[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Nervous Herbalist, a podcast for Chinese medicine practitioners who like herbs and want to learn more about their function, their history, and treatment strategies to use in the clinic. Let's get into it.
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Nervous Herbalist. My name is Travis Kern, and I am here with Travis Cunningham.
And today we want to talk to you guys a little bit about herb processing powder.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: So I think it'd be great to tell them. So Travis K, for those of you who don't know him, has a background in cooking which predates his training in Chinese medicine. So I actually think it would be great to start off the discussion talking about the combination of flavors and.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Preparation methods.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: Yeah. So I. I was a professional cook for a couple of years before I switched over into, well, several careers ago. Now, it turns out it's been a while. But the interesting thing to me about getting into Chinese medicine eventually, and particularly Chinese medicine work, pharmacy work, is that so much of the emphasis in classical formula design is, you know, we think about herbs through this lens of flavor. You know, what do they taste like? And then the flavor having an impact on the way that those herbs move and change.
And of course, tang, like the classical word for decoction, is the same word for soup. Yep. And so that always really stood out to me in school, and I just thought, well, everybody's making medical soup.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: You know, over and over.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: And so, of course, if you've ever made soup, if you spend any time at all in the kitchen cooking, you have probably seen or used recipes that describe specific steps to the creation of a final product.
So it's not like you. I mean, some recipes are like this, but by and large, you don't just take everything that goes into the soup and just put it in the pot and turn it on. Right. Now, some people intentionally design recipes for, like, crock pots and stuff that are like that. But even. Still, a lot of times, even those recipes will be like, okay, first you need to brown the meat.
In fact, maybe you need to salt the meat overnight or marinate it or do some step, right. To prepare it ahead of time. And then you're going to brown it. And then you're going to put the aromatics, the onions, the garlic, the celery, the bell pepper into the juices from the meat. And then you're going to cook that, and then you're going to add a little bit wine, Right. And you're going to scrape the bits off the bottom, and then you're going to add your broth. And your other flavoring components, and you let it stew. And then if it's something like really starchy, like beans or lentil soup or something like that, Right. Before you serve it, a lot of the recipes will include hot sauce or vinegar or something like acidic. Right. That's got an acrid, kind of acrid, sour component to it. Right?
[00:02:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: And those flavors are going to help to make the starchy, fatty substances more palatable. Right. They won't coat your mouth. You won't feel so rich.
And this is just food, Right. This is just making good stew, making good soup. These are techniques that people use.
And of course, you can just, like, throw it all in a pot and cook it. And assuming your ratios and stuff are correct, like, it'll still be good. Right. I mean, you're probably not going to be like, this is the most amazing stew I've ever had. But, like, it'll be edible, it'll be flavorful, but it won't be as good as the one that took all the preparation steps. Right. And put it together.
So when we were preparing for the show, I was sort of thinking about that just wintertime right now while we're recording, and we're doing a lot of, like, soups and stews and just really thinking about that process a lot and really sitting with the idea that so much of what we describe as powder, the prep of herbs, has to do with trying to leverage the flavor of them.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Push them in another direction. And it's really not that different than, you know, taking time to caramelize the onions because they go from being acrid to being sweet. Right. Like, they change, you know, like, you can't make French onion soup with raw white onions.
[00:04:10] Speaker B: Right.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Like, you have to cook them down, otherwise the flavor will be overwhelming.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:14] Speaker A: But also using that as an example, by the time you sit down to eat French onion soup, Right. French onion soup that's made for, say, six to eight people has pounds and pounds and pounds of onions in it. In fact, when you slice them all up, when you read the recipe, you're like, surely this is too many onions.
[00:04:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Right.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: There's way too many onions in this. But then you cook them down slowly, caramelize them, you add in broth, you add in wine, and that final soup, a little bowl of soup. Right.
When you eat it, you will feel so warm.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: Like crazy warm in a way that's, like, kind of hard to describe.
And the reason is because you are consuming a huge quantity of warming substances that have been warmed further by Slow cooking and breaking down.
[00:05:00] Speaker B: Right.
[00:05:00] Speaker A: And then the addition of other things that add to its warming. But French onion soup is a winter dish for a reason. Yeah. It is a deeply warm, warming dish that happens from cooking it down. Whereas, like, if you made an onion soup that was, like, brothy and light, and those onions hadn't been stewed down to caramelize, it would still be warm, but it would feel acrid, and you would sweat quickly. Right. And there would just be this kind of, like, moving component as to, like. As opposed to a deep warming component.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: And so that's just. Again, like, people experience this all the time with food, but a lot of people don't really. I mean, we know this isn't the case, but a lot of people don't put a lot of credit into the power of food.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: Because, of course, terrible irony, since you eat food every day. Right. And it's the most important thing relative to your health. But in the context of herbs, then, since people have that knowledge, like, they know that you can change the action of a thing by just from their experience of cooking, then of course, as practitioners, we know, we probably all learned in school about powder, but it's important, I think, to take some time and really look at those things and say, okay, what is there here?
[00:06:08] Speaker B: Do you think there's a connection between.
So in cooking, you're making these changes largely because of flavor. Right. The flavor of something is going to be different if you prepare it differently.
But do you think that there's a connection between the flavor of a food and. And the wellness of that food? So, in other words, like, certain dishes are balanced.
If we look at it from our perspective medically.
[00:06:36] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:37] Speaker B: Naturally they have something that's pungent or something. You know, there's. There's rich pork, and then there's something that's pungent or sour that cuts it, and then it's just kind of naturally added in together. Do you think that there's a.
A relationship between the health of something and the palate of something?
[00:06:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I do. I do think that. And I think that it's tricky because, you know, palate and appetite and taste can get pushed in a lot of different directions. You know, so, like, people will be like, well, I love sweet flavor. It tastes good in my mouth. Does that mean it's healthy? You know, the thing is, is that, like. Well, actually, maybe. Right, sure. It really depends on the context. You might actually really be drawn to something sweet in a way that's meaningful. Right. But I do think if you look at food traditions, which, of course, like Chinese herbal medicine, is in some way a very specified extension of food tradition. Because, like, the logic that drives Chinese herbal medicine is the same logic that drives Chinese nutrition. They are identical.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: Right. And then there's the.
[00:07:38] Speaker A: The.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: The story about Yiyin.
[00:07:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:42] Speaker B: Forgive the pronunciation, but the. The first decoction ever made, or the first, you know, thing ever made was for this guy who was trying to prepare. Was challenged to prepare a stinking fish for the emperor.
[00:07:56] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: And he said, I can make this taste good. And so then there's this development of combinations of flavors and things like that. But it starts off again with. Even if the story is to some degree mythological, it starts off with food. It starts off with food being the core premise. Right.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: Because, of course, before there was any kind of herbal medicine, of course there was food.
[00:08:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:18] Speaker A: Obviously, you know, like, people had to eat. And then people observed, especially in times where people had time to observe. And in this context, I literally mean, like, Neolithic man. You know, we're talking 10,000 years ago.
As man's intelligence grows and our desire for storytelling and pattern finding becomes, like, a defining characteristic of our species, we can't help but, like, watch and observe. And there's plenty of time to watch and observe in a Neolithic period, right?
[00:08:48] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:08:48] Speaker A: And so people eat stuff and you watch what happens, right. And you're like, oh, it seems like Joe over there is, like, got some weird poops. I wonder why that is. You know, like.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: And John over there is sweating.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, you just. You would observe. These things happen. I mean, we do this now. Like, how many times have I, when I point out to a patient, like, hey, that cottage cheese and peaches you have for breakfast in the morning, do you ever get flemmy after that? And they go, oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: Or they go, no. And then they come back and they're like, oh, my God, every time I do.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Because they didn't have any awareness about it, no awareness until you pointed it out. You know, so, of course, there was first food, and then, of course, that the manipulation of food is going to matter. And of course, this is being driven on the idea of, like, what's palatable. But. But our appetites, like, what is palatable is also part of our own survival. You know, like, you smell food that is rotten or off, and you don't want to eat it. Right, right. There's like a revulsion, intrinsic revulsion. That's not intellectual. That is. That is deeply biological. Sure. In the same way that you smell like fresh Baked bread and sweets and things like that. And you're drawn to them. Right. Because you're like, oh, your body's like, ah, this is what we need. Like your chi cries out for that chi. And so it comes in. Right.
The thing that's interesting, I think is that with foods that are balanced in traditional models, you know, over literally tens of thousands of years, this evolves into a much more sophisticated understanding of how foods interrelate. And maybe it was in a culture that had language like we use now, nature, flavor, temperature, that sort of thing.
But even without that, cultures have a kind of default reaction to balancing dishes. So for example, my favorite example actually is with sushi.
[00:10:29] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:10:30] Speaker A: So sushi is worldwide now. Everybody eats sushi.
Um, but of course, traditional sushi is made actually with fish that's aged.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: So it isn't actually the freshest ever straight out of the sea. Doesn't taste like anything except sort of like fat, I guess. It's aged. So that's the first part that's different than what we do now. And then in the traditional models too, people ate it always with wasabi, with ginger and with shiso. Yep. Right.
Now what do we know about specifically about ginger and shiso? Firstly, ginger's warming, shiso is moving and the two of them together are anti parasitic. Right. Now why is that? Because if you eat raw fish, you're eating parasites. Right. Like now we have like high blast freezers that can kill and sashimi, frozen, whatever. But like that's literally the invention of the last 30 years.
