Great TCM Websites
Great TCM Websites
Published on July 13th, 2009 @ 12:29:27 pm , using 360 words, 1185 views
by Eric Brand
As a book nerd and a TCM nerd, I must confess that I can't get enough when it comes to good reference materials. For readers who can navigate the Chinese literature, it is amazing how cheap and abundant the TCM resources are. For example, in English there are three main materia medica texts, Chen's, Bensky's, and mine; all are around $100 or more. Each has its own advantages, but nonetheless there are only three books total. In Chinese, there are about 8 or 9 that form the main curriculum books, and each title is only about $3. Beyond the curriculum texts, there are literally hundreds of historical and modern reference books in materia medica. All of the historical books are available for free in digital copies, as none of the old texts have copyright issues. The digitized files can be easily copy-pasted into software solutions to speed one's translation and language acquisition, while having a fun time reading.
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Here are some of the best websites I've found in Chinese for free information. While only a minority of our readers will really enjoy these websites, they do make an incredible amount of free information available anywhere, anytime to those who can access it. Bookmark these sites, they are really amazing.
This site has an integrated TCM database that contains basically all the information from the Chinese pharmacopoeia, including the Zhong Yao Da Ci Dian, a collection of nearly 6000 medicinals (basically everything ever recorded in TCM). All this, as well as full text versions of many classical texts and other key curriculum texts in all subjects, can be found by digging around within this website. Tons of acupuncture info also, as well as staggering formula databases.
Another good one: http://www.zeeming.com/wiki/
Here is a great link to a Taiwanese government website on herb-drug interactions.
Note that to look up an herb, you need to type the name in
traditional characters, it won't work with simplified characters.
http://tcam.ccmp.gov.tw/meun_8_search_end.asp
Happy surfing! Hoping that lots of new minds will enjoy sifting through this information to bring it to the English-speaking community...
Permalink3 comments
Here is another great one, dig around alphabetically:http://www.zysj.com.cn/zhongyaocai/indexH.html
Thank you for these great resources! Most of my Baidu searches on herbs seem to lead to consumer-oriented sites. These are very handy. Hi Brendan,Glad you like the sites. Beyond using sites like these, you can also improve your search results by typing in a few extra words that mirror a Chinese source text. For example, instead of simply googling Bai Zhu （白术）, try googling Bai Zhu Xing Wei (白术性味). This will tend to produce more hits that quote Chinese source texts, simply because the phrase Xing Wei commonly occurs in books that talk about Materia Medica. Obviously, it is still imperfect but it does help to get more relevant results.
Eric
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