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Who you calling Fu? This episode covers the concept of "San Fu Tie," a classic treatment in Chinese medicine that corresponds to three distinct periods between mid-July and mid-August. We discuss the significance of the timing of this treatment and how it aligns with the natural rhythms of the body and the environment. By doing so, the practitioner can use the least force to achieve maximum efficacy. We also explore how using these external herbal treatments to disperse cold during the summer can treat diseases that are exacerbated in the winter, like asthma. By following the natural flow of energy and adapting treatments accordingly, Chinese medicine practitioners can optimize the body's healing process while minimizing the use of aggressive techniques. We also share the classic herbal formula from Ming dynasty Dr. Zhang Lu 张璐!
And of course, for you classics nerds out there, one of the key Nei Jing quotes we cover in this episode:
“春夏养阳，秋冬养阴，以从其根” from 素问·四气调神大论
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Transcript
Introduction to Sanfu Days
00:00:20
Speaker
Anyway, we're here this week to talk about some food because we're in that hot period right now.
00:00:28
Speaker
That's why that storm is popping up. Maybe I would say so. Yeah, it's getting a little dampede kind of little blistery summary kind of thing going on. Yeah. So, or dog days of summer. I've heard it translated that way. Yeah, that's usually how we translate it or how I've heard it translated. Yeah, exactly.
00:00:48
Speaker
Yeah, so when are the sanfu days?
Understanding the Three Periods of Sanfu Days
00:00:51
Speaker
All right, so we got sanfu. And so that's a Chinese term meaning san-thri-fu, like hot, oven-like, temperature-y periods. And this is 10 days apart, because there's two different seasons. One is called chu-fu, and one is called mo-fu. So chu-fu is the beginning one, and this year it falls on the 21st of July.
00:01:15
Speaker
Muo-fu is on the 10th of August, and then the halfway point between those two, which would be 10 days after the first one, 10 days before the second one, we just refer to that as Zhongfu, even though it's not its own specific name. So these three fu periods, we then refer to as sanfu. We've got chu-fu on the 21st of July, Zhongfu on the 31st, Muo-fu on the 10th of August.
00:01:44
Speaker
But of course that always changes yearly because we're going on the lunar calendar. And so it doesn't always fall on the same dates on the every year based on where it falls on the solar calendar. Nice.
Why the Hottest Days Aren't Mid-Summer
00:01:56
Speaker
And interestingly enough, I would have expected the dog days that the hottest days to be peak summer, like, you know, maybe even pre solstice solstice right after solstice, but it's not. It's we're kind of turning the page a little bit into fall, especially when we get to this last one.
00:02:14
Speaker
Oh, heck yeah. Oh, you betcha. In fact, you can see this mirrored in a lot of different elements. But it's kind of the idea that when you get up to the noon time, yes, the sun's apex, but the Earth hasn't absorbed all the energy yet. And so you're actually just getting heat from above. And then down towards noon to two time, the Earth is also hot and radiating back up at you. So then you get heat from above and heat from below.
00:02:40
Speaker
Interestingly enough, for those out there in the Shang An-Lun study pattern, I know that's a little bit jumping, but it's a practitioner episode anyway, right? But those out there, a lot of people will translate Yang Ming as noontime. That's not true. That is not true. Yang Ming should be the biggest, the brightest, and the hottest. But that's not noon. That's the afternoon.
00:03:02
Speaker
So noontime really should be the transition from a rising yang to a descending yang and that's called shao yang. So it should start as tai yang in the morning, shao yang to transition between the two yang or the hub between the two yang and then yangming as the afternoon blazes on with heat. Good to know. All right. So what is
Using Herbs in Summer According to TCM
00:03:21
Speaker
the treatment? What are the herbs that people are putting on their bodies? Where are they putting it?
00:03:26
Speaker
So the treatment, and yeah, those are two biggies. The first one is basically like, maybe we should, do you want to go Y first? Should we do Y? Let's do, cause yeah, I think this would be confusing to a lot of people why we're trying to add, I'll explain. We tend to use a lot of hot herbs, but actually more importantly than heat is dispersing herbs. But it's true. We are using often warming herbs. And very importantly, we're doing something that Yang does in our body, which is move and disperse.
00:03:57
Speaker
And because of that, we want to use the maximum yang time to move and disperse to the greatest ability and also warm and also heat, right? And so we get this really cool phrase as you pointed out earlier. This is called dongbing xia zhi, which is winter diseases or diseases that flare more notably in the winter, xia zhi treat in the summer.
