Zhu Xiao-Nan

Chinese Herbs for Lactation

Recently a practitioner posted a query on our Chinese medicine egroup wondering about a patient who suffered from insufficient lactation. It gave me the idea to post some interesting and very helpful material for this type of thing. Anyone working with women during pregnancy and through the postpartum time will come up on nursing issues and Chinese herbal medicine has so much to offer. I myself had insufficient lactation some 21 years ago and made myself some Pig’s Trotter Soup (see below) and experienced first hand the way it worked instantaneously.

In the Graduate Mentorship Program we spend a 3 full days on treating women during pregnancy and postpartum and some of the principles taught in this program are illustrated below. I’d like to mention these before going into the case studies:

When seeing women during the postpartum time, there are several checks that need to be done along with your regular intake and diagnosis. All of the issues you check for have an influence on the breast milk.

The first thing you check for is the woman’s appetite and thirst. If the woman has a poor appetite, it will be difficult for her to transform her […]

Dr. Zhu Xiao-nan’s case on Fetus Failing to Develop

Dr. Zhu Xiao-nan was born in 1901 and spent much of his life working as a Doctor of Chinese medicine, focusing on gynecology and obstetrics.

I decided to translate and post this particular case because it is informative from a practical treatment perspective but also from a medical anthropological perspective.  It seems that, in 1961, when this patient came to Dr. Zhu, there was no ultrasound, amniocentesis or blood tests to determine the well-being of the fetus.  In fact, in the introduction to the text from which this case is published, it states that Dr. Zhu considers women’s pathology to be “invisible”, making it very important to “interrogate thoroughly, make precise diagnoses so that the herbs are used with bull’s eye accuracy”.  For me, it is interesting to consider what would have happened in this patient’s case today.  My guess is that the outcome may not have been so positive.

Dr. Zhu uses his own methods for determining whether the fetus is alive or not. It is clear from his discussion here that this method involves the following:

  • Checking the pulse:  If the pulse is still slippery, there is a chance the fetus might be living.
  • Observing the tongue: If the tongue is not dark, there is a chance the fetus is […]
By |2017-12-29T17:28:54-08:00May 11th, 2011|Gynecology, Obstetrics, Zhu Xiao-Nan|2 Comments
Go to Top