How to Change your Chinese Herbs

Video Transcript

"SARAH HAUER: Hi. I'm Sarah Hauer. SIG HAUER: And I'm Sig Hauer, and we're professional practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine. SARAH HAUER: We're here on behalf of Expert Village. SIG HAUER: And welcome to our video. Hi kids. How are you today? Today, we're going to make you eat all these herbs. Okay, serious now. Today, we're going to talk about Chinese herbs. And Chinese herb is a very, very complex subject. We, as we went to school, we had over 1200 hours of schooling in Chinese herbs, and we continuously are studying Chinese herb. We have several books, a couple of examples are right here. They're so complex and rich and it can do so many different things that really takes quite a bit of study to get a good grasp on what would different herbs can do. SARAH HAUER: Chinese herbs, what we do is we pull on classic Chinese formulas that are a thousand of years old. That's what this book is. This is a formulas book. And there are over, probably, 500 formulas in this book alone. And what we do, when we see a patient, is we diagnose your case and we prescribe an herbal formula but then we modify the formula to fit your unique diagnosis and where you are at that time. What happens a lot with when you get better is your patterns change, so a good herbalist consistently modifies your formula. And we do that by talking to you about what's going on, what's changed, but also importantly by looking at your tongue and pulse. So, as you continue with your herbal therapy, a formula that you're taking that works great and that you think you found the elixir of your life is going to change because you changed. And that what's health is. We peel back layers, we get to more core issues, we move in and out of balance, and it's very important to be with an herbalist who can work to walk that path with you. We've had one case that's passing into my mind is someone who walked in our office and was taking a formula for asthma, and she put it on the counter and said, "This formula has worked great for me for two years but no longer," and that was exactly how that formula was supposed to work. Actually, it was not long term, it was only short term and because she had taken it for so long, of course, it wasn't going to work. There was nothing wrong with the formula. It was just its application. So, application of herbs is so important and in today's world where herbal remedies are widespread where you can go at any natural food store and find a lot of different herbal remedies. It's really important to get educated and self-prescribing is a difficult thing to do. Even with Sig and I, where we both take Chinese herbs, we don't self-prescribe. We use the other's expertise 'cause it's very difficult to be objective about where you are. So, that's an important aspect of prescribing herbs."