Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) offers an extremely valuable, rich, lengthy, and extensive herbal treatment history. Within it are thousands of years of development and research which we benefit from greatly today. As opposed to some forms of herbalism and western medicine, Chinese herbs are often used in formulas instead of being used singularly in larger amounts. Formulas allow you to blend herbs to enhance their positive effects and reduce or eliminate any negative side effects they may have. These formulas take years and years of practice to master and many are kept within families and or generations of teacher-student transmissions. This rich tradition is a very valuable gift from previous generations.
The true benefit of this herbal tradition, as with acupuncture, is that it allows practitioners to blend formulas to match each patient and their signs and symptoms exactly. Instead of having a standard formula for a particular condition you can increase the clinical effectiveness of the herbs through this tailoring. For the patient this ideally means faster results with less side-effects.
In our clinic, we mainly use herbs which were ground into powder/ pills or tea bag. Our made-ready herbal pills are produced based on the Herbal Classic Shang Han Lun(伤寒论), which has been used over two thousand years. These herbs are called “ Classic Formula”; There are also other customized formula available in our clinic, which were created by some famous physician in China over the different dynasties.
You should never attempt herbal treatment without proper training as some of the herbs are toxic and need to be prepared correctly and others can have side-effects without being used in proper amounts and/or mixed properly into appropriate formulas.