Clinical Guide to Chinese Herbs and Formulae - Traditional Medicine Remedies for Wellness & Healing | Herbal Therapy for Stress Relief, Digestion & Immunity Support

This book provides an excellent adjunct resource to build on core Chinese herbology texts such as the Bensky et al. books or Chen & Chen. However, it will not be a good resource on herbs for people who are looking for an understanding of Chinese herb actions within a Western biomedical framework, and I see that several people who were looking for that panned this text. For Chinese herbs discussed in a pharmological and biomedical framework, as well as in traditional Chinese medical terms, the books by John & Tina Chen will be much more suitable.For students of Chinese herbology who seek to understand herbs in terms of their effects on Qi, Xue, Jing, etc., this book is great. It provides excellent comparisons to differentiate herbs within categories, as well as discussions of the effects of the flavors, natures, and so forth that are better than those in most other books. It also provides elegant information on topics often missed in formulas classes, such as the potential for causing trapped heat by using heavy bitter and cold herbs without combining them with light acrid herbs to provide an escape route for the heat.For those reviewers who criticized this book for not providing research data to back up claims about herb actions, I assure you (as a research scientist myself) that there are good reasons why it did not do so, if only because discussing the research support for Chinese herb use could take several volumes in its own right. Chinese medicine has its own framework of vocabulary that sounds extremely bogus to ears not accustomed to it (for example, the common cold is generally referred to as "a wind invasion"). This language makes sense within its own context as a functional model that makes valid predictions and provides guidelines for prescribing herbs even when the biomedical mechanisms of a disease are poorly understood, as with many autoimmune diseases. I admit that it sounds ridiculous when you're not used to it. There are many people in the field who are seeking to understand the correspondences between the traditional terminology and biomedical concepts, but that is not the purpose of this book, and it should not necessarily be criticized for failing to do something that, in my opinion, was never its intention.