00:04:22
Speaker
And this comes from a really key phrase in the neijing. And this one's a really funny one at first because, you know, the neijing has a lot of, it's based on really subtle concepts or kind of basic intuitive concepts, but they take it to degrees that are just kind of astounding at times. And this is a good one. Don't know chapter numbers so much, but this comes from the first half of the neijing called the suwen. And the name of the chapter in Chinese is called
00:04:52
Speaker
So the Four Chi Regulate Shen chapter. I'll shout out the numbers. Yeah, you can search that one up. Anyway, so the phrase here is, which is in the spring and summer, you want to cultivate yang. And in the fall and winter, you want to cultivate yin. But when you take a step back as a practitioner, it's a little bit wacky, like nobody tonifies yang in the summer.
00:05:23
Speaker
Nobody would be like, oh, I'm going to hit this person with the warmest herbs, the foods, the ganjang. It just wouldn't happen. And we all know if you heated someone's body up that much in the summer, you're going to sweat them out. You're going to damage the fluids. So it doesn't kind of make sense in a way. And this treatment method is one of the ways that it really does make sense.
00:05:44
Speaker
So when it comes to winter diseases or diseases that flare with cold and so forth, and you can see this with other things, not just asthma, but asthma and lung diseases are the most prevalent. But even things like skin stuff, right, like rosacea and stuff, a lot of facial rosacea will flare mostly with wind and cold and so forth. And so how do we try and get rid of that? Well, from our perspective, it's use the coursing and basically anything that would stop the constricting of the cold.
00:06:12
Speaker
We want to nourish that, we want to warm that, we want to disperse that at a time when our body is most able to do that by itself. And so this is using the timeliness of nature and what our body is going to do in that time period to our maximum benefit. Yeah, it's true. Get out of our own way, right?
00:06:35
Speaker
This is funny because it brings me back one of our first conversations because you were not, you were a teacher of, I forget what class you were teaching, but it was not strictly in the TCM kind of bandwidth. It was one of the side classes that we had to take at school. We were talking about whether or not Chinese medicine was a homeopathic medicine or a, what was the other one?
00:06:57
Speaker
Allopathic. Allopathic. As a student at that time, my thought process was, oh, well, we're going to use the natural rhythms of life and of the body to treat disease. And then for me, that was homeopathic. The outside world is hot and young and moving. That's when you're going to add hot, young and moving.
00:07:21
Speaker
That's really true that this is a case where you could arguably say this is a kind of homeopathy or targeted algalopathy. Yeah. It's only a homeopathy. If you look at its relationship to the outside of the body, to the natural world and not what's happening inside, because inside the body, there's still that cold. That's right. That's exactly right. And if we weren't struggling with the cold, there'd be no reason to heat. Yeah. So it's very contextual, but
00:07:51
Speaker
You're exactly right. We never treat heat with heat. But we might use heat times to help our heat work better. And the cool thing is, you can use gentler methods, you can use less herbs, which, you know, in general, less herbs the better, right? If you can use less herbs to get a greater effect. I mean, who doesn't want that?
Efficiency of Minimal Force in TCM Treatments
00:08:10
Speaker
It's like sales pitch of the year, right? So this is that same idea. We do actually do the same thing in TUENA. I don't know, I saw some people in
00:08:19
Speaker
There's different ideas out there, but my advisor for both my master's and doctorate in China, he was very well known, maybe the most recognized in the northern half of the country for all of Twena. His books start out with a phrase, like right there in the forward, he says, the goal of Twena is to use the least amount of force, the least amount of time, the least amount of pressure, getting the least amount of pain to then achieve the greatest efficacy.
00:08:48
Speaker
And so many people just go ham on doina. That's why I think like, like, this is, you know, it's either like nothing, it's like a little like, you know, rub rub on the shoulder, or it's like, like hammering in there. And you're like, guys, there's got to be neither of these are efficacy based, right? They're just confusion. Good point too. And confusion is how the body is going to read it too. If you're like, always think about it. It's like shouting at the body or you're telling the body a hundred different things and
00:09:17
Speaker
It's got to take a little bit. And I think, you know, it's, it's our Western culture that we think more is good and more, more is got to be even better. And people think this all the time, like with, especially with massage, right? I see it all the time is that off someone come in and they're like,
00:09:36
Speaker
Oh yeah. Like I feel like crap after my massage. And I'm like, well, that's not good. Like that's not a good massage then. And the range of motion will go down and like everything goes the wrong way. And I'm like, like objectively, this is, this is not working. And you can make great changes with just gentle stuff. And I mean, there, there is a point where you, you know, you might have to get in there and like wash or like break up a bunch of stagnation, but if they're guarded, if their body is superficially not going to let you in there.