Before that, if you're eating a lot of raw fish, you are consuming parasites and therefore you need to take action to prevent those parasites from taking up host in your body because it'll be bad. How did they figure that out? Well, they observed, Right?
[00:11:35] Speaker B: Right. They learned quickly.
[00:11:37] Speaker A: They're like, oh, this is how this doesn't work. And then the wasabi is a really interesting component because of course sushi, even aged fish sushi, but especially the hyper fresh stuff we have now is cold and damp.
And if you eat a lot of cold and damp stuff combined with the sweet flavor of the rice, which also in the traditional model, the rice is aged. Right. It's slightly fermented, sour.
[00:12:00] Speaker B: I didn't know that.
[00:12:01] Speaker A: But now we use vinegar to copy that flavor. I see, I see. But at the grocery store, you buy grocery store sushi, for example, it's just rice.
Maybe they put some vinegar on it, but it's just rice. So that slightly sour, slightly aged component is gone. So you just have sweet flavor rice. And you've got cold, damp, fresh fish that walked out of the ocean.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:24] Speaker A: And people go, I don't really like wasabi. It's kind of spicy.
And the ginger is too strong, and I want to eat it.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: And if you're getting grocery store sushi, you don't get any shiso. They just give you the plastic grass, which is.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: And it may have, like, barbecue sauce on it or whatever.
[00:12:37] Speaker A: Spicy mayo.
[00:12:38] Speaker B: Yeah, spicy mayo.
[00:12:39] Speaker A: At least there's some spicy there, but mayo. Right.
And so what happens is, like, you end up eating a bunch of foods that now are cloying and damp.
[00:12:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:47] Speaker A: And so you got people with, like, weak digestion, for example, who are like, I love sushi, but I can't eat it. And I was like, oh, it's because you're not actually eating it balanced, like you're eating a cold bomb. So what you need to do is you need to spread some wasabi on your. On your sushi. You need to eat ginger with every round, like every couple of pieces. You eat some of those pieces of ginger. You drink warm tea or miso soup as a beverage while you're eating the sushi. Right. And. And now you'll feel a whole lot better. Yeah. I didn't just make that up. That's the traditional model. Right? Right. The people who ate the stuff, who invented it, they ate things that were balanced. Yeah.
[00:13:25] Speaker B: They figured that out.
[00:13:26] Speaker A: They had already figured it out. Another really great example is with lamb.
So lamb is a hot food. Right. From a Chinese medicine point of view, every culture that eats lots of lamb eats it with a balancing factor. So like in Central Asia, lambs everywhere. In Sardinia and the islands, in Italy, everywhere. Lamb.
People eat that with yogurt. Mint, cucumbers. Right? Yogurt, mint, cucumber. Cool.
A little bit damp.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
But also pungent if it's mint.
[00:13:57] Speaker A: To balance.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: To balance the yogurt.
[00:13:59] Speaker A: If you just eat the yogurt and.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: The cucumbers and the lamb could be kind of fatty, you know, so it could assist there, too.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: And then think about Central Asian flavors, like zaatar. Right. It's like strong herbs. Right. Oregano, sesame, that are, like, mixed together. Thyme. There's different blends, but, like, it's strong herbal flavors. Same thing. Right. Something a little bit acrid, something a little bit moving.
And so people aren't just going to eat a pile of lamb. They're always going to eat the lamb with the cooling components.
[00:14:26] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:26] Speaker A: With the acrid components. A lot of, like, Persian Dishes will literally just have piles of herbs on the table. Right. That are, like, dipped in salted water and eaten right along with the bread and the lamb and the rice.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:38] Speaker A: Even in the Western tradition, British people eat leg of lamb. The old school folks. With mint jelly.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: Right. So you got cooling, acrid mint jelly. It goes with. With leg of lamb. So these are ways in which people intrinsically figured out that there are ways to leverage these flavor factors to build a balanced meal so that you could eat that meal, you know, over and over again without harming yourself. Right. And so the problem we have now, like, in our diet situation, of course, is, like, food is just leaning too much in one direction. And so people's palates become adjusted to, like, hyper salty, hyper sweet.
They're drawn to eat more and more of it. A lot of the net, the natural cues that would balance out those flavors or limit how much you would eat are removed. And so people end up with, like, a skewed appetite. That.
[00:15:23] Speaker B: That's actually my next question for you is I wanted to talk about why do you think the app, you touched on it a little bit there, but why do you think people have skewed appetite? Because we've all met patients who are like, I love sweets, you know, but my body doesn't. Like, I actually. I hate it when people say stuff like that, like, oh, I like this thing, but my body hates it. As if they're different than their body.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: Right, Right.
[00:15:48] Speaker B: It bothers me to no end, and then I have to, like, try to moderate my own reaction.
[00:15:52] Speaker A: But why do you.
[00:15:54] Speaker B: Why do you think?
[00:15:56] Speaker A: I think. I mean, I think there's a variety of reasons. Sweet is probably the easiest thing to look at. Right. So, like, we have this idea culturally that, like, some people have a sweet tooth.
[00:16:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: In fact, you'll know this about people. I even felt this way for a long time myself, where, like, I like sweet food fine. But I would usually prefer to have a second helping of dinner than have dessert, like, if it was a choice. Right. Or I'm drawn to French fries and potato chips and cheese more than I'm drawn to cake and cookies and chocolate. Right, Right. And so some of that is surely just jing. Right. It's just an ancestral tendency in one way or the other.
But the thing was, is that I think the reason that things get skewed now is some of it mechanical, which is that it wasn't that long ago that if you wanted any of those things, you had to make them true. Right. And that just is, like, A literal mechanical barrier to over consumption. Because you only have so much stuff here and you only have so much time.
So even if you made a dozen cookies and you ate all of them. Yeah, that's it. You'd have to make some more, you know what I mean? To, like, do the process. But now you can just go to the grocery store and buy all of the sweet flavor you want. It's cheap, relatively speaking, though these days.
[00:17:12] Speaker B: Not so much anymore.
[00:17:13] Speaker A: Yeah, But I mean, you know, relative to fruit or something, it's cheaper. Right. And so you can buy it. The mechanical barriers to stop overconsumption are less largely gone. Modern society. So I think that's one piece.
The other piece is that there are some flavors that are naturally quite rare.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:17:34] Speaker A: Sweet being one. Right. Sweet in the dramatic form that we like. When I say sweet, you and I know we mean stuff like rice is sweet, but when most people hear sweet, right. They think cake.
So that level of sweetness is quite rare in nature. Right. I mean, it's basically honey.
Right.
[00:17:51] Speaker B: Dates, maybe dried fruit.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Really? You got fruit, dried fruit, honey, sort of like the. The naturally occurring versions. And then, you know, for hundreds of years now, we've known how to refine sugar from cane and beets and stuff like that and those. Those flavors. Right. Because they're naturally rare.
Right. Our middle jiao function is drawn to them. Right. We know that sweet supports earth. We know that sweet builds flesh. But because for most of human history, the real challenge was getting enough calories, like, staying alive. So our programming says, like, oh, if they're sweet, you should eat it. Right. Because we need to build flesh. We need to support the metal. Sure. We need to make sure that there's lubrication and warmth. All that's coming from sweet flavor. And for most of human history, we got that from grains.
That was the place that we got it.
But those also had mechanical mitigating factors, which was that many of the grains that people ate were whole grains.
And so they had fiber. They had. So you had bran, you had germ, you had the actual starchy part in the middle.
I mean, Asian people ate white rice too, obviously, because the store is better. But even still, people ate many, many more whole grains than we eat now. And those things we know contribute to a feeling of satiety. Right. Satiety, some people say, like feeling full are helped by eating fiber. It slows glycemic jumps and it lasts longer in your system.
And so all of these literal, just mechanical things have been pulled out by modernity. Right. So like, you can buy as much sweet flavor as you want. It's relatively inexpensive. And even the things that are not like sugar sweet, but like grain sweet, have also been refined to the point that there are no real limits on eating them. So you can sit down and just eat like 5,000 calories worth of rice and not really feel it. Right. You know, because you're just going to like down all that rice.
So I think a lot of the times what happens is you take a standard programming like a draw for sweetness, but the things that existed for most of human history to prevent you from getting too much sweet are gone.
And so now we have to rely on cultivation of ourselves to be aware of it. And it's a real struggle.
[00:20:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I think too there's maybe a component to this where you have to educate. Everyone has to educate their appetite or their palate. Like, you know, I think about French people giving their kids specific foods.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: Right.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: And, and saying like, yeah, with this explanation that like, no, they need to get to know French food.
They need to get to know the good foods because they may not know what they are.
[00:20:30] Speaker A: I mean, literally in French schools, little kids, like in preschool, they sit down for three course meals.
[00:20:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:36] Speaker A: Literally. It's like part of the mandated federal food program from France.
[00:20:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: And it's because it's a cultural thing. Right. You know, they got like four year old kids eating blue cheese.
[00:20:46] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, what do you think? I want to move on from this point in a minute because I know we have other important things to talk about related to pouch here, but what do you think happens to people? So relative to herbal medicine now, where patients will come in and they feel good, much better taken a formula, but they hate the taste of it. I can barely stomach the taste of this. I really don't like it. But you can tell all of their symptoms are getting better or the targeted symptoms that you would expect to change in a positive direction are improving.
How do we rectify the difference between.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: Let'S say appetite as a source of finding what's good or what's healthy versus rejection of taste. Right. In the case of a poorly tasting herbal formula, but that's still producing helpful results for that person's health.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a really good question, I think, because we do spend so much time telling people to like, follow your appetite.
