Chinese Herbal Medicine

Rating:
Summary: Great explanation of Chinese Medicine!
Review: Chinese Herbal Medicine by Daniel P. Reid is a wonderful guide to Chinese Herbal Medicine and its philosophies. This is a breif, but understandable summary of the process of diagnosis and treatment from one of the world's most ancient forms of medicine.

Beth Anne Haigler, Medical Herbalist

Rating:
Summary: Good overview, little else...
Review: It is definitely a good overview, and if they gave prizes for design of Chinese Medicine Books, this one woud've won them all. The full color format and abundant pictures and drawings make this book a beautiful gift, but that's about it. Like Reid's other books, it is intended as an informational book for laypersons, with a couple of interesting recipes and well-narrated anecdotes and folktales. You can see in CHM, which predates Reid's other books, that his ideas and convictions regarding chinese "self-healing" and energy medicine were not yet developed. The historical overview of Chinese Medicine is very good. The descriptions of practice, however, are confusing, cursory, and/or brief.

There are a couple of mistakes, too. The page facing the full-page reproduction of Hua To, the physician reputed with the discovery and first use of anesthesics, has pictures of the Five Animal Frolic qigong, erroneously described in the picture quotation as Taijiquan. The Five animal frolic predates taijiquan, and although similar, they should not be confused. The bibliography is very short, and not very good. The recipes are a sampling, not a balanced diet, and the index is neither complete nor useful. The last part of the book is a "materia medica", the practical use of which is negligible. The book is indeed not for practitioners of TCM, and this part attests to it. The selection of items for this section, is an arbitrary mixture of the most common and the most exotic. There is no detailed information on use or preparations of the materials listed, although some of them are used in the recipes described afterwards. The glossary and the categorization of the herbs and other substances is correct, though.

Reid is a very opinionated author, although a knowledgeable one, and he doesn't restrain himself much on his views. There is a comparative description of two physicians, where Reid contrasts Taoist and Confucian outlooks on the practice of medicine. It's a bit simplistic and stereotypical to me, but perhaps it can be useful and informative as a sampling of how medicine is practiced in non-communist China. This book is beautifully designed, and I keep it mostly for the pictures, which are well-chosen and illustrating. If you are looking for information on TCM, though, Ted Kaptchuk's The Web that has No Weaver is a better, deeper introduction to the subject.