营养 YINGYANG – NUTRITION

BRIEF HISTORY OF TCM NUTRITION

DIET BEFORE DRUGS
Sun Simiao lived and practiced in China during the Tang Dynasty 619-907 AD. Born in 581 AD in Huayuan, Jingzhao, he was a sickly child, and the cost of medical treatments that reduced his family to poverty, motivated him to enter into the study of medicine. He rapidly learned the wisdom of Daoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, mastered the Chinese classics by age twenty, and was quickly renown for his apothecary skills. 

He advocated the primary importance of proper diet with the simple axiom that ‘living beings have always depended on food to maintain their life.’ Sun Simiao wrote on the beneficial and harmful aspects of foods in words that ring true to the present day; he cautioned that ‘those who practice medicine must first recognize the origin of an illness; they must know which violations have caused the suffering, then they must treat it with dietary means. If dietary therapy does not cure the illness, only then can they employ drugs.’ Despite his masterly command of herbal medicine and folk remedies that earned him the title ‘Medication King’ or Yaowang, he warned against the indiscriminate and careless use of drugs: ‘The nature of drugs is violent, just like that of the imperial soldiers. Because the soldiers are so wild, how could anybody deploy them recklessly? If they are deployed inappropriately, harm and destruction will result everywhere. Similar excessive calamities are the consequences if drugs are thrown against illnesses carelessly.’

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