00:10:05
Speaker
It does no good.
Philosophy of Cultivating Yang in Warm Seasons
00:10:06
Speaker
It spends a lot of energy. So I think a lot of us will know the Yoda saying there is no try. And for me, like this is what that's about. It's like the old man doing tai chi outside in the park. It's like he moves so slowly and so with so little effort and energy, there's nothing wasted. He's not trying. He just is. It's the same thing with the body work. It's like,
00:10:33
Speaker
whatever the least amount that will affect change is where I'm going to start. Efficiency. You're huge. Yeah. Efficiency. Advocacy is so, it's not like you can't get it with brute techniques, but it sure is a lot easier with efficiency. And not everyone's going to respond well to the brute techniques. No. That's very true. Especially if they end up with us. That's very true. Usually it's because they've tried brute techniques. They've tried everything else and stuff. Now, last Hail Mary.
00:11:03
Speaker
I'm on the Brute Squad. You are the Brute Squad. Quote for quote. Nice. Geek-a-rific.
00:11:18
Speaker
You hit that one again? So it says, in the spring and summer, nourish or cultivate the yang. But the key here is, and boy, this was a game changer when I realized this kind of going back to it. Asher said, is this is the way to increase physiology, not to decrease pathology.
00:11:40
Speaker
Boy, that's a game changer right there. So if you think about it, what are we trying to do in the summer and spring and summer? Well, if these people are Yang-deficient, that is literally the best time to nourish Yang. But what if they're Yang excess? Or you can kind of see that as Yin-deficient. Well, then don't rev the Yang. That's adding heat to heat. But you can see physiologically, or what we'd call the Yang-shung side of things, where there's not necessarily a pathology there.
00:12:07
Speaker
nourish best time. But once there's a pathology, maybe someone gets liver rising headaches, upsurging liver yang headaches in the spring. Well, don't lift more. That would lift on lift.
00:12:22
Speaker
You know, can't do that. So the switch from understanding, oh, I'm trying to build something that should be in the body versus I'm trying to treat a pathology where we've already gone awry. That's where you can really see the difference here. And so you could arguably say homeopathy or that idea where you're following the course of nature is how you build, but you often go against that for the path that is the perfect description. Thank you. You betcha man.
00:12:51
Speaker
So
Treating Asthma and Eczema in Summer
00:12:52
Speaker
here's where we're also using that idea. So when there's certain winter illnesses or things that are prone to flare in the winter, the biggest, most common one would be asthma. There's also that phrase in, there's this phrase in Chinese medicine, they say internists hate asthma and externists hate eczema.
00:13:11
Speaker
because they're just like a big pains in the butt, right? They take a while to treat and they're big pain in the butt to treat. And so we've had to figure out different ways of trying to treat asthma. Because if you try and treat someone who's young deficient asthma in the winter, you're already, you know, you're already on the back foot, you know, you can't parlay on the back, uphill battle, don't parlay on the back foot. We have another one you can't fight with wet noodle.
00:13:39
Speaker
Is this a pasta reference? It's the same thing where it's like you need to set up your strike before you strike. You can't do that with a back foot. You can't fight someone with a wet noodle. Which then would make me think that the positives of that would be you can fight someone with a hard noodle. Better luck than with a wet one. Got it. It's the whole thing where it's like,
00:14:07
Speaker
Yeah, the opposites is a is almost as insightful as I was gonna say I don't think the opposite would be fighting with a with a dry noodle I think the opposite is just you know punching someone in the face with the fist Yeah fist noodles similar thing. Okay, so we're gonna tonify the body's natural young and heat in the summer with young and moving herbs and Do what young should do which is disperse?
00:14:37
Speaker
So we're going to disperse, and specifically, of course, we're going to disperse cold. And so most of the herbs that we'll be using, there is some variation people can make their own up. But by far, in my opinion, the most important is actually one of the gentlest and simplest herbs. I don't know if I should say gentle, but common herbs, and it's by Diezla, which is the white mustard. Yeah. Very, very key.
00:15:00
Speaker
It's just a game changer. Oh, by the way, there is one last line to that quote in China or from the from from the Beijing quote. Yeah, it's so after they say, they say, and that means to follow its root. So the key here is, well, what's the root of the problem?
