by Bob Flaws Yesterday I heard about a Chinese company importing granule extracts from China. When asked if they intended to do U.S. product testing for heavy metals, microbes, and pesticides, the company spokesperson said no, that that would be too… more »

by Bob Flaws The other day, I happened to overhear one practitioner telling another practitioner that, in the absence of "any real patterns," they could always have their patient take a "tonic" formula such as Bu Zhong Yi Qi Tang (Supplement the Cent… more »

by Bob Flaws This morning I was reading an article in the November 2008 issue of Xin Zhong Yi (New Chinese Medicine) about Prof. Luo Song-ping's personal approaches to and experience in the treatment of recurrent spontaneous miscarriage. Like many Ch… more »

by Bob Flaws Sometimes customers call us to say that a formula which they had been giving to a patient was no longer working. I think they are calling to find out if something went wrong with a batch of the formula. In this case, I believe there are… more »

by Bob Flaws Over and over again, I hear or read American acupuncturists saying how important the classics are, that modern Chinese medicine is somehow debased, and that the classics are the "real" Chinese medicine. I also think study of the classics… more »

by Bob Flaws Over the years it has become a convention in non-Chinese countries to identify Chinese medicinals by a combination of Chinese name in Pinyin romanization followed by Latin pharmacological nomenclature. If we all used the original Chinese… more »

by Bob Flaws Luo Bu Ma (Herba Apocyni Veneti) may be unknown to many students and younger practitioners of Chinese medicine. In part, this is because it is not found in most entry-level Chinese materia medica, nor is it found any major traditional Ch… more »

by Bob Flaws What we refer to today as Traditional Chinese Medicine or TCM, the unified, systematized theory and practice of Chinese medicine current in China today, is really the outgrowth of the scholarly medicine of the Qing dynasty. It was in the… more »

by Bob Flaws Recently I had to look something up in Nigel Wiseman and Feng Ye's A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine and this set me thinking about how important and useful this book is. That then got me thinking about how often, when I mention… more »

by Eric Brand Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is a major topic of discussion in the modern medical world. While Chinese medicine offers a rich and well-preserved historical record of medical interventions, its “evidence base” is fraught with confoundi… more »