Chinese Patent Medicines: A Beginner's Guide

Great alternative health resource. Easy to understand. Most products carried at health food store or can be ordered.

I worked at a very busy herb shop in the Bay Area for over 15 years and this book was a god send.So many people are interested in using Chinese medicines and have no idea where to start. This book is a golden doorway. It is also excellent for knowledgeable people and practioners as it is designed and laid out in a very user friendly way. I think it is the BEST book available for learning the whole story of which medicines to use and why.

This book is something of a historical document. It was researched over an almost 20 year period. I went to China for the first time in 1983 to visit an acpuncturist friend working in a hospital in Guangzhou. From that time, I returned to China many times, and I have seen the transformation of China from rice fields and fishing villages to the industrial powerhouse it is today. In my book, I was looking at and evaluating the quality of Chinese manufacturing long before it became an issue in the US. We see today that many products made in China are of substandard quality and manufactured with questionable integrity. I decided almost 20 years ago to seek out and find the best products in my area of expertise, Chinese Medicine. I found high quality factories and good manufacturing practices, but I also found low quality products and witnessed poor manufacturing standards. My book was an attempt to find good quality products for my patients and I succeeded. Today, we read about serious problems in pet food, baby's toys, and other products. This could have and should have been researched and dealt with more than 20 years ago. Lax standards among American companies which import these products has allowed this damage to occur. It could easily have been prevented. In my travels to China, I saw high-quality and low-quality products. It wasn't difficult for me to make this distinction. Because I was concerned, this book came into existence. In some places, I was the first white person to visit since the revolution in 1948. Our relationship in the US with China is very important and good Chinese companies are more than willing to be inspected and to share their knowledge. Anybody who knows anything about Chinese manufacturing knows that companies must be inspected, certified and recognized for their high quality. This is essential and this is the reason that I wrote my book. I hope that others will find value in it.

Mr. Taylor starts his book with a balanced and reasonable assessment of Chinese medicine versus Western medicine. Western medicine has been extensively tested in laboratories using rats and other animals, and has been through human trials. Chinese herbal cures, on the other hand, have been described in literature for almost 3 millennia and certainly have been used by hundreds of times more human subjects than the products of our laboratories. A dedicated Darwinist such as myself is inclined to believe that successful remedies will persevere and grow more popular and those that don't work will die out. Western medicine is characterized by families of drugs: serotonin uptake inhibitors, antibiotics, anti-acids, and the like. Mr. Taylor points out that herbal remedies more often go to the genesis of the problem within one's body chemistry rather than merely treating the symptoms. The taxonomy appears to be less rigorous because the drugs are more complex in their action. They may be grouped by ingredients or by the illnesses that they treat. Mr. Taylor is acutely aware of the nature of the modern marketplace. Piracy is rampant in all spheres of Chinese business involving intellectual property. It is no different with patent medicines. If it is cheaper to create a knockoff that looks like the real thing, somebody will certainly do it. Mr. Taylor has good advice regarding which drugs are frequently counterfeited and the measures one should take to be sure one is getting the real thing. The scope of Chinese medicine is impressive. Mr. Taylor describes around 200 formulations. That appears to stack up fairly well against the lists of Western ethical drugs that one finds at drugstore.com. It is interesting to note that acupuncture, another of Mr. Taylor's specialties, has moved from fringe to mainstream within the past couple of decades. We may not fully understand how it works, but it is certainly effective in many instances. The same is true of Chinese medicines.

This book is a great introductory guide to Chinese Patent Medicines. It covers more than 200 patent formulas and provides detailed information on individual ingredients and actions, common usage and dosage information. The back of the book also lists patent formulas by western disease. For example: you're treating someone with common cold. The book lists 10 patent formulas for common cold with descriptions/indications for each formula such as: Ge Gen Wan for wind-cold type common cold with stiff neck - or Yin Qiao for wind-heat type with sore throat and fever or the standard Gan Mao Ling.This book is a great reference for beginners or for practitioners that just need to jog their memory. It is also a necessity if you prescribe Plum Flower teapills. For example if you want to prescribe Jin Gu Die Sheng Wan for traumatic injury - the Plum Flower name would be The Great Mender.I highly recommend this book for TCM practitioners and students.