Despite reaction of kids, adults drinking herbal medicine have always felt bitterness too. The impression is “bitter”, and whenever you think about the taste, you felt shuddering.
For young kids, they definitely felt declining to bitterness herbal decoction. Their parents have been racking their brains, to persuade and coax, eventually to convince the kids to drink the herbal decoction in most circumstances.
Question: Why Chinese herbal medicines are bitter?
Answer: The Bible of Chinese herbal medicines stated most of the herbal medicines tasted bitterness. The bitterness regarded as one of the element to fine tune the body, which is to reduce heaty inside the body, to let Qi descending, to let the dampness dehydrated.
Actually, varieties of Chinese herbal medicines contain multiple tastes. The tastes are consisting of sour, sweet, bitterness, spicy and salty.
All kind of tastes works well in different part of the organs inside the body. The bitterness goes to heart. The sour taste goes to liver. The sweet taste goes to digestive system. The spicy taste goes to lung. The salty taste goes to kidney.
Generally, the bitterness taste help to reduce heaty inside the body.
Here are some examples of Chinese medicine which taste bitterness such as: Chinese Goldthread Rhizome, Baikal Skullcap Root, Amur Corktree Bark, Lightyellow Sophra Root, Chinese Gentian Root etc.
The sweet taste medicines benefits patient who are having weakening stamina and whole body aches, these medicines balance the overall chemical reaction in the combinations of herbal medicines.
For instance, licorice reduce heaty and enable detoxification. Malt sugar is consumed as a medicine to reduce body aches.
In daily life, we consume white sugar, brown sugar, malt sugar, honey etc. as the ingredients of food, they also serve as the valuable medicines.
Malt sugar had been used as a major ingredient in one of the decoction used by a medical sage in Han Dynasty, his name called Zhang Zhong Jing and he used malt sugar immensely in the decoction of “Xiao Jian Zhong Tang”. In this decoction, malt sugar play an important role as major medicine and its main functionality is to strengthen the Qi of stomach and promote the Qi to protect the stomach. Individually, malt sugar used as condiment to stimulate the appetite as compare to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). In spite of condiment, it served as one of the major medicine in a combination of variety of herbs in the decoction.
White sugars have had the properties of cool and tastes of sweet. Folks liked to boil white sugar drinks to reduce heaty inside the body. Brown sugars have had the properties of warm and tastes of sweet. Folks liked to boil brown sugars with gingers to keep stomach warm and ease stomach ache due to cold, especially when women encountered stomach ache during menstruation period.
The “taste” of herbal medicine once changed, the outcome after consuming the herbal medicine will be changed too.
For example: the decoction of ‘Gua Di San’ is bitterness and used for emetic treatment where it induced vomiting as the final purpose. Bitterness triggers the sensation on the tongue, bring in the nerve reflection and hence cause vomiting. If we add sugar into the decoction, the effectiveness might be alleviated. As a result, we would not encourage people to add sugar into the bitter taste herbal medicine.
Among some of the patients, if their body consider ‘dampness’ plus ‘heaty’ or some of them whom are diabetic patients, it is definitely not advisable to add sugar into the decoction of herbal medicine.
As it’s known that brown sugars have had the properties of warm, help enriching the blood ingredients, dispersing the blood stasis, warming up the stomach and getting rid of coldness inside the stomach. These categories of patients whom consider both ‘dampness’ cum ‘heaty’ type, if they have skin rashes or eczema issue, we would not advise people to add brown sugar into the decoction, as the warmth effect will mitigate the function of the herbal medicine to reduce heat and detoxification, it will result in adverse result.
We said the herbal medicines taste bitterness, how do we adapt the taste?
1 Mentally, adopt the concept of herbal medicines are genuinely the essential medicines used for building up a healthy body.
2 Recognize the process of sickness started from the disease to recovery goes with timeline. We ought to adjust the lifestyle to become a regular lifestyle; to adjust mind set, to perform more exercises, and last but not least the herbal medicines play an important role in treatment too.
3 Before we drink the herbal medicine decoctions, we prepare a cup of warm water in advance. After finish drinking the decoctions, we rinse the mouth with the warm water so that to remove the ‘yuck’ feeling of bitterness medicines.
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