Herbal Cuisine 
Herbal Cuisine
One review of TCM herb work that I read opined that all of the materials used within TCM act as "poisons" within the body when they are administered. By this the author wasn't using the term in the usual context (ie poisons are hazardous / dangerous) but meaning that all herbs act within the body to modify the internal or external functions of the body. Extending his analogy, I would suggest that herbs (which encompass everything which we eat / drink / breath / ingest) when carefully selected "poison" the body in such a way to specifically target those parts which are not in balance (and by this action ultimately brings us back to balance). This means that our diet will have a major effect on our degree of balance (and our associated degree of "poisoning") that we have day-to-day. Every food stuff will affect our inner balance and so by careful matching of foods against symptoms of disease we can improve our balance. This use of food as medicine is the area of TCM termed herbal cuisine and is a good place to start when attempting to treat patients. This is for a number of reasons. Firstly, food tastes better than most TCM herbs ! This better taste is a great incentive for a patient to finish a course of treatment. Secondly, herbal cuisine generally has slightly weaker effects than many other of the herbs used in TCM. Still works very well but hits the body in a "softer" way. A consequence of this is that herbal cuisine is much less likely to cause significant (bad) side effects such as vomiting or diarrhoea if you get the diagnosis totally wrong. It is still possible to cause these effects but they are much less pronounced. These kind of side effects usually only occur if you get the diagnosis totally wrong and "go the wrong way" with the rebalancing (eg making a person more damp when they already have this symptom). Obviously, sometimes vomiting etc is the desired result but not often. When I started TCM studies, I once used a headache cure based on onion stalks to clear internal heat (my main, persistent imbalance). Recipe was to boil up six stalks in a cup of water then drink the extract. Only thing that the recipe forgot to mention was that this was likely to make me throw up violently. Good thing though was that my headache was totally gone after the contents of my stomach hit the toilet bowl ! As to whether this was the desired response or I got the diagnosis wrong I'm not sure but these types of effects are always a possibility. Always good to try diagnosis etc out on yourself first when you are training and then use what you learn from your own symptoms to treat others.
The third thing which makes herbal cuisine attractive is that it is generally more easily obtainable than the more esoteric herbs. This means that we can all do this type of medicine once we get a bit of an idea about diagnosis, symptoms and treatment. So, everyone can have a go if you think it will help friends / family and hopefully some of these medicine pages will help guide you along this path.
How Do You Administer This Treatment ?
When I first talk to people about herbal cuisine they think it means totally changing their diet in preference to the cuisine items. This normally isn't the case and it's just a matter of adding a bit of the herb to your usual food. A typical dose of herbs (both herbal cuisine and others) is normally in the range 10 -15g (but can extend to 5 - 30g), which is a very small amount of most things. Obviously, there are times when you should consider changing your diet (eg if you are habitually internally hot / dry then maybe it's time to cut out the vindaloo curries !) but often its better to use the herbal cuisine in the same way that you might take a Western headache pill. It's something you add to your stomach contents to get a desired result (in our case balance) in the whole system rather than something you live on. However, if you do have persistent problems, look at everything within your life (including diet) to determine the source of the imbalance and try to target them (see the pages on diagnosis for more details of this) .
Also, don't think that now you have a "self help" medical kit that this means that you can punish your body more than you did before you had it. Although herbal cuisine will get you back to balance when your lifestyle moves you away from it, that's not a good enough excuse to then keep a lifestyle (or change to a new one) which regularly does you damage ! For example, partying all night is OK once in a while and, on those "difficult" mornings after, ginseng will help you get awake enough to ensure you do not not accidentally put your hand in the toaster. Your yin / yang balance will be out (as you stopped it transforming by not having any sleep) and your overall energy will be down (as you have been burning it away whilst dancing the night away) but neither of these problems are insurmountable and are quite easily rectified. Your body knows where its balance point is and will set out to get there as best it can. You can just help it along by taking some herbs and it will probably take a couple of hours. However, if you choose to upset your yin / yang balance and reduce your energy every night, eventually no amount of medicine will help you back to balance. In an attempt to help, your body might possibly permanently moving your internal balance to a different position than that you matured to. This new balance point is then the point from which you will have to live the rest of your life (unless you do something radical to push it back to where you started and even then you might not be able to get there).This is not always disastrous but it does weaken you overall and limits your potential. If you have a choice about whether this balance moves, make it consciously (or don't make it). If you don't have a choice (eg during bereavement of a loved one) you eventually have to accept your new balance point and live from this position (just as an aside, this is partly why you are never quite the same person after someone you love dies. Your balance point included them because love is a bit like your partner having part of your qi with them all the time (and you have part of theirs if they love you back). Your partner dying has moved the balance point between the two of you (and hence has moved your own internal balance). When you are in love and together with, or just thinking of, your loved one, your qi is made whole just by the action of meeting / thinking of them. The part that lives with them is "back home" and this is one reason why it feels so good. There is no barrier between you as your respective energies merge and deepen over time as your balance settles between the two of you. It's great and one of the joys of life to have someone to share your life with and to have someone who wishes to share their life with you. Sadly, the down side of this is that when they die, part of your qi goes with them and so you never feel quite so complete again. Your balance has moved and you have to judge your life from your new perspective).
