Special Effects of Urine and Stool from TCM Perspectives (4)

[b:ae5a7be934]Special Pharmacological Effects of Urine and Stool from a TCM Perspective[/b:ae5a7be934]

According to the TCM pharmacopoeia, human excretions have therapeutic effects. If our stool and urine are properly processed and prepared, it can be and has been used to treat specific conditions.

It is recorded that stool has a bitter taste, a cold property and is non-toxic. It is mainly used in virulent heat and delirium conditions. The Bencao Gangmu (Compendium of Materia Medica) claims its major therapeutic indications are as follows:

1.Bone heat syndrome: A syndrome due to a yin deficiency accompanied with hyperactivity of heat evils in the interior part of body. An individual presents with a hectic fever, night sweats, dyspnea (difficulty in breathing), weakness, irritability, insomnia, hot sensations in the palms and yellow or reddish urine.
2.Disease relapse due to overstrain: a condition occurring during the early stage of disease recovery when the qi (vital energy) and blood are not yet restored or the evils have not yet been expelled entirely from the body.
3.Swollen and painful conditions.
4.Carbuncles on the back: a kind of sore that usually has several openings through which pus is discharged.
According to the TCM pharmacopoeia, human excretions are cold in properties and can be used to treat special heat conditions.

Urine is salty in taste, cold in property and is non-toxic. The urine from a boy is thought to be most appropriate for therapy. The famous physician Zhu Zhenheng (1281-1358) described urine as "the fastest fire reducing agent." Its major therapeutic indications in which it may be used include:
1.Headache.
2.Spitting up of blood and fever in chronic consumptive diseases.
3.Cough and difficulty in breathing due to retention of sputum; a syndrome referring to the air passage being obstructed by phlegm and dampness evils invading the lungs.
4.Trauma which has developed blood stasis.
5.Promoting urination and defecation.
6.Promoting body fluid production and alleviating thirst. (Often we have heard of outdoor sporting persons who have drunk their own urine to prevent dehydration when water is not available.)

Hey, Friends,
What do you think about the urine and stool? Are they only the waste matters or the useful materials for the pharmaceutical use?
Tell your opinions and ideas here so let the others share your good points of understanding!
All your posts are welcome

Dear Tutor,
It was very interesting indeed, and very useful for better understanding of diagnosis, to read all four posts about urine and the stool.

Once I heard from one man a fragment of old Korean story about ladies of the court who had found nice-looking mushrooms in the forest. They cooked them and ate, and were poisoned. They were rescued after drinking “golden soup”, which was made of the stool. Of course, I do not know was that story true or not.

May I ask you, if stool was used for treatment of diseases in the old days, may be it has some special treatment abilities which cannot be replaced by other herbs?
And are these substances also used as medicine in nowadays?
Thank you.

I my doctor prescribed something like that for me I think I would prefer to not know what it is.

But, how are such products prepared? And also, if waste products from a person's recent meals are used as medicine, does it matter what they ate? Could you have them eat particular foods to produce better medicine?

Thank you

Ed Austin

Dear lit_hua_nia and ed austin,
To tell the truth, I don't know how to process or prepare the human excretions, urine and stool!

I was told in my young age when I was doing the job for preparing Chinese materia medica, by my teacher, that the stool would be stored in bamboo pipe and sealed inside, and reserved for a long while.
But we never did the preparation.

Ans at the moment, the stool is not used at all in hospitals of traditional Chinese medicine in China. Not at all!

As to the urine, usually it is referred to that of young children especialy the baby boys', maybe it is still in used by some folk practitioners, in some remote or rural areas. But I'm not quite sure.

Personally I think the actions or the effects of the urine and stool are true, but not really convenient and acceptable by patients or by the public.

Always, the useful things are not sounding good, so they are disposed earlier or later.

For sure we have many other good ones, which are much better accepted by patients, so why do we have to use the human excrets?

Tutor

I used to have a dictionary, or guidebook, of western medicines that described very modern drugs, their uses, doses, side effects and so on. It also described briefly how they were derived, whether from some plant, or mineral or whatever. I was surprised to see that a whole group of them were made from horse urine. These were not folk remedies, they were modern drugs from major corporations.

So maybe the ideas have not changed as much as we think. Or maybe old ideas have been re-discovered, and modern western doctors don't even know they are borrowing from the ancient TCM doctors. I am sure many of them would shake their heads and roll their eyes at the idea of using waste product as medicine without even realizing that they are doing the same thing today.

Thank you

Ed Austin

Dear Ed,
Yes, sometimes it is really amazing that the traditional cutlture have brougnt about so many new things but only little we know the connections or the original source!

In fact in ancient time the Chinese culture was great and western civilizations were greatly benefited from the Chinese ones, e.g. the production of paper and the Movable-type or changeable style printing has pushed forward the Culture Rejuvanization in the Mid century, and the gunpowder was promoting tremendously the development of the modern industry.

Ok, nowadays the western world has forgot all the contributions to the modern civilization by Chinese people but only recognizes Chinese as behind or even uncivilized.
Fortunately some western people, like you yourself, have discovered the value of Chinese culture, and really lay your attention on studying traditional Chinese medicine, a very important branch of ancient Chinese culture.
Alright, let's treasure traditional Chinese medicine as much as possible and try to reveal all the valueable secrets behind the words of ancient recordings.

Tutor

If I may say something about that, I don't think it is so much that Western people think Chines culture is backward. I believe that traditional Chinese medicine carries the burden of the bad reputation of the medical practices of previous centuries in the West.

Until the 19th century, medicine in the West was little more than superstition and often did more harm than good. The great advances in knowledge since then have put those old practices in discredit. Now when we read about things like the five elements, it sounds too much like the old superstitions. TCM also contains may concepts, like qi, that are completely foreign to the West and are therefore easy to dismiss as mere superstition,like believing disease were caused by actual evil spirits invading the body.

Anyway, that is how I view the situation. It is not a simple matter of westerners looking down on Chinese culture, it is more complicated and involves negative ways that westerners see their own history as well.

Dear Ed,
I just hope what you said is true!
I don’t know, but I did feel the western people look down upon our Chinese, not only on the TCM side, but about all the aspects of Chinese culture.
Ok, anyway, I do feel happy the majority of Medboo friends are very nice to us and of course believe in traditional Chinese medicine.
Only one thing I want to point out that in traditional Chinese medicine, we don’t believe diseases are caused by the invasion of the evil spirit, but rather, it is understood in TCM the invasion of the exogenous pathogenic factors could cause diseases.
If anywhere you could find the saying of the evil spirit, I think it might be due to the misunderstanding of the Chinese language. In TCM books, there’s no such an idea.

Tutor

Dear Tutor:

Yes, I understand there are no "evil spirits" in TCM theory. What I meant to say is that many Westerners put everything into the same box. In many peoples minds, there is "Modern Medicine", which they know about and trust, and then there is "everything else", which they do not. So in their minds, TCM is in the same category with faith healing and every kind of fraudulent or silly idea. This is not my thinking, I am just describing how I think TCM is sometimes viewed here.

I think there is a tremendous amount of wisdom in TCM, more than just clinical medical practice, but also in it's view of life and environment. I do think it will slowly gain credence and acceptance in the course of time. Even in recent years it has become more generally accepted and I am confident it will continue to do so.

Thank you very much for your help.

Ed Austin