Symptom check: Heart Blood Xu
According to the mental health charity Mind, nearly 1 in 20 of us struggled with an anxiety disorder in 2009. There are several Chinese medicine syndromes that cause anxiety, and the one I see most frequently in my clinic is Heart Blood Xu. The tell-tale symptoms of Heart Blood Xu include: taking a long time to fall asleep at night being startled easily, e.g. jumping when the phone rings poor short-term memory, e.g. walking into a room and forgetting why you went in there in
Why Chinese and Western medicine are perfect partners
Great for smallpox, not so great for chronic pain Western medicine owes much to Descartes’ 17th Century Cartesian dualism, which severed the non-material mind and spirit, from the material body. The mind and spirit became the domain of the church, and the body became the domain of science. Modern Western medicine then grew out of this new purely physical science, which pursued objective observation of tangible things, but ignored our subjective experience and concepts that al
10 ways to look after your mental health
Chinese medicine teaches that our mental health is determined by the health of five different aspects to our mental/emotional functioning. These are called the Hun, Shen, Yi, Po and Zhi. You can look after your own mental health by nurturing your Hun, Shen, Yi, Po and Zhi. What your Hun does Your Hun enables you to process emotion when you dream, to see a future for yourself, to experience hope, and to move towards your goals. It also enables you to experience and express ang