[00:21:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:48] Speaker A: So here you are eating something and you're like, this tastes like garbage.
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:51] Speaker A: Why, why would like that seems counterintuitive. Right. And I think it's a really hard question to Answer. Of course, the ideal scenario, which we do see with some regularity is like people initially take the formula and like, they don't have like, especially in the west, we don't have any real palette for bitter flavor. Right. And so like even like a formula that's like marginally bitter.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Right, like guiji tong.
[00:22:12] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:22:14] Speaker B: I can't tell you how many people.
Oh my gosh, it's so bitter.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: So bitter. And you're like, are we talking about the same formula?
[00:22:21] Speaker B: Yeah, if you think that's bitter.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Yeah, Like, I think of like a, like in my mind, like a moderate, a moderately bitter formula.
Like xiaochaiutong.
[00:22:29] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:22:29] Speaker A: Right. So it's got a little bit huangchin in there. The chai hu itself has got, you know, it's a little bit bitter, but it's not. I mean, any Chinese medicine practitioner would not think of chai, who is a bitter formula. Exactly. So people take it, they go, oh, this is bitter. But then actually their, their palate adjusts and though they're not like excited to drink it, they're still thinking, oh no, it's, I'm, look, I look forward to my herbs. That's the ideal scenario. Right. Like there's an initial reaction of just like, ugh, I don't, I'm not used to it. But then it kind of rolls into their routine and you can read that as a clear indicator that the body needs it. Yeah, Right.
But of course, there are plenty of circumstances, especially with more strongly flavored formulas looking at you Shay shintongs. Sure, that are extremely important for people, but that are also hard to take. And so how do we actually thread that? I think firstly, it's a question of degree.
The thing is, is that food and medicine live in different levels of degree. Right. So we help people cultivate an appetite so that they can be drawn to food level.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: Appetite. Yeah. Which is to say, like, you know, when you need some green vegetables, when you need some meat, when you need some sweet, like you can cultivate that, I think with a pretty good sense of accuracy that's reliable.
But the thing is, is that sometimes people have problems.
That means, frankly, the reason they're seeing us is because the problems have exceeded the sort of built in functions that they have access to. And so now they come to us and we say, hey, we have to give you a formula here that has a particular nature and flavor because that is the pattern we need to reassert on your digestion. And probably that pattern that exists, the pathology pattern that exists resists itself modification yeah. So if you're throwing in shaentang, because we need the bitter flavor to go into the middle and drain the accumulation that's there and balance the, like, hot, cold, combo, combo problem that's there.
That pattern resists transformation. And I think part of it is also, like, you take it and there's a part of the pattern. I don't want to personify it. Like, it's not like a. Like a being inside of you, but there's like a stickiness to it.
[00:24:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:41] Speaker A: So I think people take it and they're like, ugh, I don't want it.
[00:24:44] Speaker B: I remember talking to my friend Civito about this idea who's trained in Ayurvedic medicine, and he was saying that in Ayurvedic medicine, they have different stages of disease that they categorize. There's like, I don't know, 8 or 10 or something like that. And for the first couple, when the person's mostly healthy, they'll crave things that are good for them, but then as they proceed down the layers of pathology, it'll sort of morph into. They'll start to crave the wrong things, and it'll actually exacerbate the disease if they follow those. Those cravings. You know, I think that's super interesting because you're kind of saying.
[00:25:26] Speaker A: I've heard some Chinese teachers talk about it in the context of, like.
Like, damp. Craves damp.
[00:25:33] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:25:34] Speaker A: So it's sort of like there's a preponderance of a physiologic thing that's now become pathological, and it just calls for more of itself.
Yeah.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: And I think even in damp, like, if we're using that as an example, a lot of the formulas that treat dampness still have sweet flavor. So there's this effort to promote the healthy function of the middle jiao with a little bit of tonification with dispersion at the same time.
And even in Shayshan Tong, you know, Shayshan tongs, three of the Shayshan tongs have renshen, dazao, and zhigancao in them. So there's still sweet flavor inside of this very bitter and pungent formula.
And I think that's pretty typical for how dampness is addressed. So the craving of sweet may not be wrong. It just may be kind of incomplete, complete. Like, you may need sweet, but you may need it moderated by these other forces.
[00:26:33] Speaker A: It's also worth noting that many of the herbs that we use to slightly tonify in that context, like sweet for middle jiao yeah. Are almost all of them warm?
[00:26:43] Speaker B: Yeah, it's true.
[00:26:43] Speaker A: They're warm and sweet.
[00:26:44] Speaker B: Right. They're not cool and sweet.
[00:26:46] Speaker A: They're not cool and sweet. They're warm and sweet. And it is also worth noting that cane sugar and beet sugar are both of them cool and sweet.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:26:54] Speaker A: Yeah. Whereas honey, maltose. Right.
Dates, those are all warm and sweet.
[00:27:00] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:27:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And so I'm not sure you know this.
Generally speaking, I think people are kind of fooling themselves if they're like, I made this cake with date sugar, so it's healthy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Whatever. Whatever, man. It's still full of sugar. But I do think it's worth considering that, you know, again, talking about traditions, like a lot of traditional pastries, even in the west, are flavored with warming spices.
[00:27:22] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: Lots of cinnamon, lots of allspice, lots of nutmeg. Right. Lots of things that are in there that we think of as flavor factors. But if you sort of zoom out a little bit and you consider the fact that these belong to a warm category, many of themselves warm and sweet. Right.
Then those are standing as a counterpoint to the use of refined sugar. Right. To help and actually warm that stuff up a little bit.
[00:27:46] Speaker B: Makes a lot of sense.
[00:27:48] Speaker A: Yeah. So when you think about how all of those things fit together in how they would impact digestion, comparing, for example, like a cinnamon spiced fall pumpkin pie compared to a key lime pie compared to sweet pound cake with a royal icing glaze. These are all sweets, but they're actually all fairly different from a nature and flavor point of view. And it would be an interesting thing to experiment to run. I've never run this, of course, but an interesting experiment to see how does my damp patient do with warm pumpkin pie versus key lime pie versus glazed pound cake. Like, how do they feel?
[00:28:27] Speaker B: Thanksgiving's coming up. We could run a little experiment. I want you to try eating three.
[00:28:33] Speaker A: Different pie and then fill out this survey at the end to see how you're feeling. Yeah, I know, I know.
[00:28:44] Speaker A: Sam.
[00:29:10] Speaker B: Okay, so then what would be an example, let's say, of a formula structure that would articulate some of these differences in flavor through the lens of powder.
[00:29:23] Speaker A: Yeah. There's, of course, a lot of formulas that use powder.
[00:29:28] Speaker A: And I think a really emblematic one is actually ironically, a formula that a lot of people don't use. But I think it's a good formula to think about because we make it here at root and branch. And so I have a lot of experience with, with powdering the Ingredients. So the formula is called Si Shen Wan bind the intestines pill. Right.
And we should probably. We should look at each of the ingredients in that. But maybe let's take a step back and take a look at some of the broader categories that a lot of herbs get slotted into. Right. Because like, you know, I think people have heard of pow. Hopefully they. They learned about it in school. But, you know, what is it? And I would say generally is quite big, right? I mean, you can powder a lot of stuff, and a lot of the herbs that you are using, even in granule form, have been processed before.
Like, just by default, they get processed, right? So like, no one is selling raw bancha.
[00:30:19] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:30:20] Speaker A: Because, like, raw bancha is toxic and it will hurt you, and so you can't really use it. So it has to be processed. It's either going to be FA or jiang or some other version. Right. Or like foods has alkaloids in it that are damaged by heat. They're destroyed by heat. So even though, you know, you read in the Bensky in school that like, foods needs to be boiled for 30 minutes with Gonzhao and ganjian. And Ganjian, right. To like warm it or whatever, like, that would be true if you were getting your hands on raw foodza. Right? But because raw foods is incredibly toxic, no domestic importer is selling raw food, so they're just not going to take the risk. I mean, I don't want to say no one. I'm sure you can find it somewhere.
[00:31:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I know. I know a couple people.
[00:31:04] Speaker A: But it's. But it's like you got to work for it.
[00:31:07] Speaker B: You got to work for it.
[00:31:07] Speaker A: You got to work for it, right? Like, if you're buying foods from a reputable importer, it's been processed, Right. And that's because the importer doesn't want to take the risk that you poison someone by giving them two.
[00:31:16] Speaker B: Yeah, because you could.
[00:31:18] Speaker A: Because you could.
So a lot of stuff just comes processed, baked, boiled, fried, cooked in certain solutions. Right. And in fact, many of the granules that you're buying from various companies are. Are processed and sometimes they're not labeled as processed. Right? So like you'll be buying Xiang fu, for example, that's always cooked with vinegar, but it's not going to be labeled necessarily su Xiang fu.
[00:31:44] Speaker A: In the granule catalog because it just is. It's just cooked with vinegar. Right. When you buy it in bulk, you can usually see more of the prep stuff. But so basically you've got a handful of, I think Categories that are worth looking at. So first is the most basic chow products. So this is dry frying. Something which you can. I mean, traditionally is done, like, in a kind of, like, tumble process. Like a hot wok was the old way, but I mean, now on an industrial scale, they have these big drums that they put the herbs in, and they literally, like, tumble them under heat, you know, rotating them, roasting them. Right. Because, you know, if you're doing tons of it, you can't do it in walks. Right.
So chow is the most basic.
And when you chow something, like, obviously you're heating it up.
