Clear Heat / Drain Fire

Lu Cha = Green Tea

I suggested to my parents that they should start drinking green tea. My mom, the shopper, ran out and bought a bunch. A few months later I asked if they were drinking it. She got quiet and then said, "I think it was bad tea. It gave us both diarrhea." Now she won't go near the stuff and has returned to her Folger's and Cokes. I feel remiss. Even though Green Tea can relieve diarrhea, it can also cause diarrhea if you have a stomach deficiency / cold in the spleen and stomach. My parents are getting older. Their diets leave a little to be desired. I shouldn't be surprised that the bitter, cold green tea did not suit them. And they probably bought some crappy brand because they live in Cleveland. If I have another chance, I will tell them to add some ginger.

COOL OFF: Lu Cha is used in many places to cool people down in the summertime. It is a cold herb, and also is bitter. If you have steeped green tea too long, you are familiar with the bitter quality. I kind of like it that way, though.


SETTLE YOUR STOMACH: It clears heat and directs the rebellious stomach qi downward. The only channel it goes to is the stomach. A concoction of fresh ginger, gan cao (licorice), da zao (dates), and ge gen (arrowroot) will help to relieve diarrhea (but obviously not of the cold sp/st or deficient sort).


LOSE WEIGHT/EXPEL DAMPNESS: Maybe it's just me, but when I drink a lot of green tea, my lips and mouth get really dry. That's because it dispels damp and has been used as of late for obesity and high cholesterol.


OPEN YOUR MIND! It can help with headaches and to bring clear yang to the head to open your mind.


PREVENT CANCER: Green tea is also reported to stop mutations and protect cells.


A "MIRACLE DRUG": (Found this on the Internet):
"New research is showing that green tea simultaneously prevents cancer, defends against heart disease, lowers blood levels of bad cholesterol, and even helps people lose weight. It's astounding: there's no prescription drug that comes even close to having such an impact, and yet green tea is far cheaper than prescription drugs to begin with."

I don't want to overload this entry with all of the western scientific research that's out there, explaining why / how green tea does all this. But it's out there, and it's interesting. Green tea has been in use for more than 4,000 years, and has so many reported health benefits, yet I couldn't find it in the Bensky book. Weird.

AIMC Herbs Blog

Hi! It's a sunny Saturday. We have to study. That's okay. In my lookings around on the Internet I found an herbs blog from 2007 posted by Valerie. Check it out: http://aimc-herbs.blogspot.com/. I'll bet there are more out there!

Also, quick question - have any of you found Lu Cha in Bensky?

Frances

Clear Heat / Drain Fire: Zhi Mu

Zhi Mu can pat your kidneys and rub your lungs and belly at the same time. It's a multi-tasker. A Renaissance herb. A jack of a couple of trades. While working to clear heat and drain fire from the Lungs and Stomach, it is simultaneously nourishing the yin of the Kidneys, Lung and Stomach. I, for one, am impressed.

In addition to being bitter, it's also sweet. While getting rid of a high fever, accompanying thirst, irritability, and a rapid, flooding pulse from excess heat in the lungs and stomach, and also getting rid of cough with thick, yellow sputum, Zhi Mu is meanwhile treating you to a day at the spa-- generating fluids, enriching your yin, moistening your dryness, and attending to all those Kidney yin deficiency signs (afternoon fever, five palm sweat, bleeding gums, night sweats). And meanwhile, whether you like it or not, it'll take your abnormally elevated sex drive out of overdrive. You'll thank it later.



And that's not all! It will help to heal your oral ulcers (thank god) and inflammation.

It is used often for diabetics that have "wasting condition." Clear that heat and nourish the yin!

It'll even make you crap your pants if you already have too much cold in the Spleen and Stomach. In other words, it's contraindicated for SP/ST cold diarrhea.

So, now I'm dying to know what the heck IS Zhi Mu? I usually look that up first thing, but was so impressed with its clearing heat PLUS nourishing yin combination that I got carried away.

So, Zhi Mu is...drumroll... Anemarrhena Rhizome. All I could discover about this flowering plant is that it is part of the lily family and that it grows in China. I didn't search for hours, but I don't think this one is all that common. If you know more about it, please let me know. By the way, Wikipedia says that the Lily family has been on planet earth for 58 million years. That's pretty old. No wonder it can do so many things.

