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Building a Chinese Medicine Kit

 

 

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Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.  Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

Hello, welcome. My name is Tsao-Lin Moy, and I will be hosting today’s Facebook live, and I’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for providing these Facebook lives. And, uh, hopefully they’re going to be very interesting for you. Um, I’m very excited about today’s episode and I really want to, uh, send a shout out to, uh, a friend of mine, Josh coropol and another one Neil Gordon, because it was having a conversation with them over last week. That then prompted me to talk about, uh, Chinese medicine in a way that, uh, we can teach our, our patients and also for us to be much more creative in the way we think about what it is that we do. So, so, um, let’s go to the first slide.

All right. So the topic today is building a Chinese medicine kit and how to use something like a fast food restaurant to make medicines when you’re out on the road. Uh, and it’s something, uh, I call them MacGyvering, uh, if you’re, depending on your, uh, what generation you are, um, MacGyver was a TV show and, uh, he would find himself in these predicaments and have to be very creative about getting out of his predicaments or using whatever resources were there. Uh, so what I’m going to cover a few of those formulas, uh, and, uh, yeah. Tell us, uh, where you guys are watching from I’m from I’m in New York city, union square. Uh, so feel free to type in the chat, uh, you know, where you’re from. Uh, so the first one I’m going to talk about are some formulas, basic formulas that all of you probably know them, and, uh, you can also teach your patients.

I’m a very big advocate of, you know, giving this information so your patients can actually learn how to take care of themselves, especially early stage and acute right early stage prevention. Hello, Brooke from Hawaii, Hawaii. Oh, I love it. Yeah. And Sharon from long island. Thank you. Thank you. Um, so another part will be kind of building your kids, uh, another topic, uh, I love instant soup, which is an ancient Chinese formula, big, like, what is that? And then also some, uh, you know, what to do, you know, with fast food restaurants and how you can actually make Chinese medicine. Uh, and then, uh, you being a MacGyver, like creating your own, uh, creative hacks. Okay.

So here we are, when you wish you had your Chinese medicine cabinet and really what you have is, you know, you’re, you’re on the road, whatever you’ve packed. Okay. So this list, uh, will be available on the replay, uh, the formulas and some miscellaneous supplies. Um, I love the, you ping pong sand, the Jade windscreen, uh, that is, uh, just in case anybody kind of forgot their, um, oops. I just dropped my forgot their, uh, their verbal basics, really the very initial stages of when you think you’re getting sick, um, kind of like when you’re having a premonition and that’s what you would want to, to take right away. Uh, the BN PN for that kind of stuffy nose, uh, the arch and Tom, I love that also for congestion, uh, very famous the yin child song, which I’m going to, I mean, uh, yes, the child song, which I’m going to kind of go over a few other things with it.

Uh, the [inaudible], which is the cinnamon decoction Boothbay, Tom tonifying the lungs that’s when you have the chronic cough, uh, the peep or the bay move swallow center, which is a syrup, right. That has the Loquat in it. Uh, if you’re on the road and you’re overeating, you may need something for digestion, the bowel ho wan, you know, for the over consumption of food, you know, when you’re not home to cook those organic meals, uh, then we have also the Shandling by do, do Tom, you know, for that, he gets sick with diarrhea. Um, you really need to, especially if you’re traveling overseas, you know, something other than Immodium, the classic Yunan buy-out for internal, uh, bleeding or bruising. I mean, this is like arnica on steroids, uh, a D Dodge owl, or even like a white flour for like a bruising, topical bruising pain patches emergency, which is great for replenishing electrolytes, definitely a probiotic.

Uh, this is gonna help with your, your digestion again, when you’re traveling or you really need to make sure that you have a very healthy immune system. Uh, I love to bring Kinesio tape to have that, uh, because it can double up as a great, uh, ACE bandage, uh, magnets, the little, uh, the Korean hand magnets and, you know, a little Mylar blanket for, for heat. That’s always great. So these are like, kind of, this is like a, a basic kind of a thing I like you can pick and choose, which are gonna work for you. Um, and really like, think about like how you would be able to use them in an everyday setting. Okay. So here’s this thing, instant miso soup with the tofu and scallions. Um, and this is where I was having this conversation. Uh, and I had it with somebody else too, who was traveling to south America.

They were going to be doing acupuncture, acupuncturists without borders. And I would hear that every time someone would go on these trips, they were like getting some kind of parasite, some kind of dysentery situation, um, not a lot of available. And so I would say like, bring some instant miso soup, right? It’s got the miso in it, which is, has the probiotic a fermentation, it’s got a little bit of the tofu. Tofu is considered a complete, like a full, uh, vegetarian type of a protein, right. And then the scallion is also great for the nose and the broth a little bit of salt, because you could be losing, um, some, uh, salt and you need to retain, uh, the fluids. So this, interestingly enough, I look and I said, oh yeah, this is part of this, the, the song church, Tom, which is the scallion number, Baird, soybean decoction.