And when you heat stuff up, a lot of the things that can contribute to, like, the. Like, a cloying or, like, oily quality or things that are, like, effervescent a little bit, like essential oils, things that are volatile, those things are going to be cooked off in the process of heating them. So chowing something is going to warm it. It's going to reduce cloying quality.
And so that gets applied to a lot of different herbs.
Honey frying is another really common one. Meager. And it's funny, because the reason that it's important to talk about meager is because of jurgon sao. Sure, Right. Jargon. SAO is everywhere. It's so. So ubiquitous an ingredient. In fact, I think a lot of people don't think about the fact that it's gansao that's been honey fried. Right, Right. Right. It's just like you have gonzo and you have Jurgen sao. Right. Which is actually helpful because, like, they are distinct units now.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: Right.
[00:33:15] Speaker A: They're different things. But meer is a really common process where you're going to take your herb and you're going to basically coat it in honey, and then you're going to chow it in a wok or in a drum or whatever until that honey caramelizes and darkens and gets right up to the edge of burning, but isn't. So it's like a dark honey caramel, and then that gets dried out to varying degrees of stickiness, and then you end up with jurgon sales. And when you do that, you're actually going to increase the moistening quality of the product. You're going to make it sweeter, obviously. Right. And it's going to be warm, not just from the chowing, but also from the honey. Right.
So you have something that's more distinctly oriented toward the middle. Right. That's going to support earth. Right. It definitely has that component. And it's sweeter. Right.
Wine frying is another one. Jiu Chow.
Jiu here is like baijiu.
So, like, it's. It's that when we hear wine, people are like, oh, are they tossing it in like a nice merlot? Like, no, no, we mean by joe, which is really liquor.
[00:34:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:15] Speaker A: So, like, calling it wine fry is a little liquor fry. It should be.
[00:34:19] Speaker B: That's.
[00:34:19] Speaker A: It really should be. Because, like, people are always like, bai, Joe, white wine. I'm like, no, baijiu is not like a cab franc. Like, what are you talking. You know what I mean? Like, it's just not. It's not wine, it's liquor. And it's made from a particular mash of things. And so if you think about that, just slot that in your mind. It's important because the difference between wine and liquor is quite dramatic, both in the experience of drinking it and the alcohol content, et cetera. But the reason that people wine fry stuff is because it increases the moving and dispersing quality of an herb. And so, you know, you could do it with wine for sure. Like, it'll still move stuff, be more dispersive, but it's much more dispersive with something that is 40, 50% alcohol.
[00:35:00] Speaker B: It makes sense.
[00:35:01] Speaker A: And that's what baijiu is. Right.
Then you've got vinegar fry, suzer.
Vinegar fry is.
It basically just imparts the quality of vinegar. So it's sour, and therefore it's going to constrain and have stuff move inward. So if jiu chao wine frying is having stuff move out, like, disperse and move, vinegar fry is doing the opposite. It's constraining and moving in.
[00:35:25] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:35:27] Speaker A: And then you've got salt fry yen.
You know, salt is going to soften hardness, of course, but the thing that we actually usually see it for is to accentuate the kidney function or kidney affinity of herbs. Sure. So you salt fry something. Now, what does that mean? Basically, you actually make a salt water solution is basically the salinity of the ocean.
[00:35:48] Speaker B: Right.
[00:35:48] Speaker A: And you saturate the herb. Like you basically slightly rehydrate it with salt water, and then you chow it.
[00:35:53] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:35:54] Speaker A: Right. So you're not just like. I mean, you could toss it around in salt, but just practically speaking, it's much easier to use a salt solution. You also know when it's been evaporated, it actually sits in the material as opposed to just coating the outside. And it's much easier. Like, you don't have to sift anything out. Right, Right.
So vinegar fry, wine fry, salt fry, these are all solution. Right. And so you take your dry herb and you apply whatever wine or vinegar or salt water and you let the herb absorb it a little bit and then you roast it. Right. Basically dry it back out.
[00:36:26] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:36:26] Speaker A: And then take it slightly past dry to browning so it actually looks cooked.
[00:36:31] Speaker B: And we do, we've done a lot of these preps. Yeah, we do.
[00:36:34] Speaker A: We do all this actually. Yeah, yeah, we do all this. The only thing we don't do is the last one, which is tan, which is the char.
And that's because we don't have good ventilation for the smoke. Because when you char stuff, obviously it's going to smoke.
[00:36:46] Speaker B: But that's another good example of like paojiang comes charred.
[00:36:50] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. It's interesting. So pow jiang is blast fried, which means it's like hyper heat and it causes the ginger to like puff. Like, if you've ever seen Pao Zhang, it's like kind of light. It has the, the feeling like. Like styrofoam.
[00:37:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:04] Speaker A: And so Pao Zhang is not technically tan. It's, it's blast fried. So it has some of that quality to it, the like astringent quality, the sort of stop bleeding quality. And it's certainly lost virtually all of the acrid quality of ginger. Right. It's like the, the dispersive quality. Right. Still warm, still middle jiao. But, you know, it just doesn't, it doesn't have the same.
[00:37:29] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:37:29] Speaker A: You know, still a little spicy though. Still a little pungent.
[00:37:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:32] Speaker A: But it's just not so moving.
[00:37:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:34] Speaker A: You can take the powder and then continue to, to tan it until it actually is like, it looks like true charcoal. Like you could like draw on the wall with it. It's like a charcoal brick. And then that's the stuff that's like the hardcore tan herbs that you use for like, active bleeding problems.
[00:37:52] Speaker B: Gotcha.
[00:37:52] Speaker A: So if people had like, like bleeding ulcerative colitis middle jiao formula, you would probably use pao jong anyway for all of your ginger versions because they're actively bleeding. But if they're like really showing a fair amount of blood in the toilet, you're probably going to go ahead and step it up to a tan pao jong.
So, and this is a, this is a small distinction, you know what I mean? Like different people pow make pow jam. That's pretty close to tan, maybe is Right. You know, and then other people will do it where it's just kind of like a caramel brown color, but it's really puffy and light. And then that will get further tanned.
[00:38:28] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:38:29] Speaker A: So you know, all of this distinction, of course, we're talking about it in the context of bulk herbs.
[00:38:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:33] Speaker A: And so, you know, in granules, which we'll talk about later, like that you don't quite have so much choice. And you can't tell because it's in a granule. Right, right. In a powder, you know, but when you're looking at the real herb, you can see the difference. Right. And even from vendor to vendor, like sometimes we'll, we'll buy pao zhang for a year from the vendor and it's like puffy and caramel colored. And then we'll buy paojiang, you know, the next month and it looks more like tan.
[00:38:58] Speaker B: Okay, interesting.
[00:38:59] Speaker A: And so you're like, wait, is this tan paojiang or did you just guys, like, really cook the hell out of the paojiang? Right, right. And so this is the thing where it's a little unfortunate that we live in a time now where few people use bulk herbs and they're expensive and whatever. And also in the US we don't really, we don't have a curriculum in Chinese medicine schools that's pharmacy oriented.
We all go to school to be clinicians. But in China, like in Nanjing, where we were, they have a whole program for pharmacy and that involves like herb identification, this kind of stuff, medicine making powder, how to bind pills together and what kind of things will hold them and how do we do shelf stability. And like, it's very practical. It's not about solving the disease pattern, it's about making sure that the person who is solving the disease pattern has all the stuff.
[00:39:48] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:39:49] Speaker A: Right. And so I've just had to learn this since we graduated. Yeah. We got our hands on some books, some of them in Chinese. That's been a fun process, like translating those, because I don't read Mandarin, but we've learned a lot from those manuals that were written for Chinese herbal pharmacists, which is a distinct degree and training program in China. And it's really too bad we don't have an option here for it. But there's no, there's no need because, like, the vast majority of people are writing granules.
[00:40:17] Speaker B: Right. But when would we use some of these preps? So can you give us some herb examples of when we would use some of these things?
[00:40:25] Speaker A: Yeah. So let's start with chow. So in a chao context, probably the most common thing that I see is with bai, xiao, baiji and dongwei. Those are the three most common that's.
[00:40:37] Speaker B: What we saw people like, I think of watching Greg write formulas back in the day, he would use the chao Chao, those three, actually.
[00:40:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Big version. So why. Right. So Bai Xiao in all the many formulas that it appears in. The thing about baisha is that it is a little bit wet as an herb. As. As is also dongwei. Right. Like dangui in its pure. It's oily. Right? It's oily. And so if you have some people who have a tendency toward damp accumulation and fluid accumulation, but you want to say, apply sour flavor to help harmonize ying and wei or whatever, or you need sour flavor for.
[00:41:18] Speaker A: Muscle cramping. Right. Really common actually in damp people to have muscle cramping problems. You want to give them baishao ganzao to help with that. But they take the high dose bai shao, which you would find in the formula, right. In shaya ganzao tong. And then they just have really loose, slick stool. It's hard for them to manage it. So you can chow that baishao still bring the sour flavor, but make it a little less wet.
[00:41:39] Speaker B: Right.
[00:41:40] Speaker A: And so now middle jiao can handle it.
