Quote:
Originally Posted by monitor1
just an FYI not playing my practitioner is better than your practitioner. I received my 20 day supply of herbs (in liquid form) consisting of 30 or so herbs but NOT guo teng. I am no expert on this stuff, but what i understand is what gets compounded is highly individual based on practitioners observation.
So I pose this in a question manner to those who are more attune to TCM than I. Wouldnt it be very WESTERN like to cherry pick individual ingredients off the shelf and give-em-a-try? Doesn't that defeat the fundamentals of TCM??
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Chinese medicine can be either in an individualized form or "generalized" "ready to use" form. The individualized form (often in liquid) is more personally tailored per your symptoms, tongue and pulse by a practitioner, then does "plus and minus" based on original recipe(s) in which hundreds of TCMs are inherited to today. The "generalized" (ready to use) form is the one with minimum "plus and minus" and generalized to fit the commonalities, usually in bolus, tablet, granules, IV and so on.
It is true that the individualized form by a practitioner could be more effective, however, it can be only so when the medicine fits your problem(s) and there is a good practitioner available to you. So it is limited, obviously. For these reasons and others, the "generalized" form with minimum "plus and minus" has been becoming very common. Further in this direction, the extract of a single herb is also showing great promise, as it is just like a pharmacological compound, more scientifically based so to speak, and is very popular now. Ginkgo Biloba, Curcumin and a lot more are examples...