So instead, like, where would you get it? Okay. Go to the supermarket. Most supermarkets actually have, you know, this instant miso soup. Um, and some of them also will have the, uh, seaweed and seaweed is really good for detox, right. And also it has a little bit of iodine, nothing wrong with that. Um, and, and what it treats. So this is in the materia Medica. It’s the very first stage of that external wind invasion that mild fever and chills will stuffy nose or the headache, um, the thin white tongue coat, the floating poles. All right. But if you’re out, you just need to know that, Hey, if you don’t have the, uh, you pink Fung sand, this is what you would take right now. The interesting thing about this particular miso soup is the formula comes from a book it’s called the emergency formulas to keep up on sleep. This is from the Jin dynasty. And, uh, by the practitioner was the home, uh, a natural scientist, a Taoist expert, uh, and really, uh, a pharmacologist. And so when we think about Taoism, I’m going to go off on a tangent here is where they say, oh, you know, it’s like religion, but that was, we’re always also looking for how to extend life. You know, we’re always looking for immortality. So what’s gonna show up is really like things to continue to, um, help your health. Right.

Okay. Foods, we could do an entire, uh, segment or on foods. But what I would say easy is T bring with you teas, you can bring dried mushrooms again, the Meese, so soup, some ginger candy preserved plums. I was in a supermarket in Chinatown, and I’m looking at these, a traditional kind of candies, which are actually, uh, like orange drawings with a salt, sugar, a little ginger. Um, so they’re sour, they’re like sour plums, and those are great for digestion dry in my office here. Okay. So what can we find at something like a Walgreens, Chinese medicine at Walgreens? Well, the formula [inaudible], which again, combined with [inaudible], now this, we know as practitioners was part of some of the strategy for treating COVID right. If you’ve been following some of the formulas and the classic, really what we’re looking at is the two herbs, which are actually flowers are the honeysuckle and the forsythia. Now, if you, and I’ve said this to my patients, if they don’t have the in-house on, the closest thing to get is airborne and the ingredients, which I it’s very tiny on, there has a lot of the ingredients that are in [inaudible] and in particular, the honeysuckle and the forsythia, right? So this is something where you can go to a Walgreens. They’re going to have it in a supermarket now, so you can just read the label. There’s also the, [inaudible] the chasteberry I think there’s licorice in there as well.

Okay. So creative hacks and resourcefulness. So one of the things that I want to impress upon is, you know, we, in our modern society become like really complacent with our idea of what medicine is, right. What’s what’s really happened is, is a lot of pharmaceuticals. Um, but the world itself has not really changed. Right. We still get sick and we were still very much, uh, vulnerable to serious viruses and pandemics. Right. And, um, what’s happened is unless it comes from a particular place, we don’t even recognize what it is. So a lot of the things that are used in Chinese formulas, like ginger, cinnamon, um, clove, hot peppers, garlic, those things have now, uh, you can find them in the baking section, right. So if you need to like, make something like, oh, what am I going to get? Ginger? I can’t find it. There’s no sewer.

You can find it’s like freeze dried. It’s just like the package has changed. Right. And the thing about going back to gung ho, he was an expert in natural science, right. Plant medicine. And he actually intact attach more importance to experimentation. He’s the one that wrote a hundred volume tome, the Jaida case formulas. So anything that’s in a Jade case means it’s very important, right? You got a golden cabinet or a Jade Jade, uh, case. Um, but he was doing this based on his own understanding of Chinese formulas and folk medicine that he would really collect. So here we have, you know, someone who has access to all like volumes and volumes of medicine, just like us. We’ve got the internet, we’ve got Dr. Google. We’ve got a lot of it. And, but also he was looking at, Hey, what’s actually really working out in the world.

And so from there he wrote 101 formulas to keep up one sleep. I remember they had these long sleeves. Right. Then they could put stuff in. So these, that means these were important, right. In, in the ancient times, anybody that would get sick, it could be really like death. Right. If they didn’t recover. Now, one of the things that’s very interesting, the more I started, like looking into like, who is this person? I mean, Hey, we’re thinking alike. I’m telling my friend, okay, if you’re in an emergency, this is what you do. Get out your instance soup. Right. And suddenly I’m reading like, wait a second. The same formula. It comes from a book called emergency formulas to keep up on sleep or in your glove compartment, or, you know, wherever you’re going to be in your suitcase and you in your little makeup bag or right.

