re:Ginseng & Coffee

[Guest guest]

Turiyah,

 

Good point about the milk and sugar. Dampness, as a form of stagnation,

increases the possibility of yang to float, or rise, rather than circulate

properly. Very good point, indeed. Thank you.

 

 

 

turiyahill <turiya wrote:

 

 

 

Coffee enters , for sure, the Heart Channel, by virtue of

bitter taste.

 

More importantly....what i believe has been missing from this

thread, is the milk and sugar that gets added.

 

Personally I believe that coffee ladened with milk and

sugar/honey creates significant lower burner dampness.

 

Turiya Hill

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[Guest guest]

Eric,

Sorry I haven't responded on this issue, but there are so many areas

to think about in our field these days, not the least my own patients'

issues, that it becomes difficult to think clearly about everything

that is put in front of me. All I can share is my own experiences,

thoughts and perceptions on the issue of ginseng vs. coffee, as I don't

have the time to do the research from the scientific perspective or

Chinese literature. It doesn't sound like there is too much to draw

on, anyway. Please allow me to muse out loud, and don't take me too

seriously, please.

 

My first thoughts are that coffee beans are possibly somewhat toxic

in their raw state. It is known that raw coffee beans are toxic to

cattle, and my intuition is that roasting coffee beans is not just for

the taste, but to neutralize toxic alkaloids that would be undesirable.

I'll have to research this further. It also increases the available

caffeine content.

 

Also, in my clinical practice, I can always tell when a patient has

had at least one cup of coffee within a few hours of coming to my

office. Their pulse is always more rapid, more floating or flooding

than it would be without it. I've never experienced this effect with

black tea, for example, on the pulse. Coffee is powerful stuff. If it

is not the caffeine that drives the pulse, it must be the complex

interactions of coffee's constituents. Coffee is a powerful medicine.

 

The best discussion of coffee I've found is in " Pharmako/Dynamics "

by Dale Pendell. He devotes an entire chapter to its history,

pharmacology, botany and sociology. Dale is a great writer on natural

drugs, the best on this topic since Andrew Weil's book " From Chocolate

to Morphine " . Interestingly, he mentions that in the Galenic herbal

literature, coffee is considered to be cold in nature. Pendell says

that coffee " mimics the effects of warmth. The body, via the pituitary

gland, responds by lowering body temperature " . This is my intuition as

well. Coffee is warm at first, but then actually cools the body as it

disinhibits damp and warms the yang.

 

My rationale for this is that medicinals in the category of warming and

assisting kidney yang, such as fu zi/aconite, are always combined with

kidney yin supplementing medicinals such as shu di huang, based on the

principle of supplementing yang with yin when dealing with the kidneys.

One reason for this is that yang supplementation by itself can easily

over-stimulate the yang qi, quickly warming the body, but then can

exhaust the yang and lead to cold. By combining with yin

supplementation, it allows the warm qi to be absorbed by the kidney

more effectively. At least, this is my speculation.

 

My feeling is that stimulants such as coffee warm and stimulate the

yang qi, but can lead to exhaustion of the yang qi if overindulged.

 

Ayurvedic and Tibetan medicine have the concept of taste and

'post-digestive taste' of medicinals. In other words, medicinals may

change in their nature after being metabolized. Perhaps we can explain

substances such as coffee in this way.

 

By the way, I was unable to find anything on the interaction of ginseng

and coffee in the new version of Clavey/Bensky's Materia Medica. Was

it in previous versions? If so, it has been deleted from the latest

one.

 

 

On Dec 23, 2004, at 2:12 PM, smilinglotus wrote:

 

>

> It is amazing that a list of 1000 professionals has been unable to

> discern whether a caution between ginseng and coffee that is

> referenced in our most basic herbal textbook is fact or fantasy.  We

> are constantly complaining about our eroding legal privileges and

> the potential of WM to take over herbal healthcare, yet we are not

> even adequately informed on the potential interactions of the most

> famous herb in CM with the most widespread herbal drug in Western

> society.  We haven't even been able to figure out whether this claim

> is based on the isolated experience of the author of the textbook or

> whether it is based on research or a consensus of experience.

>

>