00:15:22
Speaker
Tong means to go with or to follow that. Gun is the root of the problem or the root of, in this case, not necessarily even problem, but even the root of physiology here. If the problem was Yang deficiency, follow that and nourish and build the Yang like this. But if the problem was Yang deficiency building internal cold,
00:15:42
Speaker
Then as a treatment, you know, treatment principle, our main job isn't necessarily even to nourish young or to cultivate young. It's actually to disperse that cold that's been. Right. Because with that cold there, you can't nourish young in the first place. Yeah. Correct. Exactly. Yeah. And it'll just, it'll always be a hindrance. It won't allow things to absorb correctly, all that stuff.
00:16:05
Speaker
Yeah. All right. So that's the whys. And then what are we doing next? What do you think? Well, I guess we kind of have described who we're treating. We talked about asthma patients. We talked about what was the other one? The main one? Oh, rosacea for like skin stuff. But lung stuff is definitely number one here. Well, we're in COVID times. How about post COVID?
Complexity of Organ Treatment in TCM
00:16:30
Speaker
You betcha. Yeah. So you could do, um, so like, you know, this translates to like chronic bronchi to see people, all that stuff. The key here is again, um, don't add heat to heat. So we would never, so if COVID long COVID can sometimes show as extra heat in the lungs, blocked, um, ministerial fiery stuff. And you can see that with, um, high heart rate, palpitations, stuff like that.
00:16:57
Speaker
There's a lot of, in general, this was more notable at the beginning of COVID and then as the variations and variants came later, it kind of mellowed. But in general, COVID attacks damp people a lot more than dry. And so this is where we often would focus on, you know, clearing the damp from wherever it is, middle burner, lung, stuff like that. Awesome. I have a couple of patients I'm talking about right now with that. I have people who really don't like cold.
00:17:27
Speaker
And the people who really don't like cold, I'm like, that was the first impetus of the thought was, oh, hey, it's summer. It's like high noon. The heat's coming out. What about some song food for these people?
00:17:40
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So damp cold, you bet pure cold, you bet just no heat. Is there a line that we can kind of delineate between, you know, because the body is physiologically hot anyways. So a lot of people are going to have some heat in their systems.
00:17:57
Speaker
So is there a, you know, obviously if they're having like acid reflux or really bad smelling diarrhea, like probably too much heat, is there like some minor heat signs that we're like, Oh, it's still, you're still going to be okay. That's a really good point. Um, yeah. And I think it's, it's a comparative thing. Like obviously they have no heat or young left and that's just, yeah, that's a different game.
00:18:26
Speaker
Yeah, so there's some, but for instance, phlegm is a good one. There should be no thick phlegm, certainly no color to the phlegm. So clear and runny is the standard. I call it nose faucet. That's a classic sign.
00:18:42
Speaker
And in those cases, you're like, okay, we are clear to go. But if you're starting to get even just a twinge of yellow, not good. Now, some people who do that might have the hint of yellow on their tongue. And we're talking like just off of white. That's usually fine because as long as the symptom is still just totally watery and clear, then you're good to go. And this is actually a really tricky one too.
00:19:07
Speaker
Tons of different formulas can point to this. There's a really classic one called Ban Chia Xian Tang. And it's really confusing to people because it has a hot stomach next to a cold spleen.
00:19:19
Speaker
And for those of you who are treating stomach and spleen, I mean like they're almost interchangeable from most like the way we learn it. And yet you can have one that's hot and one that's cold and they're right next to each other. And that formula then has Huang Nian to cool a hot stomach and Gan Jiang to warm a cold spleen. So stunning that it works so brilliantly. But that's the whole trick there is
00:19:42
Speaker
I mean, I teach this to my Shang Han Lun class because I teach a classics course. And one of the best things they can take out of the Shang Han Lun is treat the organ as that organ needs. You don't have to treat the entire body, right? Huang Nan, it's not like the whole body's hot, but the stomach's hot. Gan Jiang, not like the whole body's cold, the spleen is cold. And so you're treating each organ as each organ needs, which is really confusing because everybody wants
00:20:10
Speaker
the one pattern that fits the whole thing. We like to simplify things, but there's plenty of nuances. Yeah. And if you treat each organ based on its own needs, it's a really... Well, I was going to say, I think it's pretty common. You had to have that kind of the heat over on the stomach side and the coolness over on the spleen side. Yeah, pretty rare probably to see it the other way.
00:20:34
Speaker
Yeah. I was wondering too, it's like, it's just the body wants the, the heat and the access and the on, cause it's better able to handle that kind of stuff. Like it's more built. The deficiency is going to end up in the, in Oregon.
