 Throughout the history of traditional Chinese medicine and really the history of humanity, there have been many different methods of administration of herbs and herbal medicines. So, for example, when you take something like this, rogui, which is medical grade cinnamon bark, there are many different ways that historical ancient people had prepared this for maximal medicinal benefit. Now in this video, I thought I would introduce probably what is the most ancient way of taking and administering herbal medicines outside of just eating them directly and putting them in your body. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hein, author of the health book Master of the Day, doctor of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine. So before we jump into this video here, there's two very important links right below the video. The first is for a free guide, which is four daily rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. And the second is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, you can check out the links right below the video to reach out to my private practice. So there are many ways to take herbal medicine, right? Modern people may be familiar with, let's say, brewing up some mint tea because they're having some digestive upset, or maybe taking capsules of valerian root to sleep. Maybe modern Angelinos may be familiar with taking ayahuasca, where it's boiled and prepared, and then they do their whole ayahuasca ceremony. But very much in the same way, one of the, perhaps the oldest method of administration of Chinese herbal medicine is called decoctions. So decoctions means it's water extracted. And we take an herb like this, I'll show you a couple of them. This is basically medicinal cinnamon bark, you can see how thick it is called rogueway. And rogueway, we often use, I mean there are myriad uses, but very often it's used for insomnia and for sleeping issues. It's good for chest pain and regulating heart rhythms, but in general it's very, very commonly used when there are issues with sleep. To extract the active constituents from this plant and this thick bark is like ginseng root. I don't have any on me right now, but these roots are so thick that you can't just chew them because you're not going to digest or absorb anything or find it bioavailable. But compare that to something like this, chenpea, aged tangerine peel. P in particular is very often used for indigestion, bloating, what's called digestive stagnation. Also can be good for reflux and indigestion related to that. So this obviously needs to be boiled for a much longer period of time than this to extract the active constituents. But a decoction is very distinct because unlike let's say chopping up ginger and putting it in your stir fry, a decoction is where we actually put the raw herb like this into water and typically boil it for 30 to 45 minutes and then we drink that extraction. So a water soluble extract. Now I'm going to give a demonstration in this video of what these decoctions look like because very often if I get sick, decoction is the primary method I use to treat the symptoms of whatever I've caught, whatever upper respiratory infection or viral infection that I've caught because they're very, very strong. So that is an overview of what a decoction is and it's very important to differentiate because there are other methods of administration that we use to this day just less commonly. So let's head over to the kitchen. I'm going to show you in real time what making an herbal decoction looks like and then we'll try it and sample it as well. So let's take a look over here at the herbs. Some of these herbs that I was missing, I have them already in here. So we're going to dump these in there and I'll show you what some of these are here. The big red one is the dazao, the date. You can see these big square chunks is guggen, kudzu. This is really effective for colds and upper respiratory issues involving the sinuses or rhinitis, runny nose, that sort of thing. So there's a large dosage of that and then some of these little thinner white pieces is baishao, which is peony. You can see that and then let's add the cinnamon twig. You said six grams for that. So I'm just going to take this, I'm just going to go to six. We're going to add the honey fried licorice, six grams of that. And the last thing is the fresh ginger at nine. It's just from the market, it's pretty weak in terms of ginger but I'm just going to slice this up here. You know the dazao, which is the dates, the guggen, the kudzu, you see the cinnamon twig, you see the honey fried licorice, the ginger sinks, and the baishao, the peony, you can see that. We're going to simmer it for about 40 minutes. We're going to strain that out and re-boil it again for 40 minutes. So we'll catch you in about an hour and a half after we've boiled this twice. We'll do a little tasting. I'm going to make Chris taste it too so in case you project all vomits on camera you guys are going to know why because of this formula. So we'll try it in about an hour and a half and then we'll wrap this video up. All right guys so the timer has gone off so we're going to walk on over here and come check out this formula really quick so you can see this what this looks like, the final product. So it's a very thick and soupy, very dark red. Smells very cinnamony and gingery in here. Nice color there. Take a look at these, the herb matter, pretty nice. Those big dots out of the dates, the ginger. I'm going to pour it in here so you guys can see the color because it has a beautiful color to it. All right and so it's a pretty thick kind of soupy mix and then typically what we would do is I reduce the six cups to about three and then take one cup three times a day when you're acutely ill. So let's try this, this little chemistry set, very tasty. It's like a very thick kind of chicken soup taste with sweet ginger, cinnamon, tastes good. So that's how you make a traditional herbal decoction on the stovetop. Right we've taken the raw herbs, we brought them to boil and then simmered them and then we've broken it down into our this is this would be probably a dose and a half for three doses in a day. Now there are a couple other methods of administration for taking Chinese herbs. Probably the other, it's a little bit less common but it's famous through history it's called a one or a pill. So this one you can see is called Li Zhongwan and Li Zhongwan is called Regulate the Middle Pill. It's based on four herbs, renchen, jinsing, baizhu, ganjiang dried ginger and jargansao which is honey fried licorice. So these are just chewed, you know. Well you just put them in your mouth, chew them or you could even put the one right into hot water and then basically in this case these herbs are still relatively raw as opposed to being boiled and prepared and extracted. So similar to a one like this is granules. Now ignore me as I'm just chewing loud on this microphone here. Basically granules or a powder extract is the most common method of administration today most commonly just due to convenience. So if you get an herbal extract online or you go to a TCM doctor a lot of the time they use granules. So granules will either be preprepared in little capsules, in little tea pills, you know these little pea-sized pills and you take 10 to 15 of them, but very often the one like this is a bit similar to the granules in some way but the granules are actually they are boiled like a raw formula that we just showed you and then they're basically dried from there and then the granules are packaged in that way. So granules are probably the one you're most familiar with. Various herb companies use varying different kinds but one of them is that what you're getting in herb capsules is varying degrees of a granulated raw formula. Sometimes it's just the raw formula on its own. Now there are two other types we sometimes use. One is called a sand and a sand is also the raw herbs that is then basically consumed a lot more raw than from a decoction. And finally a gau for example all varying kinds of topical elements let's say for eczema or varying kinds of dermatitis. So decoction though is really in many ways the ancient way because a lot of these herbs are water soluble in particular and the boiled raw decoction is just simply the strongest method of administration that I've certainly seen that's most commonly used. So when you see an herb like roguay cinnamon bark or chenpi tendrine peel it's been aged a lot of what traditional medical doctors would use for thousands of years was a decoction meaning it was boiled in the stovetop for 30 or 40 or 45 minutes and then they would drink the liquid that way very very interesting very fun it's sort of a unique healing ritual that a lot of my patients like when I do on rare occasion give them raw herbs like that but that is herbal decoction making one-on-one so before you guys go check out those other links there and there and I'll see you soon