Chinese Medicine is the Nemesis of Rheumatic Disease
Rheumatic patients often face this trouble: without medicine the joints hurt; with medicine the stomach hurts. Because the usual anti-rheumatic drugs irritate the stomach, patients often cannot keep taking them.
Chinese herbs avoid this. TCM speaks of pattern-discernment-treatment, and holds: "When wind, cold, and damp meet together, they form bi ."
- **Wandering pain in the joints — xing-bi (wandering bi).** Cause: wind-evil striking the channels. Treat: chiefly dispel wind, with scattering cold and dispelling damp.
- **Joint pain worsened by cold — tong-bi (pain bi).** Cause: cold-evil striking the network. Treat: chiefly scatter cold, with dispelling wind and damp.
- **Joints / sinews / muscles with pain, heaviness, local swelling, numbness, worse on rainy days — zhuo-bi (lodging bi).** Treat: chiefly dispel damp, with dispelling wind and scattering cold, and fortifying spleen and benefiting qi.
- **Red, swollen, hot, painful joints with fever, dry mouth, constipation — re-bi (hot bi).** Cause: long illness injures yin and turns to heat. Treat: dispel wind, clear heat, open the network, vent the bi.
So under the one name "rheumatic disease" lie different patterns, different causes — calling for different treatments by person, place, time.
The famous senior TCM doctor Jiao Shude has deep grounding in rheumatic disease and decades of clinical experience — having cured tens of thousands. We recommend that rheumatic patients try Chinese medicine.