[00:41:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:42] Speaker A: And that's basically the same theme with dongwei. So you want to actually, like, you want to provide some support for the blood and for the liver channel and this in a. In a tonifying way. But if you give them just straight dongwui, then it's probably a little too wet for some people, end up with loose stool. So you chow it. Yeah. Right. And then with baiju, the difference there actually has to do with bowel motility. So if you have someone who has a weak middle jiao that you're using baiju to support, and what you notice is that they have incomplete stool and it takes them a long time to. To move the stool. You leave the baiju shung, leave it raw because all the volatiles are present, all the aromatics are present, and it'll encourage bowel motility. Right. But if you have someone who has the same presentation but has a tendency toward really frequent bowel movements, very watery, we can chow the baiju and then that will actually slow bowel motility. Right? Right. So it's a little bit less moving. Right. So that's some of the ways like. And again, that's not the only ways that you can use those things. Right. But that's some of the stuff that we've seen people do. And then a lot of other herbs are just chowed, like homaren gets chowed. Right. And that's Mostly because actually, because houmarin is cannabis seeds, and so a lot of it's chowed so that they can sell it on the market because it's been baked now, so you can't grow weed from it. Yeah, right. So stuff like that or like swan tsa ren, you've got chao swanzaoren, Cheng Swan caoren. Some people have really strong opinions about whether or not swan tsao ren even functions correctly if it isn't chowed or not. Sure.
[00:43:08] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a Bensky discussion about that.
[00:43:10] Speaker A: Exactly. So basically, things that are oily and things that are slick are things that can benefit from chowing if you're giving them to people who might be sensitive to things that are oily and slick.
[00:43:21] Speaker B: Makes sense.
[00:43:23] Speaker A: Some other big ones, obviously the honey for the jurgon salad, we talked about that wine frying, dongwei comes up in that as well.
[00:43:29] Speaker B: Because I think for honey frying, actually, what's the formula there that people use for deficiency allergy presentation or like low immunity? It's like Huang Chi Fung Fang Baijiu.
I can't think of the name right now.
[00:43:45] Speaker A: Not Yu Pingfengcing Yuping Feng San.
[00:43:48] Speaker B: I believe all the ingredients are honey fried. I could be wrong about that. But, yeah, I think they are.
[00:43:53] Speaker A: So a lot of times the honey fry, it's moistening. Right. And so like a lot of two Lissa formulas, they're not necessarily like Shanghan formulas, but like the formulas that will deal with cough stuff. You'll honey fry, like pipay.
[00:44:07] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
[00:44:08] Speaker A: Or you'll honey fry Huang Chi. For sure.
You'll honey fry some other herbs that you want to provide a kind of moistening, mucilaginous quality because people have like dry chest, dry cough.
[00:44:22] Speaker B: Right.
[00:44:22] Speaker A: You know, and it's interesting. You can imagine a person who's really into powder taking formulas that are designed for, like, chest obstruction but that are dry oriented and being like, oh, this is a dry chest obstruction. So we want to still use gualo to, like, move it out, but it's a little bit too drying. So let's honey fry it.
[00:44:41] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:44:41] Speaker A: And see if that will soften the edge.
[00:44:43] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:44:43] Speaker A: You know, makes sense. So honey comes up in that context a fair amount. And then stuff, unfortunately, you know, we don't get to see any. Is like their formulas where the honey fry Mahuang.
[00:44:52] Speaker B: Oh, right.
[00:44:53] Speaker A: Super interesting as well, to just sort of like sweeten the mahuang and drive it more internal as opposed to at the surface. Right.
Sadly, you don't get to play with that. Very much to see how it shows out, you know, on the wine side, Dongwe is the thing I see most commonly wine fried.
Because a lot of times what will happen is you want to help the blood tonify it a little bit. So we need the dongwui. But what we actually want to do is help blood stasis, particularly in the lower jiao. But we don't want to go breaking blood, moving blood hard. So we take something that's like blood supportive and blood tonifying and then we wine fry it. And so now you get, you know, it's like you can imagine the different levers of effect, right? Where like Shang Dongwei is pretty blood nourishing, you know what I mean? And it's a little bit moving and it's got a little bit cloying quality, right. Because of its nourishing.
[00:45:43] Speaker B: Makes sense.
[00:45:44] Speaker A: So if you wine fry it, you're going to bring down the cloying but also reduce some of its tonifying.
[00:45:50] Speaker B: Right.
[00:45:51] Speaker A: It's not going to go away, but it'll be less and you're going to increase its movement in the blood.
[00:45:56] Speaker B: Right.
[00:45:56] Speaker A: Because now the wine is helping it be more young, moving around. So you see that a lot. You also see with Da Huang.
[00:46:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I. I see it a lot with Dahuang. I think that's.
That's the most common one that I see.
[00:46:09] Speaker A: Yeah. A lot of people use jujuts similar thing, right. Because like Shang Dawang on its own. Firstly, just in general, if you didn't chow it and you didn't wine fried or whatever, like it's fairly.
[00:46:22] Speaker A: Especially if you short boil it.
[00:46:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:46:24] Speaker A: Bulk, it's fairly moving. Yeah, it's very bitter and it'll down drain right. Pretty strongly. But as soon as you cook it a little bit, like even you just throw it in with the herbs and cook it through the whole time. Like this idea though, you can take Da Huang and be sitting on the toilet for hours or whatever. Just like isn't true.
[00:46:40] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially if it's like in a pill version, like I think of Da Huang Ji Tong Wan, right?
[00:46:46] Speaker A: That's.
[00:46:47] Speaker B: That's.
[00:46:47] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a tiny dose.
[00:46:48] Speaker B: It's a tiny dose and it's. Yeah, definitely for the blood.
[00:46:52] Speaker A: Those formulas that you learn about in school, like as we've talked about before, like it's really Da Huang plus Mangshao. That's like making exactly purge, right. Da Huang is a really useful herb and I think it gets a. I think it gets a bad rap from school where people Are like, be careful from that da huang.
[00:47:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:47:06] Speaker A: But that said, it is still very bitter and downward moving. Right. And so if you take dahuang and you, you ju chao it firstly you're going to apply heat to it. So we're going to reduce some of its down draining quality. We're going to warm it a little bit. It's still going to be, it's not going to be a warm herb, but it's just going to be less cold than it was before.
And then by using the wine, we're asking that Dahuang to work at a slightly higher register in the body, like a literal, like a higher layer. Instead of just being like go in and drain down, it's like actually hold it back a little bit. The wine is sort of like pulling it upward, you know, in a way that like keeps it from being so down draining.
[00:47:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:47:46] Speaker A: And so that's just a way I think to get the effects of dahuang that you need clearing heat, usually in the lower jiao, some accumulative heat quality. Right. But without just completely.
Yeah.
[00:47:58] Speaker B: Emptying someone and maybe more focus on the blood too.
[00:48:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:01] Speaker B: Moving blood or purging blood or whatever. Yeah.
Okay.
And then.
[00:48:09] Speaker B: Vinegar fry, we talked a little bit about before, but where would we do that? Like which herbs would we do that for?
[00:48:14] Speaker A: Yeah. So it's interesting.
Xiangfu is the one I see most commonly just in the catalog, both in granule and in bulk. You see it.
And of course vinegar being sour is therefore going to constrain slash, astringe, the like the movement of a thing.
And xiangfu of course like moves qi in the blood. Right, right. And so it's actually, it's a very moving herb. And if you just smell fresh.
[00:48:42] Speaker A: They call it like nut grass rhizome. Like if you smell fresh xiangfu, nut grass rhizome, whatever that means, it has a really nice smell and you can smell that it moves.
And then if you smell vinegar fried xiangfu, you can now smell that the natural smell of the xiangfu. Right. Is more notable. Like it feels brighter. Right. And so you think, oh, this will be more moving. But actually it constrains how forcefully the xiangfu moves and pushes it internal. Like shangfu's nature is to move the qi and the blood and kind of push things outward and up. It's an exterior circulator. But if you fry it with vinegar, you constrain its action to within the vessels.
[00:49:24] Speaker B: Right.
[00:49:25] Speaker A: And so that's why it's most commonly done.
[00:49:27] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:49:28] Speaker A: And Again, because people do it in like a lot of times you'll just buy shangfu. Like you guys are all ordering shangfu and granules. Almost certainly it's vinegar fried. Yeah. Like it's not going to be labeled vinegar fried. It's just like that's what happens to shangfu. It's not required like it is with stuff like bon sha or foods.
[00:49:41] Speaker B: Right.
[00:49:42] Speaker A: But. But it's just the most common thing that you'll see.
[00:49:44] Speaker B: The other herb that I see in granule is Wu we. That's vinegar fried.
[00:49:48] Speaker A: Yeah. Almost all wuwetza is going to be in the formula we talk about because it's. Now it's funny, right, because wuwetza is already sour.
[00:49:55] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:49:56] Speaker A: Right. And so you're like, why would we vinegar fry the thing that's sour? And it's. Because the thing that people use wieza for is its sour flavor.
[00:50:05] Speaker B: Is its sour flavor.
[00:50:06] Speaker A: Even though it has other flavors, it's a little bit sweet. It's got a weird, like acrid, bitter thing from the seed.
But the thing that people want out of uitsa is the sour. They want the straining function of. Wait.
[00:50:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:50:17] Speaker A: So you vinegar fry it or actually usually it's steamed. Right. So like you set it up and the vinegar passes through it in a steam and then it resaturates the weights and then you dry it again. Right. And she's slightly to dry, so it doesn't get cooked very much. It just gets re dried, basically after it's been steamed in vinegar. And so then that weights is just that much more sour. Right. Just that much more constraining. Right. You know, which is what people want it for, for the cough mods and like all that kind of stuff, you know.
[00:50:45] Speaker A: And then tan herbs again, like Pao Jiang's one. Jerza is another one. It's really interesting. So you're like Jerza tan jersey.