In some instances (especially when the body's rebalancing is "self inflicted") the balance point it chooses might not be a good position from an external perspective. However, your body is doing the best it can to balance everything out. For example, if you smoke 60 cigarettes a day, your body may eventually rebalance the increased internal heat in the lungs by adding fluid to try to cool it down (eventually leading to other complications). Continue to force the body to do this internal rebalancing and the body gets used to the new position and eventually settles at this new balance position and makes it a permanent change. Once this occurs, no amount of "gentle" medicine will move it away from this new balance point;you have to have a major change to do the rebalancing. Better to cut down to 30 / day (or less) earlier on to ensure that the permanent shift of balance is delayed to later in your life (or might not happen at all). By making less of a shift in your internal balance over your lifetime, you stand a better chance of keeping yourself in balance for longer (and so being healthier). In this example, the cigarettes are acting on one level as a "hot" herb so if you are naturally on the cold / cool side internally, then they might actually have health benefits for you. However, whether you are internally hot or cold was probably not one of the considerations when you started smoking and the associated nicotine poisoning is another matter altogether ! Enjoy it if you do smoke but look at it in terms of a herb and its effects and then maybe do other things in your life to balance the effects of smoking (or other activity) out, constantly pulling it back to your original balance point. Although smoking is an easy example to see, the same permanent changes in balance can occur if you display excessive emotions (eg excessively angry / happy / sad etc) or if you choose to not live in an way attained to your surroundings (eg not wearing a hat to ward off cold, rainy weather). There are numerous other imbalances which result in irreversible effects but I'm sure you get the idea.
Anyway, back to the subject we started on.
The route to administering the treatment is to first do the differential diagnosis on the patient to determine what the source of imbalances have come from and to assess the nature of any imbalance. Herbs are not always the appropriate treatment path for patients (eg in cases of pain, moxibustion, acupuncture, acupressure or Qigong techniques may be more appropriate in some cases). If you do decide that herbs are the way to proceed there are three main ways of administering them.
1) Prepare as a tea
2) Eat the herb raw or lightly cooked
3) Add the herb to your everyday meals
I'd recommend doing the first one as I find it the easiest. Place a piece of the herb in boiling water, allow to stand for 5 minutes then drink the extract. Depending on your preference (and also the desired action of the herb) you can drink the tea hot or cold (actually, not cold, no cooler than tepid otherwise it shocks the stomach when it gets there and so is less effective). If you are treating coldness in the body (and so the tea has a desirable "hot" character) it's better to drink it as hot as possible. If you are treating heat in the body (and so the tea has a "cooling" character) better to let it go a bit cooler before drinking it. Remember you are using the opposites to rebalance. You can add your own tea if you want (eg if you don't like the flavour of the herb) but the tea (and both sugar and milk if added) will affect the effect of the infusion. Generally though if you keep these additives to a minimum, the effectiveness of the prescription will not be overly affected.
Eating the herb raw is fine if you like the flavour. Ensure that you chew it well and eat it separate from your main meals (as this lets it work in isolation and not fighting for priority with your other food). I started doing this method but found there was only so much enthusiasm I could have for nibbling celery sticks and walnuts ! Easier to drink the infusion.
Option 3 is the most difficult as sometimes cooking the herb will accentuate its effects and sometimes it will make the herb less effective. This is why I generally tend to keep away from this option but feel free to have a go and see what happens for you. Stir frying is probably the best method as it cooks the food fast (which minimises any loses in effectiveness) but can sometimes add a "damp heat" quality to the final dish. Balance the whole meal for food dynamics to give the overall desired effect and it is still very effective.
Consequences of the Prescription
The consequences of the prescription is that the patient will (hopefully) come back into balance. The symptoms they show (eg pain, uneasiness, nausea etc) should go and they will just feel "better" even if they can't quite quantify why. TCM is often very quick to function even for long standing diseases and after the first day the patient should start to see a positive change in their symptoms. Unlikely they will excessively joyous after treatment (unless this is their natural balanced state) but will just "be" whatever their balanced state is. The feeling that being balanced (or near balanced) gives is a difficult state to explain so it's probably worth trying to get yourself there first to be able to recognise it (and so be able to help your patients get there too). The main effect when it works well is that all of the disease you have taken on as "old friends" such as your "dodgy shoulder" or "dicky tummy" leave and you just feel better.
