Chinese Natural Healing

Herbal medicine, Acupressure, Acupuncture, Qi Gong and more.

Posts Tagged flu

Orange Vs. Cough

Jan 30

Posted by conrad in Common herbs/foods, Cough, Diet / Nutrition, Recipes | No Comments

Oranges

To stop coughing is always a hassle. I recently heard a special natural healing recipe that uses orange. It doesn’t matter how much vitamin C in an orange. Citrus in orange always triggers more coughs. So in traditional Chinese medical point of view, orange is always bad for coughing.  However, this easy recipe for healing cough is going the opposite – JUST use an orange, but BAKED in an oven first. Here are the steps:

The only ingredient is just a fresh orange. Peel off the skin of the top of the orange for about a size of a quarter coin. The purpose is to force the heat directly into the orange. Place the orange into the oven and bake for  10 minutes in high heat. There will be a nice, “moist” smell from the oven. After the top of the orange is shows a little burn, it’s time to pull it out. It’s very hot so be careful when you handle this round little thing. A baked or roasted orange is very easy to peel the skin off, and it’s sweeter than a fresh orange. Season with a little salt then it’s going to be even sweeter but also more effective to stop coughing. Especially if you just start coughing, usually just one baked orange will work. It doesn’t matter if it’s Sunkist or expensive Japanese orange, sea salt or kitchen salt, as long as they’re orange and salt then this formula should work.

A baked orange is very easy and inexpensive to prepare. The nice taste should keep the kids happy as well. At least there’s no side effects. It’s non-drowsy and it won’t ruin your appetite.

Tags: , , , , ,

Ginger healing: hair loss, common cold and flu

Dec 18

Posted by conrad in Alopecia, Colds and Flu, Common herbs/foods, Diet / Nutrition, Ginger, Hair Loss, Herbal Healing, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in general | No Comments

ginger2

In western culture, I don’t see ginger as a common food but more for seasoning . But in Chinese or Asian community, ginger plays a very critical role in cooking. It’s because of both its great culinary and medicinal value. It’s commonly used for seafood cooking especially steaming fish in order to get rid of the fishiness. Its medicinal value is even more important. Chinese use ginger to heal many diseases. Ginger root is the major one we always use, but ginger skin, ginger leaves and even dried ginger all have different medicinal uses.

Chinese consider cold or flu to be an attack of “coldness” inserting our skin and other organs and reach the inside our body. The property of ginger is “warm” (yeah, it’s spicy so you can tell), which helps open up the tiny pores of skin again to release the “coldness” that got us sick. So whoever starts to get a cold or flu, just make some hot tea with ginger boiled and drink it. It’s going to help a lot. There’s always a typical recipe we use in our own family – hot ginger coke. You boil a can of coca-cola with a few slices of ginger and then drink it before going to rest. It works pretty much every time for us.

Very few people know that hair loss and alopecia can be healed by ginger as well. It’s also based on the theory of refreshing the pore on the skin. There are few ways of healing alopecia and hair loss with ginger:

1. Ginger skin (dried by baking) and Ginseng 30 grams each.  Grind them into powder. Cut some ginger slices to smear the hair losing area with the powder. Do it every other day.

2. Grind a piece of fresh ginger, heat it up and smear it on the head 2-3 times. Make sure you don’t burn your skin though.

3. Probably the easiest way: Cut a few slices of ginger and smear some alcohol (like brandy) on your head. About 2-3 times a day. Or another way is put a few slices of aged ginger into a glass of alcohol for 2-3 days, then smear these ginger slices onto the area of alopecia or hair loss every day, normally 2-3 weeks hair will grow again.

There are even more complicated ginger uses for hair loss, I just provided these three ways. I hope it helps certain people. Ginger still have plenty of medicinal uses. And since it’s a pretty easy thing to find in the market, I’ll try to bring up some more uses later on.

Tags: , , , ,

Hand Acupressure for cough and sneezing, part 2

Sep 5

Posted by conrad in Acupressure (Tui Na) / Reflexology, Allergies, Bronchitis, Colds and Flu, Cough, Flu (see Colds and Flu), Hand Acupressure/Massage/Reflexology | 1 Comment

So in the last post we talked about the stimulation of an acupoint on the wrist can help relieve sneezes and cough caused by cold, flu and allergies. Now we’ll continue with a reflexive area that’s very popular  for healing many oral and bronchus illnesses.

Reflexology on hand or foot usually works the best when doing it for a long period of time. If cough and sneezes become annoying chronic symptoms, we definitely need to heal the disease first. Other than that, objects stuck in the throat or coughing non-stop are also quite common. Especially senior people always swallow their saliva inappropriately and stuck those spit in the throat, causing annoying cough. If that happens, slightly slap on the person’s back and see if it helps. If not, massage hard on the “oral and bronchus” reflexive area between thumb and index finger. (See diagram) Massage hard a few more times and rub the back at the same time.

cough_reflexive_area

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Hand Acupressure for cough and sneezing, part 1

Sep 4

Posted by conrad in Acupressure (Tui Na) / Reflexology, Allergies, Colds and Flu, Cough, Flu (see Colds and Flu), Hand Acupressure/Massage/Reflexology, Moxabustion, Nose Bleeding | 1 Comment

The symptoms of cold and flu are mostly fever, cough and sneezing. To cure flu or cold, enough rest and nutrition awareness are most needed. However, in order to stop those annoying coughs and sneezes, we can stimulate the relevant acupressure point called “Tai Yuan” on your wrists.

