Chinese herbology is also the medicine based on traditional Chinese medicine theory. It includes Chinese crude medicine, prepared drug in slices of Chinese materia medica, traditional Chinese patent medicines and simple preparations, etc.
Chinese herbs have been used for centuries. The first herbalist in Chinese tradition is Shennong, a mythical personage, who is said to have tasted hundreds of herbs and imparted his knowledge of medicinal and poisonous plants to farmers. The first Chinese manual on pharmacology, the Shennong’s Classic of Materia Medica , lists some 365 medicines of which 252 of them are herbs, and dates back somewhere in the 1st century AD Han Dynasty.
Succeeding generations augmented this work, as in Treatise on the Nature of Medicinal Herbs , a 7th century Tang Dynasty Chinese treatise on herbal medicine. The most important of these was the Compendium of Materia Medica compiled during the Ming Dynasty by Li Shizhen, which is still used today for consultation and reference.
Chinese physicians used several different methods to classify traditional Chinese herbs:
The Four Natures
The Four Natures pertain to the degree of Yin and Yang, namely cold (extreme Yin), cool, warm and hot (extreme Yang). The patient’s internal balance of Yin and Yang is taken into account when the herbs are selected. For example, medicinal herbs of “hot” (Yang) nature are used when the person is suffering from internal cold that requires to be purged, or when the patient has a general cold constituency. Sometimes an ingredient is added to offset the extreme effect of one herb.
The Five Tastes
The Five Tastes are pungent, sweet, sour, bitter and salty, and each taste has a different set of functions and characteristics. For example, pungent herbs are used to generate sweat and to direct and vitalize Qi and the blood. Sweet-tasting herbs often tonify or harmonize bodily systems. Some sweet-tasting herbs also exhibit a bland taste, which helps drain dampness through diuresis. Sour taste most often is astringent or consolidates, while bitter taste dispels heat, purges the bowels and gets rid of dampness by drying them out. Salty taste softens hard masses as well as purges and opens the bowels.
The Meridians
The meridians refer to which organs the herb acts upon. For example, menthol is pungent, cool and is linked with the lungs and the liver. Since the lungs is the organ which protects the body from invasion from cold and influenza, menthol can help purge coldness in the lungs and invading heat toxins caused by hot “wind”.
