Crazy Heat

Working at SACHR, I see a lot of patients that have hepatitis, or that have HIV. Recently, I just began treating a woman with both. She has hep A and C, HIV, and diabetes. Heat is the byword for this woman. Her pulse is rapid and thin, and her tongue is scarlet. She has, perhaps, the first truly scarlet tongue I've seen without the aid of hard candy.
Her hepatitis has given her hepatomegaly, and she has a hard time breathing due to crowding of the abdomen. She also has lots of phlegm. While not jaundiced, her skin does have heat papules covering her upper chest, which makes sense since heat rises.
So far, I've only been giving her palliative acupuncture. Her last treatment focused on trying to clear some of her heat. Liver 2 was a prime point, and she also received Kidney 6, L.I. 11, Pc 7, and Stomach 40 for phlegm. I also used GB 41 to move some of her Liver qi.
I intend to follow up with this patient intently, and am currently waiting for her doctor to send me her Liver work-up. More to follow.

Speaking of heat, sometimes a little bit of knowledge is indeed a bad thing. Another of my patients at SACHR has been coming regularly to me for about two weeks, and has loads of heat in him. This patient is actually quite robust. Just two days ago, when he thought I was in the treatment Sanctuary, but wasn't, he tried to open the door. He twisted the locked door-knob with such force that he destroyed it. So far, he has almost always presented with a red tongue, especially near the tip and front, with a dry yellow coat. He has a lot of hunger, and is thirsty a lot. He also suffers from gastritis. He almost always presents with a sweat, staining his clothes.
This case drove me crazy, as I would give treatments to clear heat, and nothing I did seemed to work. The last three treatments have focused on clearing heat from the ying/nutritive level; although not delirious, he does have some history of mental illness (currently under control). Points that I used were Pc 8, Sp 10, L.I. 11, Heart 3, and Pc 7. At times, there would be a slight improvement, but nothing substantial.
Today, however, as he was getting ready to leave, he let slip a vital piece of information that he hadn't told me before. He was regularly taking ren shen (Radix ginseng)! Not just regularly, but daily, both Chinese and Korean varieties! Suddenly, it all made sense. I'd clear heat, and then he'd go and put it right back in. I don't blame the patient; I blame marketing. Drink makers and marketers have been touting the wonderful effects of ginseng and you can even find it in neighborhood bodegas. As wonderful an herb as ginseng is, like the saying says, too much of a good thing is a bad thing. What's worse is that this is precisely the kind of abuse of herbs, in ways that the compilers of all Chinese materia medica never dreamed of in their darkest nightmares, gets herbs banned from the market in this country. The latest casualty in this country is ma huang (Hb. ephedra). It's impossible to get, all because Orioles pitcher Steve Belcher abused ephedra and inadvertently killed himself. I say abused ephedra, although I'm sure he and thousands of people like him didn't think they were abusing it. After all, the makers of diet pills were putting it in their product, and they wouldn't do anything to harm you to make a buck, would they?
Bottom line: more people across the USA abuse oxycontin than abuse heroin, cocaine, and alcohol combined, but it's still prescribed legally. One ill-informed athlete uses ephedra in a way never intended in any Chinese medical text, in a manner that flouted all the traditional contraindications, and winds up killing himself, and suddenly it's too risky, nope, sorry, training or not, you can't have it. There's something very wrong with this picture.