Self-Moxa #1

Five cones on Zusanli.

Quote for the Day

"If you were an animal what would you do? You would eat; you would fornicate; you would defecate. You would live." --Steve Jackowicz, last Sunday

In Northeast Thailand, a Cuisine Based on Bugs

Interesting NY Times article on eating bugs.

Crunchiness and sogginess are, respectively, the most and least desirable physical attributes of any food I eat. These rankings informed my selection, which included a bag each of everything except the large brown water beetles. Apart from its huge, squishy-looking midsection, the shiny blue-black scorpion presented more crunchy bits than the crickets or grasshoppers. I randomly picked a four-inch candidate, pulled off its legs, tail and claws, took a deep breath, shoved the lot in my mouth and started chewing.

Read the whole article at NYTimes.com

Now Available in the Library: Journal of Chinese Medicine CD-ROM

All the articles from the UK-based Journal of Chinese Medicine are now available on CD-ROM. Just ask for the disk at the front desk. You can't copy the files to your computer (I tried) but you can put the disk in to any of the computers in the library and print articles.

Also on the disk are abstracts from the Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is an English-language journal published in Beijing. The full articles aren't included, which is unfortunate. The articles from JTCM have titles like "Review: Antagonistic Action of Heat-clearing and Detoxifying Chinese Drugs On Endotoxins" while the ones from the JCM are more likely to have titles like "Dosage is the Secret That is Never Taught" and "Herbal Medicine for Everyone" (these are actual articles). But never mind - there are still plenty of good articles available.

Alt Health Watch Database!

Hey, I just found out you can search and print out articles from the American Journal of Chinese Medicine FOR FREE FROM YOUR HOME COMPUTER. Take advantage! The website is http://search.epnet.com/. There is also a permanent link to it on the right hand column... There is a one-year lag - in other words right now you can search and print articles from June 2005 and before. This is part of what we pay for! Use it!
Username: pcom
Password: student
Enjoy!

Happy Midterms to you

An article on Hua Tuo, for your procrastinating pleasure... did you know Hua Tuo was a surgeon? Apparently he wrote a whole series of books on surgery, using what we now call traditional Chinese medicine, which utilized acupuncture and herbal medicine. The story goes that his books were burned by Cao Cao, one of the important military figures in Chinese history.

Let A Stranger Sleep In Your Apartment

- and get free admission to the PCOM NY symposium! Contact Nini Mai for details. Her email is on those flyers all over school.

Dog Meat Soup

A prescription in traditional Chinese medicated diet. Ingredients: dog meat 1500g, seasonings in proper amount. Preparation: cut the meat into cubes, stew them in water with aniseed, tangerine peel, common fennel fruit, cinnamon bark, tsaoko, fresh ginger and salt, until they are thoroughly done. Administration: The meat is for eating and the soup for drinking. Functions: warming and reinforcing the functions of the lung, spleen and kidney. Indications: cold-deficiency of the spleen and the kidney, epigastric and abdominal distention, cold and pain of the loins and knees, light-colored urine, frequent urination, declination of sexual function, deficiency of both lung and spleen, asthma of insufficiency type, chronic cough, etc.

-From Chinese-English Dictionary of Traditional Chinese Medicine, 1996