Customer Reviews

Western Herbs according to Traditional Chinese Medicine: A Practitioner's Guide

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It's a beautiful book, in fact it seems to me more like a coffee table book than a real practitioner's handbook. There are lots of beautiful full page color photos but not as much information as I'd hoped. The text and approach are good, certainly authoritative, but I expected to find many common western herbs listed. I live in Europe and most of the herbs in the book are specific to north America. Lovely book but not as useful as I'd hoped.

Thomas Avery Garran has written an excellent book, combining his deep experience using western herbs in Chinese medicine with a thorough understanding of the energetics of the herbs. Although there have been a couple of earlier books attempting to use western herbs in the sophisticated Chinese herbslism, this one lacks the serious dosing errors of Holmes's Energetics of Western Herbs and is more extensive than Jeremy Ross's larger book, Combining Western Herbs and Chinese Medicine. His practical experience with each of the herbs profiled gives this book an edge, and his ability to compare western analogues of Chinese herbs helps Chinese medicine fit within a locally sourced herbal tradition. The book allows one to make use of the generally fresher and organic American sourced herbs while using the genius of Chinese Medicine diagnosis.

This book has been great - as a beginning student of Chinese herbalism who has an interest in local plants, I couldn't have asked for much more. I will note that many of the spp are garden plants, not wild plants, and others are tailored to the SW US. Not a big problem, as most still help me in my Eastern US area, but worth noting so that you know what you're getting. Also, this is NOT a field guide... it could almost be a coffee table fixture!

As a practitioner of both Western and Chinese herbal medicine I am thrilled to see this book in print. This book contains many features that are completely unique to clinical guides in the Traditional Chinese Medical literature in print in the West. First off, the photographs taken by the author are gorgeous, unrivaled in any clinical herbal that I know of. The adherence to T.C.M. terminology makes this book more coherent than other attempts to take on this task in the past which ought to allow for easier inclusion of the included Western herbs in a clinical setting for the practitioner. Especially engaging are both the authors commentary on combining medicinals for specific conditions and for combining Western herbs with Chinese formulas. Also of value in the commentary is the extraordinary erudition - the guided tour of the best of 2000 years of Materia medicas and clinical manuals of both herbal traditions. I could go on, but well, just buy the book...

Very good book. All you need to know about the subject you could find in this book.

Western Herbs According to Traditional Chinese Medicine: A Practitioner's Guide offers up some 58 monographs, illustrated with color photos, of herbs commonly used by Western herbalists. Each herb is grouped by the basic categorization for medicinals in Chinese medicine, with writings dealing with functions, dosage, preparation and contraindications. Any herbal medicine collection must have this in-depth index of Chinese formulas applied to Western herbs.