My Formula Kitchen 方剂
Single herbs are letters; formulas are sentences. A classical prescription is a small team — a chief, deputies, assistants, an envoy — balanced so the whole does what no single herb can. These pages unpack the famous ones: what's in the pot, who the tradition brewed it for, and what we actually know.
逍遥散
Free and Easy Wanderer Powder
The prescription for being wound too tight. When stress knots the qi and the knot starts wearing out the body, this is the tradition's most famous answer.
归脾汤
Restore the Spleen Decoction
For the studied-too-hard, worried-too-long pattern — when overthinking has drained both the digestion and the blood that feeds a settled mind.
六味地黄丸
Six-Ingredient Rehmannia Pill
Three that fill, three that drain — the most elegant architecture in the pharmacy, and the tradition's definitive answer to yin running dry.
四君子汤
Four Gentlemen Decoction
Four mild herbs, no drama, endless descendants. If formulas were calligraphy, this would be the first character every student writes.
玉屏风散
Jade Windscreen Powder
Three herbs and a beautiful name — a jade screen set against the wind, for the people who catch everything going around.
补中益气汤
Tonify the Middle and Augment the Qi Decoction
Written during a siege, for the exhausted. When everything in a person sags — energy, appetite, organs, morale — this is the formula that lifts.
银翘散
Honeysuckle and Forsythia Powder
The sore-throat formula in every Chinatown pharmacy. Written for epidemic fevers two centuries ago; bought today at the first scratch of a hot cold.
