blue poppy journal

[Guest guest]

I can highly recommend subscribing to the blue poppy online journal. It

comes out quarterly and and is always chock full of newly translated

information from chinese medical journals. The articles tend to focus

on both modern research studies and case studies, especially

illustrating the use of ideas from classical texts. This month has an

excellent article on the treatment of knotty diseases by Jim Chaffee. I

have read a few thousand such articles and abstracts translated from the

chinese journals over the past 14 years, with my primary sources being

Blue Poppy, Institute for Traditional Medicine and a now defunct journal

called Abstracts of . Of the many things that struck me

about this article was the discussion of dosage. Without exception, all

of the articles and abstracts I have read over the years have made the

same point implicitly and/or explicitly. That high dosage, often

extremely high dosage of certain ingredients, is typically required to

treat knotty diseases. The author clearly makes the point that dosage

is the secret that is not transmitted in texts and that failure in

clinic is often not due to poor pattern discrimination, but rather to

incorrect (often excessively low) dosage.

 

While various arguments have been made to justify how low dose forms of

herbs can work in serious illnesses, I have yet to see an article or

abstract from chinese journals supporting this point of view. Perhaps

all the editors of the translations I have read have been biased away

from such work, but I would be very interested if someone could dig up

such information to open my mind to this possibility. Otherwise I am

left with intriguing anecdotes, which is not adequate for me.

 

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Chinese Herbal Medicine