Why would we need to. Why would we need to tan that? But a lot of times jersey gets used because, you know, jersey is cooling and it moves in all of the jowls. It has a kind of like Sanjay quality to. It just sort of moves throughout the whole body.
And so you can use it for like broad spectrum bleeding disorders. Right. And so people have like capillary bleeding. They've got micro bleeding, they've got bleeding in their eyes, they've got bleeding, just bleeding. In general, you can tan the jersey. And so the heat clearing is going to prevent the reckless movement of the blood. And then the fact that it's tanned is going to actually, just in the moment, help to estringe the actual bleeding.
[00:51:29] Speaker B: Right.
[00:51:31] Speaker A: And then Paojiang, you know, we talked about. And then of course, on the salt fry side, Huang Bai. Huang Bai is the one that's.
[00:51:38] Speaker B: That's the main one. Yep. Feng Suidan. And what were the other ones we were looking up? Jiu by Di Huang Wan.
[00:51:44] Speaker A: Di Huang Wan. Yeah, yeah. And actually we're going to talk about Sulfurai in Si Shen Wan. It's not Huang Bai, but it's the same idea because it's like, oh, we need this to go to the kidney. Right. Like, we need it to go into the water channel. We need it to go to the kidney. We want to target its action in a specific place.
In theory, like salt frying should also help things to soften hardness and do all the stuff that salty flavor does. But I usually just see it as a kidney booster. Yeah, that's. That seems to be how it shows up.
[00:52:34] Speaker B: So Sish En wan.
[00:52:36] Speaker A: Yeah, so Sishin 1's a formula that I wanted to grab for us to talk about because it again, it's not a super common formula, but it's too bad because actually I think it's a really great formula, particularly because it deals with a particular kind of presentation. Early morning diarrhea. The classics call it Cox Crow.
[00:52:52] Speaker B: Cox Crow Diarrhea.
[00:52:53] Speaker A: Diarrhea, yeah. So it's like someone wakes up in the early morning and they have like really urgent stool. They gotta go quick.
And a lot of people who have prolonged Yang deficiency cold digestion that will manifest as irritable bowel will have this presentation. Right. And.
But because their bowels are so messed up kind of all day, all the time.
[00:53:15] Speaker A: It doesn't stand out as a component of the pattern. Right. It's like they wake up and then they have four bowel movements that are all liquid and then all through the rest of the day they're having another six or eight liquid bowel movements. So like, it doesn't. It just doesn't feel like anything in particular. But for us it stands out because that piece of the puzzle is a really.
It tells us about a certain level of deficiency that if you can't stop the outflow, in this case the like urgent diarrhea, it's going to be really hard for the patient to assimilate any formula anyway. Like everything they're drinking is just going out like, you got to stop it. So Sichuan 1 is not a formula that you would use like for months and months and months, but it's something you might use in the very beginning to stop the outflow.
And then the patient would actually take an herbal formula on top of it. So be taking Sushin 1 as a one to help stop the urgent watery diarrhea so that the stuff that you give them will actually stay in their system. Right. This is important to remember, Right. That like, when people are having those kinds of digestive problems, like the liquid's just moving out of them, they drink your herbs and then they poop it out.
[00:54:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:54:19] Speaker A: And so, like, how much absorption actually happened from that? Not a lot.
[00:54:23] Speaker B: Right.
[00:54:23] Speaker A: But for this discussion, it's interesting because so. So Shi Shin one's pattern, Right. Is like a Mingman deficiency. Right. So you've got like, deficiency of the warmth and the yang and the fire at Gate of Vitality.
And so there's just cold, deep level cold at the kidney. And that failure of the kidneys, Yang fire prevents the spleen from being able to do what it does. So it's like a. Just a redundant deficiency. It's important to note that nobody starts their bowel problem at this level. Right, right. Like, you get there over time.
[00:54:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:54:55] Speaker A: Ideally, if you caught it before, long before this point, you know, at the earliest stages of, like, frequent stool, you. You'd be using the stuff we usually use, like Li zhong, Wan Fuzi, Lijiang1, maybe Zhen Mutong, something like that. But by this point, yeah, it's gone pretty deep. Right, Right.
So the interesting thing about the formula is that it's five herbs, it's made into a pill. Notably, it's not a honey pill. Many of the ones are powdered herbs that are mixed with honey to form the pill. This is a water pill, which means that it's made with moisture, with water, which also then means you have to dry it. Right.
[00:55:32] Speaker B: Because it would mold.
[00:55:33] Speaker A: Mold. Right. Because now there's water involved.
So you've got Bugger Rodo Koju, those are the main active ingredients. And then Xiangjiang and Dazao. Right, Right. What's interesting about it though, is like, okay, so Bugger is the primary ingredient. It's. It's the largest proportion of the formula. And Bugger on its own is a acrid, bitter, warm herb that has a particular affinity for the kidney. Right. It's yang supportive.
And so the thing about it that's interesting is that the way that a lot of the texts will describe it, they'll say that it stringes the kidney.
[00:56:09] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:56:09] Speaker A: Just kind of a funny phrase, really.
[00:56:11] Speaker B: It is.
[00:56:11] Speaker A: Like. What do you mean by that? Like A stringes the kidney.
[00:56:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:56:14] Speaker A: Especially because the form the herb is acrid and bitter.
[00:56:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:56:18] Speaker A: How does it astringe the kidney? I don't know. These are the kinds of translations that bug me because I just don't like it's not useful. Like, what do you. What do you mean by that? Sure. Practically what I've observed is that it's a warm herb that is very aromatic. Bukuchar has a very aromatic quality, which absolutely supports the idea that it's acrid.
But in function, it has an affinity for the part of the body where the kidneys live.
And so it takes its warmth and it drops it into that spot.
Why use something like that in this formula than say, something else that's super warm and has an affinity for the lower jiao, say fudza. Right. It's because you actually do need some of the acrid quality. Right.
This particular herb, though, is powdered to be salt fried.
So again, kind of like the huang bai thing where we're like, oh, we're trying to drive this stuff to the kidney. We take an herb that already has an affinity for the kidney, but then we further boost its kidney affinity, make sure this herb knows where to go by salt frying it. So now it's warmth and it's slightly dispersive quality, not like in a scattering way, but in just a way that encourages movement. Right. So it's not just warm, but it's also a little bit moving.
[00:57:27] Speaker B: Right.
[00:57:27] Speaker A: We drive that down to the kidney. And that's because, like, that's what we want Mingman fire to be. Right. It needs to be warm, but it also needs to be active.
[00:57:35] Speaker B: Right.
[00:57:35] Speaker A: We want it to be able to move into the various systems of the body and support them. Bukuji does that.
This formula, by the way, is like a Ming dynasty formula. So it's relatively new. Right. You know, comparatively.
Then you've got rotoko. Rotoco is nutmeg.
Right. So it's a funny thing because we don't really use rotoko a lot in this formula. You make it with like whole nutmegs, like the big old nutmegs. Right. And nutmeg, if you've ever used that in food, is like incredibly potent. Like, you just put like a little quarter teaspoon in a pie and like you can taste it.
[00:58:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:58:07] Speaker A: You know, and here this formula is four parts bugger, two parts rotoka. Like, it's. It's a fairly substantial portion of the total formula.
And.
And so you're like, wow, that seems like a really Strong herb to put into the mix. But here it's, it's baked. But not just chowed baked, it's actually you make a paste out of flour and then you wrap the nuts, the nutmeg, nuts in the flour and bake it. And then when that happens, the nutmeg gets hot and all the oils from the nutmeg push out from the surface and they go into the flour and then you break the flour off. Right. It's like a shell.
And then you use that Rotoco.
[00:58:47] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:58:48] Speaker A: Without that, the roto co itself is way too moving, like it's dispersive. And you can actually give someone diarrhea by using Rotoco in a non baked capacity because it's too harsh.
[00:59:00] Speaker B: Right.
[00:59:00] Speaker A: That's why we use such a tiny amount of it in food because it's incredibly strong and here we need a lot of it. So again, it's a similar thing with bukujir, Right. That you've got an acrid warm substance that we're going to use to bind, to hold. In order for it to actually be able to do that, we have to pull out some of its acridity. Right. We've got to like tone it back a little bit. And so we use the baking process to do that.
The other two ingredients are we.
And Wu Ju and Wu Wei CI is the processing we were just talking about. Right. Steamed in vinegar. Why? Because we need it to bind. Sure. So remember, this formula is trying to warm the mingmen and bind the intestines. Because the water's leaking out, it's not transforming the water, it's not venting the water, it's just holding. Right. Hold here and then the other systems will, will pick up. It is, it's a little dramatic to say it's a crisis formula, but kind of like it's a formula we use when we hit a point. It's a, it's a thing that will hold a pattern, it'll hold a pathology so that you can use other things to deal with it. Yeah, it's not going to deal with it on its own. Right. I mean someone could just keep taking Sichuan and it will absolutely stop their daybreak diarrhea, but it will not. Correct.
[01:00:09] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good, it's a good thing to know about it actually. And when I've seen, when I've seen cases of doctors use this before, they usually will use it and then add something to it or modify it to get, to put something else into it. Like Dr. Chinbowe used to like to use this formula, I think. And there's a couple case studies you can read of his.
[01:00:32] Speaker A: It's a good formula. Yeah, I like it a lot. For people who come to us at the very like the. They've been in the IBS pattern for a really long time and we need to stop the. Stop the leakage.