00:20:49
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Certainly with that one. And then it's just, you know, foo organs by nature are more yang-y. And so they're so much more prone to yang excess buildup. So it's like, you know, if you block a stomach,
00:21:05
Speaker
It's got all the yang that's ready to build up. But then you think like, well, heart and liver are pretty easy to get some internal fire, even though they're dang words, right? I mean,
Treating Deficiency and Cold in Sanfu Days
00:21:15
Speaker
at least for me, with needles in clinic, it's like I'm always draining the, like dredge with the gallbladder for that kind of stuff or, or sandjow or, yeah, maybe small intestine kind of thing. Cause I'm like, oh, these are where I can move more efficiently the heat out.
00:21:35
Speaker
Totally treat the dzang through the foo. You bet. But also super key for, for instance, sing jian, the liver too. Yeah, the ying spring of the liver, the fire point. Oh my god, one of the two best ying spring points on the body. And yet it's a dzang. But like, oh, is it a game changer?
00:21:56
Speaker
Here's an interesting point, too. We might not even be able to finish all the sound through stuff, right? But here's an interesting point with even just shooting off on that one, which is when you clear heat with an acupuncture needle, where does it go? I've wondered this many times. Well, sometimes I just believe if it's actually that hot in which case I feel like I'm going right out. For sure. I would say that in moving, you can disperse heat probably.
00:22:23
Speaker
You bet. You bet. But you're not actually draining the body of yang or anything. And if you if you herb the wrong way, you absolutely can just wreck yang and the shang hulun goes to great depth. Why not to purge in a lot of different cases because you'll wreck spleen yang and wreck kidney yang and so forth. So Sanfu, we're going to do it on the hottest days. We're going to use warm and moving herbs to treat
00:22:48
Speaker
people who are mostly deficient, but also just burst some accumulation of fluids. It sounded like fluids and cold. And a lot of these people are because of a long lasting, long-term young deficiency, which is a deficient pattern. Then they start building up internal cold, which is actually an excess pattern. And this is a little bit tough for people to wrap their brains around. But if you think about it, you can't tonify out cold.
00:23:17
Speaker
you have to disperse it. And if it's a dispersing method, it's clearly an excess problem. So excess problems can be generated from division sources and so forth. Points that we use on the body. I saw a lot of backshoes
Making and Applying Herbal Patches
00:23:31
Speaker
from those. Is that the general trend?
00:23:35
Speaker
Yeah, it is. So backshoes. Now, of course, we're mostly, you know, classically treating a lot of lungy stuff. So the lung shoe point is really one of the top dogs on these ones. That would be a big one. And then actually golf long. Oh, yes, the pericardium.
00:23:54
Speaker
Yeah, the threets went out. Yeah, but the threets went out, right? What's going to be like UV43? I don't know what number it is. That sounds right. Ooh, you don't even know. Yeah. Well, the Gao Hongshu's got a great name. Do you want to go into the translation for a Gao Hong?
00:24:14
Speaker
Yeah, so gao huang, gao is like a fat, like substance. So in this case, it's like a fat pad. And huang is referring to like this location, well, behind the back, but actually, the key is it's like a fat pad underneath the heart. And from our perspective, this is like the source of all yang, which maybe is the source of all life in a human. And the key here is, you know, if you go back to not even that long ago, 50 years ago,
00:24:42
Speaker
and from 50 years ago to basically in the beginning of acupuncture, Zuzan, the stomach 36, was never considered one of the three most tonifying points in the body. I always ask my acupuncture students that, what are the three most tonifying points on the body? Inevitably, number one,
00:25:00
Speaker
point. It's like everyone will chime in together. They're like, well, I appreciate that, but no, actually, classically not. The three biggies were yin and chen between nine and six.
00:25:16
Speaker
Yeah, Spleen 6 and Gao Huang. And it's because yin ning chuan is for your spleen, right? It's so essential for literally lifting the spleen yang. So that's where everything starts. Sun yin jiao, get all three in at the same time. That's what all those three yin and channels and organs like. And then Gao Huang is the source of yang. It's the most yang tonifying point on our body. So if you want to tonify,
00:25:41
Speaker
That's obviously a big beast right there. In Deadman, if people want to look, the commentary, Gao Huangshu talks a lot about dispersing, using it to treat phlegm. You bet. Probably, well then, you do yelling to treat phlegm. Well, they don't say that part. You have to know that part. That's the hidden messages in a lot of these things. We're going to tell you the answer because you have to figure out the right questions and that reasoning. Got it.
00:26:08
Speaker
So we'll just call this podcast between the lines, different lines and so forth. Um, also a really key one is Bailao, um, Bailao point, which is one of the extra points. It's, uh, true to an above two, one to an out and two to an above from Dodge way. Yeah. So it's a breathing point. You betcha. And I actually like, um, ding Tron, right? Like point five soon from, um, Dodge weight as well. I think it's just as good, but Bailao is a pretty classic one.
