Hi. I've been reading your blog for a while now. Just wondering if you've considered including the chinese names of some the herbs and/or techniques you're saying. I'm no TCM practitioner, but I come from a Chinese family, and with that, comes with some "innate?" knowledge of some of these herbs. Would be good to know what some of them are in chinese. Thanks. Very informative blog i have to say...

I read your blog and it always leaves me with the question/problem. How to make patients to take decoction instead of powder or patents. What do you think about the pressure cookers and putting decoction in the plastic bags? As for now, I have a powder herb pharmacy (sometimes called granules) and it seems to work fine for me.
Thanks
Igor

What is "Huang Qi" if not Chinese?

Huang Qi is a transliteration, not a translation. think this should help. http://definingcharacters.com/blog/2006/03/11/transliteration-translation/

Huang Qi = Pinyin
黃耆 = Chinese (traditional)
黄芪 = Chinese (simplified)
Astragalus= English
Radix Astragali= Latin Pharmaceutical

In general, this blog tends to use Pinyin and either English or Latin. I would like to include the Chinese characters more often, but they often get corrupted by the blog format. Some characters don't seem to display properly in this interface so it is easier to leave them out altogether (otherwise 3/4 of the Chinese words come out and 1/4 don't display). For example, in the blog about Dr. Chang Hsien-Cheh, it is essential to include his name in Chinese characters, but the characters only fully display in the title, I can't get them to display in the main text. Computer quirk.

Even if the Chinese display was perfect, then I'd need to think about whether traditional or simplified is best for most readers, then I'd start thinking about putting accents on the Pinyin, it never ends... Most readers know the Pinyin and don't know the Chinese, and most people that can read Chinese and also know CM can figure out the characters based on Pinyin for simple things like Huang Qi.

Sorry that there is not more Chinese included in this blog! If I could post Chinese characters without any display problems, I'd be more inclined to include them more often. For now, I just put them in when they are important for clarity.

Thanks a lot Eric! I can read Chinese, but don't know CM, so Huang Qi is not simple at all! but i know what to say to my local guy now. ;) thanks again for the great work you put here. didn't appreciate the complexity of adding chinese characters. maybe chinese in pictures might be best. ;)

Eric, the character encoding specified in the HTML is iso-8859-1, which is Latin 1. You need UTF-8 to get all Chinese characters to display properly.