[01:00:42] Speaker B: It makes sense too. And I think maybe from a shanghanlen perspective, you're more in Juiyin territory for diarrhea than Shaoyin, which would be more like Fuci Ganjiang. Like you're using pungent, warm and sweet to stop primarily the diarrhea. Whereas here you're using not only pungent and warm, but you're using source. Right. And you're using.
You're using wujuyu, which is in a Juan formula, in a Shang Han. Right. Wuju Yu tong. So you're definitely more in that territory.
[01:01:15] Speaker A: Well, it makes a lot of sense. Wuju is so interesting in this formula too, because it's the smallest proportion. Right. So you've got four parts bukuji, two parts rotoko, two parts buitsa, one part wujiu. Yeah. It's the smallest by percentage. And of course wuji is really potent, so of course it's small. Right. But it's also.
So the weights has been vinegar steamed increase its. Its vinegar containing quality. And the Wu ju actually has been boiled in Gansao water. Interesting. Create a. Basically create Gansao tea. Right. And then you strain out the Gansao and then you boil the weight, the Wu ju in the gansaw.
[01:01:50] Speaker B: So it's less. It's. That would make it less dispersive too. A little bit more moderate.
[01:01:54] Speaker A: Exactly. And the slight quote unquote toxicity component of Wu ju, which contributes to its intensity, is moderated also by the gansao.
[01:02:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:02:04] Speaker A: Right. So it's a little less hot, it's a little less toxic. Right. But it's still accurate. It's still warm. And specifically it disperses middle Jiao cold. Right. Which is really different. Right. Than what we think about when we're in Shaoyun problems where we're really trying to warm. Right.
[01:02:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:02:21] Speaker A: Fuchsia and ganjiang, we're trying to rewarm poor Shao Yin.
[01:02:25] Speaker B: Right.
[01:02:25] Speaker A: But at this point it's gotten so advanced that warming alone will not be enough. Right. You got to kick some of it out.
[01:02:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:02:32] Speaker A: And so we choose wuju, you specifically, because it's incredibly warm. It loves the Juan layer, but it's also acrid.
[01:02:39] Speaker B: Right.
[01:02:40] Speaker A: And it's got a strong Aroma.
[01:02:42] Speaker B: Right.
[01:02:42] Speaker A: And so the combination of wu ju and bugu jer, both with very strong aromas. Right. When you smell sichin one when you're making it or even in the final product, you can smell that this is going to disperse accumulative cold.
[01:02:55] Speaker B: Right, Right. It's almost like a pared down wu mei wan in a way.
[01:03:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a more targeted version, I think, specifically for the watery diarrhea that we see with coxcore diarrhea. So the sour weitza and the, the cooked roto ko are coming in to bind up the intestines. Right. Say water, hold. Meanwhile, wujiu and bugaji are warming, but with a way to also disperse the middle jiao cold. Right. And then of course, we're going to draw all of that forceful warmth and direct it toward the kidney because we salt fried it. Because the core problem at this level. Right. Is that mingmen has collapsed. Right, Right. It's like basically an ember. And until we can get that sucker rebooted, the rest of it is not going to work very well. Right.
[01:03:45] Speaker B: And so it's really kidney yang.
[01:03:48] Speaker B: And salty is from one of the flavor models in the Nijing. Salty is the flavor that actually builds fire. Right. So first you might think, oh, it's confusing because we're trying to like, salty actually reduces water.
[01:04:02] Speaker A: Right? Right.
[01:04:03] Speaker B: But we're actually trying to build fire within water.
Right. So that, so then you take this, this affinity to herb and then you bring it toward the lower burner. So you're in the kidney domain, you're in the water element, but you're actually trying to encourage fire down there, right?
[01:04:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. This is, this is the inherent complexity of our model. Right. It's like we're always trying to encourage certain types of elements within other elements, but particularly we're often trying to encourage warmth and fire within the other elements because they all are dependent on it.
[01:04:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:04:34] Speaker A: And it's particularly confusing to try and engender fire within water because you're like, what?
But of course, we're talking in like the movements of things. Right. In literal fire and water. But that's what's happening. That's a really good observation. Right. This idea that, you know, that salty flavor is helping to engender the fire inside of the water space because it's a kidney yang problem. Yeah, you know.
[01:04:58] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[01:04:59] Speaker A: So, and then of course, this whole thing is bound up with xiangzheng and daza. So you actually cook the dazao in xianjiang water. So Basically cook Xianzhong into water. You can blend it into the water or you can strain it out, and then you cook the dots out in that water until it's soft and you turn that into a paste and then you paste all this stuff together into pills and then you dry them.
[01:05:20] Speaker B: Fascinating. That's such an alchemically complex herb formula to make.
[01:05:27] Speaker A: Yeah, it's such a. I mean, it's a huge amount of work. It took us a long while to figure this out. We learned all the steps from a Chinese pharmacy book.
[01:05:35] Speaker A: But it's a really good insight into, you know, even if you were to use this formula and patent and it was being made by like a good manufacturer, they're doing all of this.
[01:05:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:05:44] Speaker A: So it's like a huge amount of sort of behind the scenes work. Like you're thinking like, oh, Sichen Wan, it's got Bugoji Rotoko.
But just like the analogy at the beginning of the conversation, like if you just took all those things and you ground them up into powder and you mixed them with honey and you gave it to someone, it won't do what this formula does.
[01:06:01] Speaker B: Right.
[01:06:02] Speaker A: Because this formula has been alchemically designed to modify each of the constituent parts to elicit a solid result. And it's also an incredibly potent formula that's essentially made out of six herbs. Right. Four of which are the real big players. I mean, this stuff, these kinds of pills actually, when well made and given to the right patient with the right pattern, it feels like magic to those people.
[01:06:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:06:25] Speaker A: Like literally overnight, they'll take, you know, six pills before bed, and the next morning, for the first time in a year, they won't get up at 5 in the morning and have to be on the toilet having liquid diarrhea three times.
[01:06:38] Speaker B: Yeah. And a lot of these patients have had diarrhea constantly for years, sometimes decades, literally.
[01:06:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's a really great example of how this powder gets applied in a way that's really useful.
[01:06:52] Speaker A: The problem ultimately though, which is I guess really the kind of crux of our conversation about this is it's super interesting, it's intellectually useful. It helps flex your brain around flavor and nature and impact and stuff. Right. But most of the people we know are writing granule formulas.
[01:07:06] Speaker B: Sure. But there's stylistic tendencies with Powger as well. Right. Like, you see people like Dr. Huang Huang, for example, who's not that big a fan of powder. Like, I've. I haven't studied personally with Dr. Huang Huang, but I've talked to Some of his students, and they've asked him questions about this, like, what do you do? Do you chow the. Do you chow the baishao in a formula to make it more. And he's kind of like, nah. Like, you can't really. You can't really change the function of an herb by adding or subtracting that much to it. That herbs.
General nature is going to override any particular thing you do to it. But then you also have people that are like sort of the mangha type people like dingan ren or Chinbo Wei, or even that if people are studies Shenham or pulse diagnosis. Dr. Shen comes from this kind of thinking where you take.
[01:08:08] Speaker B: Small amounts of herbs that are very precisely paired and then you use powder in creative ways to create effects with.
[01:08:19] Speaker B: Seemingly minute doses of herbs that can shift the case.
[01:08:23] Speaker A: Right.
[01:08:24] Speaker B: Which is a really fascinating thing to look at. And if anybody's interested in that style of working.
[01:08:31] Speaker B: There is a book called Chinbo Wei's 56 methods. I think translated by.
Gosh, I'm gonna forget the guy's name. He's got a great website, ChineseMedicineDoc.com he's in Boulder. I'll think of his name in a minute. But very good book if you're interested in how that kind of style of practice works.
[01:08:53] Speaker A: Right.
[01:08:54] Speaker B: But as you said, a lot of people are just using granules.
[01:08:58] Speaker A: Right.
[01:08:58] Speaker B: So what kind of powder is done, like, is available for people if they want to roll into this with granules?
[01:09:06] Speaker A: It's. It's limited, unfortunately. And you know, the thing is, is, like, sometimes I feel bad we debated whether we were even going to talk about this because on the one hand, it's like, oh, here's a tease about an idea that's really, really cool.
[01:09:17] Speaker B: Sure.
[01:09:18] Speaker A: But you don't get to use it. Yeah, right. Because like, you don't write bulk herbs. So you could write bulk formulas. This is.
[01:09:24] Speaker B: And you could. The. The other thing we're talk. We've been talking about recently on the podcast is doing the San method. Right. With bulk herbs, which would allow people to do more of these preparations if they did that method.
[01:09:36] Speaker A: Absolute. Our.
Our medicine area is actually set up to do all of these methods in house, except for ton. Except for charring stuff. So even though you go into the catalog and like you want to say wine fry.
I don't know, Jerza. And you don't see wine fried Jersey in the catalog, you can just choose Jersey. Choose powder as an option when you're building the formula. Tell us you want it to wine, fry it and we'll do that. Right, Right. So like we're set up to actually do that and a lot of people aren't.
So if you are drawn to this and you want to play around with it or you're recalling stuff from school, then by all means write a bulk formula or just go ahead and try, try San method like we've talked about before.
But again, and I also want to say that it's cool, but like, don't, don't feel like you're harming your patients or like committing malpractice or something if you're not powdering, you know, because again, Huanghuang, like, easily one of the most famous contemporary doctors of Chinese medicine that's made its his way to the West. Right. Doesn't really care about Poucher.