00:26:38
Speaker
So those would be some key ones. And people can do other ones. So nowadays, people will often add things like Lusane and so forth, which in my opinion, really does make a lot of sense because it's very hard to tonify a lung directly. It's a lot easier to go through this one. Yeah. Or do it through the rest, the mother. Do it through the mother. Yeah. That's right. Complement the mother and happy baby. There you go.
00:27:01
Speaker
And then kind of how we're going to do it. So usually what they'll do is they'll pick that you do it three times. So all right, once and then wait 10 days, do it again, wait 10 days, do it again. And those three treatments would be one course and you do the same thing.
00:27:16
Speaker
three different years, consecutively of course. And then that's kind of how you would do it the best. Usually people just leave it on for about six to eight hours. Some people go higher, ten hours. You leave it on for too long, the sampu tia. Tia is the word for stick on something. And so our treatment method here is to use these little like patches. And you know what works great? Those things for corns,
00:27:43
Speaker
So the Bunyan, the Bunyan, rappy things that you can get like Dr. Scholle stuff. So stick on a hole, right? There's a donut hole. You're exactly right. Which is also, yeah, gets us to one of the most hilarious American snacks of all time. I feel like I see American snacks differently now that it came back from China. Like really someone invented donut holes. Obviously they're not the hole that came out of the donut or maybe they are. I don't know.
00:28:10
Speaker
Oh, because it'd be even funnier. Anyway, so then you just put those centered on a point and you get a pretty good surface, right? What is that? Like half an inch diameter circle over each point. So yeah, which points we picked, we said a long shoe point. We said Zuzan Li, stomach 36, Gao Huang, maybe 43 on the bladder there. Tian Tu could be a possibility in the front.
00:28:35
Speaker
Bai Lao Shui, which is that extra point on the channels. I love Ding Juan, also 0.5 Swin from Dajue. So good ones there. And then what you do is you take any of the herbs that you want, you grind them up into a powder and you mix them with something. Now the key here is it's actually, you can learn a ton about topicals just from this one example. When it comes to topicals, obviously you need the right function, right? So that means to write what we call qi or nature, or sometimes people would call that the temperature of the herb.
00:29:05
Speaker
but it really is the metabolic temperature of the herb, right? So the right chi or chi nature of the herb is key. You need the right function, but those are kind of obvious, right? It goes without saying. But then what else do we need to understand with topicals is we need to understand how to penetrate it into the skin. And this is usually a vehicle, very, very helpful. So some common vehicles that are pretty darn good are alcohol,
00:29:31
Speaker
which we know is dampened heat. The heat is still really good. It does move young, so it totally would work because alcohol could be a good vehicle here. You can use something really neutral like Vaseline, but that's not a vehicle. It won't help penetrate into the skin. You can use vinegar, which does have a slight astringing effect, but really what we'd be using it for is the penetrating effect.
00:29:52
Speaker
And actually, classically here, what we'd use is ginger juice. So you'd just use ginger, mix it up into the paste, and then slap that bad boy on. But from one of the classics called Zhang Shi Yitong, they talk about using the Bai Jiezi method.
00:30:08
Speaker
And again, I would highly recommend people think of Baijiezi as the number one most important herb. Whether or not they add others to it, totally optional for them. And they talk about it, you know, if you go to the original, the classic, he talks about being useful for long xiao.
00:30:26
Speaker
which means like for like cold asthma, you wanna maksa, fei shu, the lung back shoe points, and so forth. Same thing, he talks about gao huang, tian tu, and all of those. And then same thing, you use them during the fu zhong, which is like the middle fu of those three seasons.
00:30:48
Speaker
and use the Baijiezi method. And so his Baijiezi method is to take Baijiezi, that's one, yen hu suo, another herb, two, gansui, super powerful herb, three, xixin, extremely powerful herb, four, and grind all those bad boys up and make it to a powder, mix it up with ginger juice and slap it on those points. He says it's very effective, yeah. And then we cover it with
00:31:15
Speaker
Uh, medical wrapping. That's exactly right. Like a Saran wrap. Saran wrap, uh, Tegaderm would be great. If you don't have any of that, even just a big band-aid will help something to stick it in there, especially the band-aids that have adhesive on all four corners. You just don't want to get in everywhere and then keep it on the skin for somewhere between six and 10 hours for adults, a lot less for kids. So like two to six hours for kids, depending on how little they are. Yeah. And there's a couple of key things too is.
00:31:45
Speaker
Heat is to be expected.
