If given a choice, I will use herbal medicines when I’m sick instead of modern Western medicine, which will be my last resort.
The use of herbal medicines in China has been traced back to the Zhou Dynasty, late Bronze/early Iron Age, about 2500 to 3000 years ago. The video at the end of this post will give you a better idea how herbalism came to be.
Li Shizhen
In 1596, hundreds of years before Western modern medicine, Li Shizhen spent decades writing down the vast knowledge of herbal lore.
His book, the Ben Cao Gang Mu (1596), has been used as a pharmacopoeia, but it was also a treatise on botany, zoology, mineralogy and metallurgy.
Ben Cao Gang Mu
The Ben Cao Gang Mu mentions 1,892 different herbs and is divided into 6 sections, 52 scrolls and 60 different categories.
It has been reported that Darwin had a copy of the Ben Cao Gang Mu with him on his voyage of discovery in 1831.
In fact, the World Health Organization reports that about 80% of people worldwide use herbal medicines for their healthcare.
Discover more about Health Care Without Drugs
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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