Um, but one thing that he noted, and this is a very interesting thing. We’re talking about Jin dynasty two hundred sixty six, three hundred and eighty, right. We’re looking at, he noted that the earth Ching, how, which is the urban Artemisia known as wormwood using that juice to treat malaria in the 1970s, Artemisia in was actually extracted from the wormwood by Chinese scientists, scientists, and this in 2015, uh, this scientist got the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. It says it was awarded to professor you U2 for her key contribution to the discovery of artemisinin. Now this is where we’re looking at this stuff is everywhere, right? And, and we, as practitioners, we have access and understanding to what there is the thing is, is that we’re not recognizing it, that it’s still around us. The world is not changed that much in terms of the natural world. Things get packaged differently. We look so much too. If it comes in a little container in a pill or a backed by let’s say science or pharmacy, that it’s gotta be powerful. The thing is, is that we have these things that we can still do. Even if there isn’t a, a, an apothecary that’s near us, we have to be creative. And, and hopefully at the end, you’re going to like this and you’re going to see it.

Okay. So necessity leads to invention. This is really applying what, you know, by observation and resourcefulness and in case anybody was born, I know in the nineties, uh, and didn’t get to see this, uh, guy MacGyver. Uh, if you go back and you’ll see like wild stuff that he would do, uh, to get out of these, uh, situations, he’d find himself in. Um, and I look at, you know, that’s the same kind of energy and creativity that we need to be thinking about when, like, what could we, you know, what could we use? Uh, one thing, uh, that I would say the pen during the pandemic, people got really creative. They were making a grilled cheese sandwiches on using an iron, right. And, and, uh, poaching eggs, you know, like in a water kettle, right? So this was, you know, something that we need to continue to use that energy, because otherwise we’re going to get very stuck and complacent in how we’re treating people and really like recognizing and observing what is in front of us and, and, and simple solutions.

Now on the list, one of the things, uh, that was on there was the, the cinnamon decoction, right. That’s the wager. And that formula is a fantastic formula, right? Cause it’s for, you know, muscle pain, neck and shoulder, you know, when the you’re cold, you’re getting sick and you feel it like in your neck and your back, but it’s also a great formula for muscle cramping. And I’ve actually given this formula to some of my patients who do triathlons. One of their problems is as they get muscle cramping, the chief ingredient in there is the cinnamon and cinnamon is known as a vasodilator, especially to the capillaries. So how do you get, you know, blood circulation into your toes and your feet, um, sediment, that formula is also great. If you have cold in the stomach, cause cold in the stomach, it’s another formula, which is basically the wager tongue plus extra ginger and extra of the Maltese.

So here we are, the MacGyver hack making some fire cider. I know fire cider has been out all over the internet and it’s, it’s made with like horseradish, garlic, onion, uh, apple cider vinegar, um, hot peppers. So there are many different, uh, recipes for it. But if you’re out on the road and you need to make yourself like a quick little, let’s knock this thing out, you’ve got horseradish. And just so you know, I picked the most common, you know, it’s not organic horseradish, it’s not organic, honey. I just picked the ones that you most likely might see at like a Outback steak house or someplace. If you’re, you know, a, you know, a fast food place. And just as an aside, if you’re ever really looking for super clean bathrooms on the road, McDonald’s better than Starbucks, right? So a lot of these places, you’re going to find these condiments that are here.

There’s the vinegar, there’s the honey, there’s the hot sauce horseradish. If they don’t have it, you can probably find the wasabi. You find those little packets. If you want to make a little more little marmalade that has the little bits of the orange peel. Sometimes with some honey, that’s something too for settling your stomach, right? This is like the using the Chen P right. Or the chain P to help with digestion. And so this is like something, you get a bunch of these packets, you get a little hot water, you can, you know, make a little decoction yourself, drink it down, or spoon it down. And it’s going to help with like a sore throat. And then also, you know, the horseradish stuff is going to go up to the nose, right? So all of these things actually have many of these anti-microbial antiviral properties.

And the thing is, is that we, you know, there’s no, not necessarily a supermarket and you’re not going to start, you know, grading horseradish. You can just get one of these packets. And this is really, we’re talking about kind of emergency situations, but if you’ve got a patient there and there, you can just say, go to the, you know, go to the Outback steakhouse or, or go to the five guys, hamburger, joint, or someplace asked for, you know, the honey packets or the hot sauce or all of that stuff. Cause most of the time they give you too much, right. Anyway, home Depot and your backyard. So getting back to bat combination of the honeysuckle and the forsythia, right. Sometimes it’s in, it’s in your backyard. If you can’t find it home Depot or gardening center actually carries these plants. And so realistically, if you needed to stop by a home garden center and, you know, grab a, you know, grab a few branches, right.