00:31:47
Speaker
A little itch is actually okay with this. Normally when it starts itching for liniments, we just say stop, take it off. But for this one, it's reasonable because there's such stimulating herbs. So the second thing besides choosing the right vehicle or the right medium to get the herbs in is actually choose more powerful herbs. So you'll see here we use herbs that we would almost never use on the inside. Xi Xin is a great example. I basically stopped using that herb. I mean, just never used it herb.
00:32:17
Speaker
It's too poisonous. It's got, what is it, erystolocic acid. Really hard on the kidneys and just...
00:32:25
Speaker
straight up poisonous, especially in any reasonable, like a larger amount. Now, classically, we never used it in large amounts, which is why they probably got away with it. There's even a phrase in Chinese, they say, which is like, don't use more than one chin, which I think translates as three grams of Xi Xin. So reasonable, but I still don't want to poison my people, you know, so.
00:32:47
Speaker
just no point. But if you put it on the outside, a lot of the more caustic or even toxic plants are really effective because they'll penetrate in and you don't get the toxicity doesn't come in, but that moving nature really comes through. So you'll see things like foods or the chuan wu, I saw you pulled that one up, totally reasonable. So you can use any of those big bad boys that you would rarely ever use internally.
00:33:11
Speaker
Yeah, another key thing is there was a really great doctor. I think it was Zhang Jingyu, but don't quote me on that one. I'll find it maybe one of these days. But he was talking about
Patient Compliance and Simple Treatments
00:33:23
Speaker
how Baijiezi is basically the number one herb for sanfu tia and this kind of external usage of it. And I really do think it's true, like based on my own experience as well. If you go back to like some of the key functions of Baijiezi, there's one that comes from Ban Cao Shi,
00:33:41
Speaker
And they say, the Chinese says zhulong qi, which means it treats, or it's indicated for cold qi. I mean, that's exactly what we want, right? So a dispersing, warming, phlegm herb that can disperse cold qi. It's no wonder why Baijians is the king of this, which is so funny. Again, like randomly, like number one, who would have put white mustard seed as the king of anything, right?
00:34:07
Speaker
And then Yixue Ruman says, so it can make people sweat.
00:34:17
Speaker
It can cause sweating or make people sweat, and then it disperses cold qi causing pain in the abdomen. Also a solid bad boy. And then the last one is from Xindai Shi Yongchung Yao, which is a modern resource, but still useful. And it says it can jun-ku, which is like to suppress a cough, basically.
00:34:41
Speaker
So super, you know, useful for a lot of different things. But you can see why baijieza really is kind of the king of that method. Interestingly, baijieza is so moving that if people take a large dose internally, you can absolutely take it internally. But if you take a big large dose internally, if you're prone to any sort of dryness or blood heat, quite likely you'll give yourself a bloody nose. So it's weirdly powerful.
00:35:07
Speaker
It's from a mustard seed. I know, right? I bit by jizzed my nose once too, just playing around and seeing what was going on. I was like, gosh, Snikeys. Then I had the syringe on my nose and just, you know. Yeah. We are our first experiments, which is both a good and a bad thing. Yeah. Depends if you're talking from the noses perspective or not. Right.
00:35:28
Speaker
But you learned something, which is the important part. Oh, I loved it. Yeah. We have great methods for stopping nosebleeds, so it's no biggie. I'll take that. Dong Wei made my nosebleed once before, too. I know. I know.
00:35:39
Speaker
Yeah. So that's kind of how it is. Um, and in China, it's pretty simple. What they'll usually do now, instead of having the patient come back, um, for the second and third treatment is they'll usually pick like three points, give them like diagrams and then show, show them where to find them. And then the diagram gives them, you know, reminds them as well. And then they'll just put it on the first time and then let them do it for the second and third one. Oh.
00:36:02
Speaker
It's a pretty easy treatment and you can try and get a lot of people treated with it because in China they'll just line up and see big lines. I wish people here had the same kind of mentality about it.
00:36:17
Speaker
because it's so gentle. Like we said, it's treating some really hard things. You can absolutely treat asthma other ways, but it's a bit of a pain in the butt to treat it. Anyone who says they get 100% efficacy on all of the asthma patients, honestly, anyone, yeah, just don't, but just big talkers, not doers.
00:36:37
Speaker
100% efficacy is pretty hard. I'm pretty sure the, what the naging is like 90% is master. And that last 10 that, that one out of 10 person is, it's tricky. Yeah, that's true. And if it's not tricky, I mean, you're either, yeah, I don't know. That's why I think like, most importantly, like, you know, big talkers can do whatever they want. They can talk all they want, but just don't be intimidated by that as a practitioner or a student.