Clear Heat / Drain Fire: Shi Gao

Background-- Shi Gao / Gypsum
Shi Gao is translated as "Stone Paste." In English it is called Gypsum. Gypsum is a crystal that forms in hot climates during the evaporation of sea water. It's made of calcium sulphate, a bunch of other trace minerals, and water. It's used in the manufacture of Plaster of Paris (the gypsum is heated to expel the water), and is in your walls as "sheet rock"--you know those big, heavy white boards they build walls out of. It is a relatively soft mineral and has been in use for many purposes for centuries. The Egyptians used Gypsum to plaster some of their pyramids. Gypsum has also been used for hundreds of years as a soil amendment/fertilizer. Alabaster (Italian Gypsum) is a finely crystalline version of Gypsum. The United States is a world leader in gypsum "production." (Can you actually "produce" or "grow" Gypsum? Maybe. I don't know.)
Above: Some of the largest Gypsum crystals ever found. These are in Mexico.

For healing purposes, Gypsum is used in making plaster casts for fractures. It is also used in tofu as a coagulant, making it a major source of dietary calcium (hence, no need for dairy!). And, of course, last but not least, it is used as a medicine in TCM.

Shi Gao ("Stone Paste")
Gypsum is very cold in nature, so it can tackle the very hot diseases -- typically yangming stage febrile disease. It does in fact look like ice crystals. According to Bensky, it is used for "excess in the qi level of the four levels of disease, or the yang brightness channel stage of the six stages." It's good for "the four bigs":

Big fever, big sweat, big thirst, big pulse.

Accompanying the four bigs you will have restlessness, and so it helps rid of this, too.

Shi Gao travels the Lung and Stomach meridians.

Lung symptoms resolved by Shi Gao: Lung Heat- cough, thick sputum, fever, thirst, asthma.



Stomach symptoms: Stomach fire with headache, swollen and painful gums, and TOOTHACHE.

Topical uses: (in the "Duan" or charred form) it can treat eczema, burns, ulcerated sores.

This is sounding like a flashcard, so I'm going to draw a picture of a very sick patient with all of these symptoms. The perfect candidate for Shi Gao:

It is summertime and it's hot. Gypsie Um, an otherwise healthy young woman, gets sick. Her fever worsens. She has no chills. She keeps asking for ice cold drinks and can't seem to cool down. She's sweating up a storm and is practically naked because any clothes or bedclothes are too hot for her. This might start sounding like a steamy sex scene, except that her bright red tongue has a very un-sexy thick yellow coating on it and she's coughing up a bunch of thick sputum and is wheezing. On top of that, she has a headache, swollen painful gums, and now she's getting a toothache. She's also breaking out with eczema and in her attempt to try to look better she burns herself with a curling iron. Gypsie Um is in bad shape. She's beginning to feel confused and is muttering something about wanting to eat sheetrock. And she's crabby. Who wouldn't be?

Her friend Sure Gow shows up with something that looks like ice, but it's not. It's a mineral. He tells her to take 15 to 60 grams of the stuff, and to pre-decoct it for 20 to 30 minutes before adding the other herbs she's going to take. For her eczema and her curling iron burn, he has a charred version of Shi Gao that he makes into a paste and applies topically.

Gypsie Um is now feeling better.

Phew.

Clear Heat / Drain Fire: Gu Jing Cao

Gu Jing Cao: Just a bunch of little eyeballs


The Pipewort Flower, Gu Jing Cao, is mostly noted for one thing and it is easy to remember because the little flower heads look like tiny eyeballs. (Well, sort of, they actually look more like cheerios, but thinking of them as eyeballs makes the function easier to remember.) So, you take this herb because you have wind heat in the Liver channel, which has traveled to the eyes causing them to be red and swollen. There are not contraindications because this herb is neutral. It also travels to the stomach channel and its neutrality, like Sweden, causes no upset there.

Secondarily, it can be used for wind-heat inspired toothache, headache, or throat painful obstruction. It is light in nature so travels up to care for these head problems.
A hot and windy day - and the tea towel even has little flowers on it! Let's pretend they're Gu Jing Cao!


Contraindication and a Big Fat Question:
However, if your eye disease is due to deficient Liver blood, it is contraindicated. I imagine this is because deficient Liver blood can cause wind to easily be generated...? That actually is not making any sense to me. Can someone clarify why an herb good with clearing wind-heat issues would not be good with internal wind issues?

