Chinese medicine is the most continuously documented healing tradition on earth, with a written record spanning more than two thousand years and a living practice today.
The Huangdi Neijing — the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, compiled from around the second century BCE — sets out the framework: the body as a landscape through which qi circulates, ordered by the complementary forces of yin and yang and the five phases (wood, fire, earth, metal, water), each linked to organs, seasons, tastes, emotions and colours.
Later landmarks include the Shanghan Lun on cold-damage disorders around 200 CE, and Li Shizhen's Bencao Gangmu of 1578, which catalogues nearly two thousand substances across fifty-two volumes.
In 1969 the Chinese pharmacologist Tu Youyou was set to work searching classical texts for malaria treatments. She found a reference in Ge Hong's handbook from around 340 CE to steeping qinghao — sweet wormwood — in cold water. The cold-water detail mattered: heat destroys the active compound, which is why earlier extractions had failed.
The result was artemisinin, now the backbone of malaria treatment worldwide and credited with saving millions of lives. Tu Youyou received the Nobel Prize in 2015.
This is the model case for what traditional knowledge can offer: an old text pointed to a plant, and modern chemistry isolated, tested and standardised the compound. Both halves were necessary. Neither alone would have done it.
Some traditional Chinese herbs are genuinely dangerous. Preparations containing Aristolochia caused an outbreak of kidney failure and urinary cancers in Belgium in the 1990s and are now banned in many countries. Some imported products have been found adulterated with steroids or heavy metals.
Buy only from regulated sources, and tell your doctor what you are taking — herb-drug interactions are real, particularly with blood thinners.
This site is a personal account and a record of traditional practice, shared for information. It is not medical advice, not a diagnosis, and not a treatment for any disease. I am not a doctor.
If you are unwell — and especially if you have a serious illness such as cancer, diabetes or heart disease — please stay under the care of a qualified physician. Nothing here should replace or delay that care.