One thing to be aware of is that on the first day of taking any prescription the patient might feel slightly more rough than they did before (warn them about this when you give them the prescription). Advise them to not stop the prescription at this point as this change (ie slight deterioration) in symptoms is a consequence of the changes that are getting them back to balance. They'll feel much better on the second day. If a patient does however take a prescription for four days and you still feel it is not helping them then terminate the treatment and do another diagnosis. All diagnoses are a "snapshot" at a point in time and it might be that just at the time when you took the diagnosis, the patient was in a state of flux between states (or you might have got it wrong for other reasons !). Don't beat yourself up over it, learn from any mistakes. The objective is to try to help people with good intent and you did that (but made an honest mistake).
Suggested Foods to be Used
The following are the foods that I use for the imbalances given. There are many others (Dr Qi has a volume ~700 pages thick on this subject !) and you might find others recommended in other sources. Try them out and see what works for you (and maybe let me know the results of your experimentation). The "major symptoms" part is just to act as a guide and is no substitute for doing a full differential diagnosis (as given here) on your patient. The number of doses per day is dependent on how severe or long lived the complaint is. Typically once to twice a day is a good starting point. You can "mix and match" the herbs against your patient's imbalance and put them all in one tea if needs be to make one single infusion.
Herbal Cuisine to Counteract Cold
Typical Symptom : Afraid of cold, feel cold, pain alleviated by heat, copious/pale urine, white / clear phlegm, headache, thick white fur on pale tongue, slow pulse.
Suggest Use : Root ginger. Typically add 1-3 slices of fresh root ginger, ~ 1-3mm thick and 25mm diameter to tea and drink warm / hot.
Herbal Cuisine to Counteract Heat
Typical Symptom : Afraid of heat, feel hot, yellow phlegm, dark/scant urine, pain alleviated by cold, headache, thick yellow fur on red / crimson tongue, fast pulse.
Suggest Use : Dandelion. Purchase some dandelion tea from your local health food shop and make tea. Allow to cool a bit before drinking (should still be warm but not hot).
Herbal Cuisine to Counteract Yin Deficiency
Typical Symptom : Night sweats, insomnia, not being able to settle.
Suggest Use : Melon. Have one slice of melon about 25mm wide of whatever melon type is in season and easy to obtain. You want a watery quality in whatever one you choose rather than a dry one so make sure it is ripe before using it. I prefer Galia as it's also a bit sweeter than others and is seldom dry.
Herbal Cuisine to Counteract Yang Deficiency
Typical Symptom : No "get up and go", often slightly fearful at a continual low level, cold hands / feet.
Suggest Use : Walnuts. Either eat 1-3 walnut halves or break them up and make a tea out of them.
Herbal Cuisine to Counteract Damp
Typical Symptom : Greasy tongue (if combined with cold tongue is greasy white, if with heat, greasy yellow), damp looking tongue, a conscious feeling of being "pulled down", slow , sluggish movement
Suggest Use : Celery. Put about 2" of one celery stick into your tea or eat the same amount. A patient I had recently found that although celery helped start the process of draining damp, it didn't drain it sufficiently. We added eating half a pear each day and this sorted the problem out. Might be worth using both in combination for difficult / persistent conditions.
Herbal Cuisine to Counteract Dryness
Typical Symptom : Dry tongue, dry lips / skin
Suggest Use : White sugar. Lick the first joint of your index finger and stick it into your sugar bowl. Eat the sugar which sticks to you finger.
Herbal Cuisine to Counteract Qi / Food Stagnation in Middle Warmer
Typical Symptom : Feeling of food sitting in stomach, bloated, stomach ache, sometimes a bit lethargic
Suggest Use : Carrot. Get a fresh carrot, wash it thoroughly, but don't dry it. Cut off the top / bottom and then eat 2-3 inches of the carrot chewing very well. Alternatively, cut the 2-3" of carrot up into slices and add to tea.
Herbal Cuisine to Control Nibbling of Food
Typical Symptom : Feel overweight but have strong urge to eat at night or between meals
Suggest Use : Liquorice. Buy some liquorice pieces and each time you feel the urge to nibble something between meals, slowly eat one piece of liquorice (try sucking it to prolong it) instead of that chocolate cake ! (limit yourself to 4 pieces / day).
Herbal Cuisine to Control Energy Deficiency
Typical Symptom : Sleepy, drained feeling, slow pulse but no other cold symptoms
Suggest Use : Ginseng. You can get ginseng in various forms such as tablets, pastilles or capsules. I prefer the teas. Some of the tablets are just too hot in one go and the water in the tea helps to soften the impact of the herb. Put it in with your normal tea if you don't like the taste.
Herbal Cuisine to Control Early Morning Irritability
Typical Symptom : Early in the morning, you get irritated at things which normally have little impact / importance in your life.
Suggest Use : Chocolate covered raisins. Not exactly TCM but I thought of this on my First Aid course when they were talking about body sugars being low first thing. Certainly made me nicer to be with first thing.