Or the down the line down the line, there is weeds there, weeds they’re all over the place. Uh, and so these are things you might be hiking and you start having scratchy throat and just trying to figure out like, oh, where can I go? You’re like, it’s right there. Um, one thing that I have to say is dandelion is pretty distinct. So you’re not going to end up picking something that is, uh, uh, poisonous. You need to know what it looks like. Right. And honeysuckle is very, it’s, it’s obvious what it is now. Things like plants, as we know, like honeysuckle in particular and a lot of the flowers that are in our formulas that we use, you remember that there are bees that come around, right. And they pollinate now what makes a honey? So, uh, immune boosting, because they’re getting all of the properties from these plans and then it’s being, uh, combined into to make honey, right. So this is why honey is one of those substances, which is actually really good for the immune system we had. Remember where does it come from? Comes from flowers. Right?

Okay. So this is not Chinese medicine, but we’re looking at using things for multiple purposes and to keep in mind, right. We’re getting creative looking at, what can you use? What has a multiple purpose preparation H right. It’s got two key ingredients. One of them is the fenal, uh, fennel, LeBron, uh, which shrinks has a way of shrinking. So for bleeding, it’s used for, uh, hemorrhoids, right? It also has the pro McCain, which is a topical Anil analgesic, which is actually great for itching and rashes. Now there are different kinds. You’d have to look even there’s a preparation age that just has, uh, the, a little bit of hydrocortisone on it. So this is like, wow, what are you going to do? If you’ve got like, uh, a bug bite? What can you do? Well, you can also use a little bit of the preparation age, right?

It’s going to bring the swelling down. It’s going to be cooling. Um, the one that is the suppository is really just made of the, of cocoa butter, right. It’s pretty natural cocoa butter. And then the, um, the fenal Efrin which shrinks the, um, has, uh, uh, shrinking shouldn’t the blood vessels, right? So that’s something in the event of a bug bite. You could probably use it, you know, say for kids, but check, um, you can just take it. It’s like a little bit of a thing and you could just rub it on and it’s gonna like help. Um, the kids. Now, this is a multiple purpose thing. If you can, people have been using it for, you know, under their, their eyes. Um, you might, even if you have little varicoceles or spider navvies on, you know, on the, you know, swollen fee, you could probably use a little bit of that. Um, what else is it used? Yes. And bug bites. Right. So those are things just be creative. Right?

Okay. Well, this is something. And the reason I decided like preparation age, cause, uh, interesting. I remembered back in the early eighties, late eighties, that there were these headlines about preparation H being a target for cocaine addicts. So this has to do with like some of the things that are shoplifted from pharmacies and what they found was like cocaine and heroin, heroin addicts were stealing preparation age and using it for their inflamed node, their noses and the places where they were injecting, which was actually pretty interesting. But then later on, so there was like 87 later on. We started to look at, um, some, it became like the number nine in the most stolen things from retail shelves. Right. So that actually caught my attention, like preparation, H one of the number one things that shoplifted, right. And then by 2005, yeah. Ended up being on the number nine list of the most shoplifted items. And this is, you start to look at, these are people that are kind of desperate and they get creative, right. Need creative causes, you know, creativity. Right. You gotta be creative. Like what can I do to, you know, I’m in pain.

Okay. So what I would love to know are, what are your hacks? What are some of the things that you do, maybe you tell your patients to try something, do something, oftentimes a patient will come to you and say, Hey, I was doing this thing. And I was like, oh, really? Why? And, uh, find that very, very interesting, right? Like why would you do that? Uh, and, uh, so I tend to look into it. I want to know more, uh, there’s a lot of information. And another suggestion is go back into your, uh, into your books, start looking up. Some of these formulas, actually individual herbs are great. Um, I didn’t have time to talk about using things like magnets, uh, and, and stuff like that. Uh, the hand magnets, but that’s a, you know, something we can do another time, you know, as a way to, uh, treat, uh, certain conditions, especially, uh, they’re non needling, so you can teach your patients.

Right. Um, so, all right. Hopefully I want to hear your, your hacks, uh, inform, if you want any more information, you can definitely reach out to me. And, uh, let’s see, I know next week, join us next week. Uh, with Matt Callison and Brian Lau, they’re going to be your host. I have, uh, done their training with Matt twice. I did the whole sports medicine training. Uh, they do fantastic job. You’re going to learn all about anatomy and physiology. You really get a good understanding of what’s going on under the skin. Uh, you’ll be a much better practitioner treating sports injuries and really understanding needle depth and really what is there. Uh, and so I highly recommend taking their training. I highly recommend that you, um, also, uh, go and, uh, tap into next week’s, uh, uh, American Acupuncture Council broadcast. All right. Thank you.