00:37:05
Speaker
because it's not right. And it depends what you're treating. I mean, like tinnitus is a great example. If you can get 50%, like literally the best doctors I've seen in my entire life, 50% is what they get for tinnitus. And that's stunning. Beautiful. A lot of Western medicine sources say you just can't treat tinnitus.
00:37:24
Speaker
Shoot, 50% is a whole lot better than zero. Right. And the other thing too, I always think about is that whenever we get patients, it's not like we get them in the acute stage when it's early, when it would be easier for us to treat, we get them a couple of years down the line and it's like, well, things are going to take longer. And you don't always have patient compliance or their, you know, dedication to herbs that you prescribe that they're taking or whatever, whatever other homework you give them.
00:37:53
Speaker
Oh my gosh. So true, dude. So true. I was just talking to a patient yesterday and she was like, I just mentioned that.
00:38:02
Speaker
One of our cool
Reflections on Treatment Challenges and Adaptations
00:38:03
Speaker
tricks for circulating fluids throughout the body is to use shengjang, just fresh ginger, the spring ginger in case anyone's keeping count. And for that, that circulates from the lungs and the spleen, it just doesn't hit the last third, the lower third burner. So you have to put something else in there. And the classic one is yiren, or Chinese pearl barley, also called Job's tears.
00:38:24
Speaker
Oh, yeah, sure. So like literally, you just mix that up like a half cup of pearl barley, like job steers, and then maybe an inch or two of sliced ginger, keep the skin on just wash the outside of the skin circulates fluid in your skin. And then simmer that up 20-30 minutes. And you can, you know, make a pitcher and keep it in the fridge and just put some in your water all summer long. You can do it all four seasons actually, but great in the summer. And like I was I just tell that to people, but I kind of assume nobody's going to do it.
00:38:53
Speaker
And then she was like, Oh, should I do this in addition to the the pearl barley tea that I've been making? And I was like, Well, yeah, I mean, I should do like, it's incredible. Like that sort of compliance is such a rarity. Right. Sure makes our job easier. Yeah, totally. And you really want them to do do well. Oh, yeah. At that point. Yeah, exactly.
00:39:15
Speaker
Yeah, you better get some good efficacy on the compliant patients because you got no excuse then. No, but even if you don't, and you know what you're doing, or at least if you have a perspective on how to think about your treatment and not just following a protocol, your lack of success or lack of moving the right direction will still give you important information and then you just change it up a little bit and then, okay, this is how we're going.
00:39:44
Speaker
I miss this part that now is really obvious because, you know. Yeah. 100% Asher. I agree. I think I told you about my teacher's teacher for herbs. He does that. Try all like herb. He'll give him like two days of herbs and be like, come back and see me in two days after this one. And you know, they'll come back and be like, my cough feels 30% better. Or they'll be like, I'm pooping green phlegm or like, you know, something very indicative. Right.
00:40:14
Speaker
No, it's important. I think, you know, you're asked test questions in school and stuff. And it's like, there's a definite answer out there. And there's just not. It's like, I don't think you know, you know, exactly what's happening in the pattern. You try, you have a hypothesis, but you don't know it's right until it's resolved. Once it's resolved, then you're kind of like, Oh, I can, I can tell you like, kind of what happened. Yeah, retrospectively.
00:40:39
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Of course, the better you get and the more information you get, once pulses feel better. Well, shoot, that's a whole other level that you added to your game because it's just more information. Maybe you got the pulse right and maybe you got the tongue right and you're like, okay, this person's having a dry cough. We can't see everything. What if they had some old pneumonia stuck in one of their lobes of their lungs?
00:41:08
Speaker
Really? I mean, like some people be like, Oh, you should be able to feel that in the lung pulse. Maybe, maybe, but that's a big maybe. Yeah. Yeah. If I'm looking for it. Yeah, exactly. Right. Like maybe you just thought it was a deep, fast pulse for another reason or something. And it usually isn't as obvious as a deep, fast pulse. Like for instance, a lot of cancer patients will be that deep and fast. Really that like deep seated inflammation. Totally. Yeah.
00:41:37
Speaker
Nice man. All right. I think we hit it. Sun Fu. Sun Fu. Sun Fu did. Yeah. Got it. Got to put the English grammar on Chinese words. Sun Fu did. We've got lots of cheese. Right. Cheese. It's verbed. Yeah, it's verbed. It's plural. Yeah. Sweet man. All right. Well, I'll catch you next time. Catch you on the mountain.