Most acupoints or acupressure points for healing cough and sneezes are mostly on the face and neck. Someday other than foot acupressure and hand acupressure, I’ll talk about acupressure points over the other parts as well.  In the mean time for hand acupressure, we just need to know “Tai Yuan” is also an effective acupoint for relief of cough and sneezes. To find “Tai Yuan”, bend your wrist and you see the inner wrinkle of the wrist. Touch it and you can feel the pulse. Use a lighted cigarette as heated source  to approach that point for 3-7 times without burning your skin. Or use a pointy device to stimulate 7-10 times. If there are no device at all, massage that point until the area around that point feels the heat.  When doing stimulation of “Tai Yuan”, make sure you bend your wrist outward to make it easier to find and approach the acupoint. See the diagrams below:

cough_acupointcough_mox

We’ll continue to talk about the reflexive area to relieve cough, sneezes and nose bleeding tomorrow in part 2.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

A brief introduction of Hand Acupressure

Aug 13

Posted by conrad in Acupressure (Tui Na) / Reflexology, Hand Acupressure/Massage/Reflexology | No Comments

I shared 3 different hand acupressure I learned in the last 3 posts. Some friends started to ask me questions about hand acupressure.I figured may be I should share some knowledgeable introduction about hand acupressure from my research so it makes more sense.

“Acupoints” are the critical points on the 12+2 major channels (or called meridians) for Qi (Chi) and blood flow to run. They’re all over our body. If we call our internal organs the power house, then the acupoints are adapters. By stimulating these acupoints through acupuncture or acupressure, Qi (Chi) and blow flow got adjusted and balance better. So as a metaphor, sickness is like a sudden change of charge/current, healing through acupoints are like controlling the adapter to adjust voltage. As long as we keep the power flow stable, we’re healthy.

About half of the starting points of those channels locate on our finger tips. Some call our hands as a thermometer of internal organs, or even a forecast channel of health, because our hands can tell our sickness in advance. For example, if the color of the palm looks uneven, the blood circulation may have  problem. If fingernails show red dots or even gray dots, it can be a sign of blood clot in the brain. If the color of the convex part below the root of the thumb turn purple, it’s a sign of a coming flu. Because there are many acupoints on the hand that are related to sickness, stimulating reflexive areas or acupoints on our hand can help healing. That’s really “natural” healing.

Ways of stimulation:

1. Thumb acupressure – use your fingers (usually the thumb on the front and four fingers at the back to support) to rub or massage the reflexive area and acupoints. It’s a very convenient stimulation. But it’s not strong enough for certain illnesses that needs stronger stimulation. There are two ways to massage, one is direct press, another is press and rub around the acupoint. Which way to use depends on what kind of illnesses. Usually press 1, 2, 3 and release, press 1, 2, 3 and release, repeat for as long as needed for different case.  The strength of massage is usually hard, but some illness can’t take too much stimulation.

2. Cigarette moxibustion – use a lighted cigarette or the Chinese medical moxibustion to approach the acupoints for heating stimulation. Be sure not to burn the skin. Horizontally held cigarette is actually better then pointing the acupoints vertically. Make sure you don’t burn your skin, 5mm distance should be close enough. Approach, and then away. Repeat 7-15 times. Depends on what kind of illnesses, sometimes we’ll have to do it everyday. Note that we never do this after shower or a bath.

3. Toothpick/pointy device – this is to replace the acupuncture needle while this gives a stronger stimulation then acupressure or cigarette. It’s easier to use a bunch of toothpicks (5-10) for stimulation because normally we’re not that accurate pointing to the acupoints. Although we don’t want to hurt our skin, feeling pain and stimulation during the process is important. Otherwise it’s not going to be effective. Usually 1, 2 press, 3, 4 away, 1, 2 press, 3, 4 away, keep repeating in this tempo. First timer can try like 10 times.

A normal question asked is about which hand to stimulate. The answer is that we stimulate both acupoints on both hands – they’re supposed to be the same. If we find that one acupoint on one hand feels more painful than the other during the stimulation, then we stimulate longer and more on that point.

We can do this hand stimulation anytime, or when we feel more relaxed. But after bath, exercise, drinking, or during fever, these are when we should NOT do this hand acupoints stimulation. Pregnant woman should never do it, especially the “He Gu” acupoint I mentioned last post for toothache. Strong stimulation on “He Gu” can cause miscarriage.

(sources: Hand natural healing)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,