[01:10:33] Speaker B: Yeah, right. Oh, by the way, the guy's name is Jason Blaylock. That's the guy. That's the translator. I was trying to think 56 methods. Yeah.
[01:10:41] Speaker A: Jason Blaylock, Chinese medicine doc dot com.
[01:10:43] Speaker B: Yep.
[01:10:45] Speaker A: Anyway, like, there are very successful doctors who don't do anything at all with power.
[01:10:51] Speaker A: So like, so many things in our medicine, I'm not sure that we can say like, you have to or you don't have to, though some people will tell you that because they have strong opinions.
I do think in my own clinical experience, I have observed some notable change, particularly in the granules that we'll talk about. So baiju and baishao, either of those you can get both in Xiang version or chow version. Right. And the variants that I talked about at the top of the episode about sort of reducing some of the wetness, making them a little bit less cloying in the case of Bai Xiao is very relevant if you're trying to give baisha to people who tend toward loose stool dampness. And I also find it's similarly effective with baiju, where chow baiju seems to be really, really useful for people with like, wet, cold digestion that needs support and regular shung by you being ones where I've got incomplete bowel movements that need a little bit more encouragement. But still cold. Right, right.
Love that distinction. And those are easy to find in virtually any well stocked granule pharmacy you can buy just straight from the manufacturers. Baijiu Chow Baijiu Bai Xiao Cha by Cha Dong Wei. Some people will carry chow dongwei, but you can almost always find jiu chow dongwei. So the wine fried dongwei. And that distinction also seems to be important to people who do a fair amount of Women's health stuff. And they want to be able to like tonify the blood and support the liver, but they've got blood stasis that needs movement. Right. So you'll see the jiu chao choice on the dongwui, especially if you use.
[01:12:25] Speaker B: Like a dongwei xiaoya san type of formula or something that in the lines describes taking with wine. Sometimes it's nice to just use the jiu chao version of one of the herbs to get a little bit of that action in the granule.
[01:12:40] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. Because the likelihood that your patient is going to take a shot of baijal with formulas, pretty low.
[01:12:46] Speaker B: I have, I have had people, though, take a little bit of red wine, and I do think it works better.
[01:12:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:12:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:12:53] Speaker A: I mean, it would.
[01:12:54] Speaker B: Yep.
[01:12:54] Speaker A: Like, that's the thing. Right? I mean, I. I think it's interesting when. When people reject the idea that powder matters. I think the question is not whether it matters. I think it's whether. Like to what degree?
[01:13:06] Speaker B: Yeah, any. I mean, even in the shanghan lun, you have. You have chao and. And jiu chao, and you. You have this done already in methods and stuff. I think jiang zhongjing's preference probably is to change the style of administration.
Right. Is a general tendency to give something as a wan versus a san versus a tong.
[01:13:26] Speaker A: Right.
[01:13:26] Speaker B: Which is a different way of emphasizing a formula. But there are herbs in there that are, you know, jurgon sao. And of course there's a, you know, there are these things already there. So the.
[01:13:38] Speaker A: The other big choice I see a lot of people trying to figure out right now is between FA bansha and jiang bansha.
[01:13:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:13:47] Speaker A: Okay, so let's just back up for a second. Bancha is a toxic tuber, the pinelliarrhizome, that you cannot, I mean, again, unless you were working for it, that you can't buy raw.
[01:13:58] Speaker B: Right.
[01:13:58] Speaker A: Because it's unusable raw. Like it's too toxic. Bancha contains a chemical, an oxalate, that creates these little microscopic crystals that, if you were to eat the raw one, is incredibly irritant to your throat.
It's like a. It's a mechanical irritation. Like, it's these little microscopic crystalline structures that are irritant to your throat.
So as long as people have been using bansha, it's been processed, and it's been processed in an alkaline solution that's made from lime, not the fruit, but the mineral calcium hydroxide. And so you basically take your banchaw and you boil it or soak it. Usually it's soaked in an alkaline solution of calcium hydroxide. And that high ph, it's like 11, 5 or 12. Sure. That high ph transforms the oxalates. Like it breaks them down. Right.
So all bonsha goes through this process because otherwise you wouldn't be able to use it. Right. It would be like acrid to a level of like harmful. You know, you'd feel it like, oh, it's so sharp.
But then the FA bancha has alum added to it, which is potash or potash. Like it's a potassium mineral, salt. And the interaction between those two things transforms the the bansha. And it looks like is really chalky. It's like chalky and opaque. Right. And so then that soaking water is removed, it's rinsed, and then it's usually soaked in Gonzale water. And then that's rinsed and then it's dried. You get fabanja. Right. So now it's basically an unspecified untargeted version of bacha, usable, no longer, like caustic.
You can boil it into decoction, you can eat it and you'll be okay. Sure. Because the oxalates are not water soluble and they're not damaged by water. So what? Excuse me, they are water soluble, but they're not damaged by water. So if you were to boil and drink tea made from raw bon chai, you would drink all these little crystals and it would hurt. Right.
But the ph changes it. The jiang ban sha is the same initial process, still alkaline soak, but instead of alum, we wash off the alkaline soak and then we put it in a hyper concentrated ginger water.
[01:16:14] Speaker B: Right.
[01:16:14] Speaker A: And then that ginger, it's usually actually cooked in the ginger. And then sometimes also with gansao. So Gansao ginger, but a lot of ginger.
And when that happens, you introduce like sugars and pectins and oils and all kinds of things that come from the ginger. Right. That then permeate this now kind of porous bansha. From the alkaline solution in the phi, it gets permeated by the alum, which is what makes it chalky. And then the jiang, it gets permeated by the. By the ginger. And so it makes it kind of like semi transparent.
That's a specific modification to bansha to make it warmer, more middle jiao oriented, and to increase its damp transformation capacity. Right, right. It's a transform phlegm. Sure. Right. Because ginger does that. So you like put it together.
So the question of like, well, which one of those am I Going to choose. Right.
I mean, honestly, you could use either one of them interchangeably. I don't.
[01:17:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I've used both. I've. I've used one. If we're out of one, I've used the other. I've never found any dramatic difference between them.
[01:17:14] Speaker A: No. But there are people who will tell you that. Like if you're, if you're on transforming phlegm version of bansha.
[01:17:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:17:19] Speaker A: You should use a jiang. Sure. And if you're focused on the like, descending function, like pushing the qi back down where it needs to go, you don't need the phlegm transformation then just use the fa. So sort of like the FA is the standard and the jiang is the, like, middle jiao, more phlegm oriented. But the FA also does flim fine.
[01:17:38] Speaker B: Sure.
[01:17:38] Speaker A: But you and I have both found that it doesn't seem to make that much of a difference. Right.
[01:17:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I haven't seen much of a difference.
[01:17:44] Speaker A: So that's maybe a counterpoint example. Right. Those other three Baiju, Baisha, Dongwui. I do actually note some difference.
[01:17:50] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I think a lot of. A lot of powder too. I think people who use the same formulas more.
So let's say, you know, you've got five to 15 really good formulas in your mental bank account.
[01:18:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Right.
[01:18:09] Speaker B: If you just want to use those formulas, you can learn how to use them, you can learn how to modify them.
And one way to modify them is dose, but another way to do it is with powder. And you can make the same formula go much further if you learned how to powder it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
[01:18:27] Speaker A: Well, because it gives you more dimension. It does, you know, it does. And it's also important to remember that historically powder was a way to make use of a smaller number of herbs.
[01:18:36] Speaker B: Right?
[01:18:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Right. Because now we have this massive catalogs, we've got international shipping. You can get your hands on so many things.
Most herbalists through most of time did not have access to 350 medicinals.
[01:18:47] Speaker B: Right.
[01:18:48] Speaker A: They just didn't. So they had to figure out ways to take things that were local and modify them. So there's a lot of potency in it. I think there's a lot of tradition in it. There's a lot of intellectual interest in it.
[01:19:00] Speaker A: Whether or not you can exactly quantify how much of a difference it makes, I think is going to come down to your own preference and your own interest.
But what I will say is that if the idea of this kind of alchemy side of, of prescription appeals to you, then in my experience, that will make your medicine more potent.
[01:19:19] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[01:19:19] Speaker A: Because you are more invested in it now. Right, Right. Like you are putting your own pattern and your own will into the design of these formulas in a way that's really intentional. Right. And I think that that creates for more potent medicine. Right. So that's the factor that would make a difference.
[01:19:34] Speaker B: Yeah. And just. Just to counterbalance what I said before, with Dr. Huang, there are other doctors who swear by powder being an effective method. And like, for example, if you don't salt fry the Huang by in feng shui Dan, it's not going to work. Like, it doesn't. It's worth. It's not even worth giving. You know, people will say stuff like that.
[01:19:55] Speaker A: This is the extreme position on the other side.
[01:19:57] Speaker B: Very extreme position on the other side.
[01:19:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
So, okay, well, we hope you guys got some information here about Powger and hopefully it was useful to you guys. So as always, of course, if you have questions, you can reach
[email protected] we also love to hear some suggestions for shows and we'll put some of this information actually into a little. Into a little document that you can find in the show notes for the show. So you can just sort of see the different methods and stuff that we were talking about here.
Of course, we would love too, to have some rating and review. Wherever you guys listen to podcasts, it always helps other people find the show. And until next time, I'm Travis Kern.
[01:20:38] Speaker B: I'm Travis Cunningham.
[01:20:39] Speaker A: Talk to you later. See you later.