Clear Heat / Drain Fire: Dan Zhu Ye

Dan "the sherpa" Zhu Ye

Characterizing an herbs properties can reveal a lot about a person's own mind. For example, I could call Dan Zhu Ye either a weakling, or I could call it gentle. I'll go with gentle (though, to be honest, after reading Bensky's entry on the herb, the first thing I thought was "Weakling!"). The functions of Dan Zhu Ye, which is a bland bamboo leaf, are similar to Shan Zhi Zi (the pretty little redish laterns - the seed pods of the Gardenia). But Dan Zhu Ye works only at the qi level, while Shan Zhi Zi goes to the qi and blood levels. Shan Zhi Zi also travels all over the place (to the Heart, Stomach, Lung, Liver, and San Jiao channels) while Dan Zhu Ye travels to just the Heart, Stomach, and Small Intestine channels. They both cool heat, put you in a better mood (eliminate the irritability that often attends heat), and make you pee (pee out the heat!). But only Shan Zhi Zi cools the blood (put a little Gardenia seed in that boiling blood to calm it down).

Gentle Dan Zhu Ye is good at assisting. This herb is sweet, but also bland. Perhaps I am not giving it enough credit. The tough guy always gets all the credit, and the sweet and bland among us tend to get none of it. Bensky mentions that it has been stated "Its therapeutic strength is rather weak. It cannot serve as the chief herb, but it can serve as an assistant." Maybe Dan Zhu Ye is under-rated. The only famous assistant I can think of right now who was obviously shortchanged is Tenzing Norgay, the Tibetan climber who accompanied Sir Edmund Hillary on his ascent of Mount Everest. Hillary was knighted for this feat; Norgay was not. He was "just" the sherpa.



So what is our gentle, sweet and bland sherpa, Dan Zhu Ye, capable of? Well, it must be rather strong because some sources say one should use caution prescribing it to someone who is pregnant. This is probably because Dan Zhu Ye is good at promoting urination, and clearing damp heat in the small intestine channel. Painful pee is enough to make anyone grumpy, and Dan Zhu Ye will remove the grumpies due to painful pee due to any kind of urinary tract infection.



The Small Intestine is linked to the Heart, and so it is also good for removing heart heat, as well as heat at the upper end of the Small Intestine -- the mouth. Mouth sores, gum pain, a dark red tongue tip, and thirst all find relief with Dan Zhu Ye.



I wonder if Tanzing Norgay could do all of these things for Edmund Hillary? Then again, Edmund probably didn't need this kind of help. They were on Mount Everest after all, and it is pretty dang cold up there, I imagine, just like Dan Zhu Ye (which is also cold).

Finally, even though this is bamboo leaf, it's not the typical kind of bamboo we are used to seeing. This leaf comes from a small stubby bamboo plant that doesn't grow that hard stalk. Maybe that's why it's so gentle? Some say it calms the spirit as well (Bensky doesn't say that, but other sources do). I think it looks like it would calm the spirit. Don't you?

Clear Heat / Drain Fire: Xia Ku Cao

The purpose of this blog is to help me, and hopefully you, too, remember the functions of herbs in Chinese medicine. Sometimes I have to make quite a stretch to generate some kind of story or association with the herb. For my lame associations, I apologize. I hope that people will make comments that include equally lame associations, so I don't feel so bad, or better yet, brilliant associations, so I can remember these herbs better! Here goes...

Background:
Xia Ku Cao -- which I think means "summer dry herb" in Chinese -- is "Prunella vulgaris spike" in Latin and "Self Heal Spike" or "Heal All" in English. All dried up in the herb bag it looks like a little bit like a long, skinny pine cone, or a spear of dried flowers. Xia Ku Cao is considered a weed by most people who don't know of its medicinal properties. It has been used for centuries all over the world as an overall health tonic and immune booster. It grows like crazy in vacant lots and along fences.


Xia Ku Cao in Chinese Medicine:
In Chinese medicine it is used as a heat clearing herb; it is cold in nature. It is also considered bitter and acrid, but I have to say I dropped some into my tea cup and it didn't taste bitter or spicy. It didn't taste like much of anything, but it got prettier--at least it fluffed up a little bit.

As a heat clearing herb, it dissipates nodules. Because it is long and kind of pointy, I am imagining it being used as a poker to stab someone in the neck. In fact, it is good for neck lumps, swollen glands, and goiters.

If you were to stab someone in the eye with it, it might make their eyes red and swollen. If you choose to do this, and then make a tea out of the herb, it will reduce the redness and swelling, and in fact brighten the eyes.



It is also said to be good for vaginal infection. I could make a crude comment about remembering this usage through imaging the shape of Xia Ku Cao...you get the picture.

This herb is nice and straightforward. It clears Liver fire, and is used for hypertension associated with LV fire, or ascending Yang, and the channels it travels are the Liver and Gallbladder.


Got any creative ways to help remember Xia Ku Cao? Please post them!