhood in Shanghai, Zhan emphasizes that unexpected encounters and interactions are not anomalies in the structure of Chinese medicine. Instead, they are constitutive of its irreducibly complex and open-ended worlds. Zhan proposes an ethnography of “worlding” as an analytic for engaging and illuminating emergent cultural processes such as those she describes. Rather than taking “cultural difference” as the starting point for anthropological inquiries, this analytic reveals how various terms of difference—for example, “traditional,” “Chinese,” and “medicine”—are invented, negotiated, and deployed translocally. Other-Worldly is a theoretically innovative and ethnographically rich account of the worlding of Chinese medicine.

Complete with descriptions of the seven traditional theories, herbal medicine, and the principles of modifying and composing everyday prescriptions, this text is part of a two-volume set that illustrates the relationship between medicine of the East and West.

“Comprehensive, encyclopedic, and lucid, this book is a must for all practitioners of the healing arts who want to broaden their understanding. Readers interested in the role of herbs and foods in healing will also find much to learn here, as I have. . . . A fine work.”—Annemarie Colbin, author of Food and Healing The promise and mystery of Chinese medicine has intrigued and fascinated Westerners ever since the “Bamboo Curtain” was lifted in the early 1970s. Now, in Between Heaven and Earth, two of the foremost American educators and healers in the Chinese medical profession demystify this centuries-old approach to health. Harriet Beinfeld and Efrem Korngold, pioneers in the practice of acupuncture and herbal medicine in the United States for over eighteen years, explain the philosophy behind Chinese medicine, how it works and what it can do. Combining Eastern traditions with Western sensibilities in a unique blend that is relevant today, Between Heaven and Earth addresses three vital areas of Chinese medicine—theory, therapy, and types—to present a comprehensive, yet understandable guide to this ancient system. Whether you are a patient with an aggravating complaint or a curious intellectual seeker, Between Heaven and Earth opens the door to a vast storehouse of knowledge that bridges the gap between mind and body, theory and practice, professional and self-care, East and West. “Groundbreaking . . . Here at last is a complete and readable guide to Chinese medicine.”—San Francisco Chronicle