The house
About us
本草
- Physicians
- Four
- Licensed in
- The People’s Republic of China
- Partner
- Fang Huichuntang, Hangzhou
- Written in
- English
- One reading
- US $39 · 48 hours
Bencao House is four physicians licensed to practise Chinese medicine in the People’s Republic of China. We write health-management readings in English, one reader at a time, for people overseas who cannot reach a Chinese-speaking physician. Fang Huichuntang in Hangzhou is our partner.
Who we are
Four physicians, writing from China.
Bencao House is Shen Mingli, Shen Zhiwei, Zhou Yanqiu and Shen Yunzhi, each licensed to practise Chinese medicine in the People’s Republic of China. Each of the four reads intakes and writes reports, and every report carries the name of the physician who wrote it.
Their profiles, and what each reads for, are on the physicians page. Their training and years in practice are printed on the reports they sign, and we will give them to you in writing before you buy if you ask.
Fang Huichuntang in Hangzhou is our partner.
The tradition
Bookish, argumentative, and heavily documented.
Before electricity, every Chinese herb counter weighed on a 戥子 — a hand-held brass beam scale with a bone rod and a sliding weight, good to about a tenth of a gram in a steady hand. The beam makes you slow down and look at the material twice: once when you pick it up, once when it settles.
Precision is the part of this tradition that Western readers least expect. It is not a mystical practice. It is a bookish, argumentative, heavily documented one, and it has been correcting itself in print for longer than most countries have existed. Most of it has survived one pair of hands at a time, with the reason attached.
It is also a practice of seasons. In the weeks of 梅雨 — the plum rains, the humid stretch before midsummer in the Yangtze delta — people describe the same thing: heavy. Heads heavy, limbs heavy, appetite gone. Chinese medicine has spent two thousand years describing exactly that, and it has never needed a laboratory to do it.
Why we write instead of sending
We will not put herbs in the post.
There are three reasons, and only one of them is legal.
The first is that herbs are chosen in person and then adjusted — at a week, at three weeks, at the change of season — by someone who can see the person again. Sending a fixed bag eight thousand kilometres to someone we will never look at twice is not that practice. It is an imitation of it, and the imitation is the part that gets people hurt.
The second is that in most of the places you are reading this, it would not be lawful for us to do it, and we are not going to pretend the internet makes that question disappear.
The third is the one we actually care about. The part of this tradition that travels well is the part that was never about the cabinet: what to eat and when, how warm to keep your feet, what time to put the lights out, and where to press with your own thumb. That advice is two thousand years old, it is written down, it costs nothing to follow, and it is most of what gets said out loud in a Chinese-medicine consultation.
So the report you can buy here is a piece of writing. It describes what a Chinese-medicine reading of your answers looks like, it names the pattern in the tradition’s own vocabulary, and it gives you food, points and daily rhythm you can act on by yourself. It does not name a disease, and nothing we write is a diagnosis, a treatment, or a substitute for care from a clinician licensed where you live.
The superior physician attends to what is not yet illness; the inferior one attends to what is already there.
Writing in English
Why a letter, and why in English.
Most people overseas meet Chinese medicine at a market stall or in a supplement aisle, where someone reads one sign — a ridged tongue, a cold hand — and sells a powder on the strength of it. A careful reading looks at thirty things together, and says plainly how little any one of them means on its own.
So this is built the way a first consultation is. Thirty questions, because that is roughly what gets asked in person. One photograph of your tongue, taken in daylight before you eat, because that is the one thing we genuinely cannot infer from words. Forty-eight hours, because a report takes one of us about two hours and we would like to sleep. US $39, because that is what two hours of attention costs when the writing is the only thing being sold.
We write in English because the alternative is that this stays behind a language barrier forever, and it has been on the wrong side of one for long enough.
Plainly
Who we are, said in one place.
We are four physicians licensed to practise Chinese medicine in the People’s Republic of China. We are not licensed by any state of the United States, we are not medical doctors in the United States, and we are not a hospital or a supplement company. Fang Huichuntang in Hangzhou is our partner.
We say this plainly because it is the thing that makes the offer legitimate. You are entitled to know who wrote your report, what they trained in, how long they have practised, what the service is and is not, what it costs, and where to complain if it is poor. The physicians page sets out who we are, the service and how to complain, with the written disclosure underneath it. Training and years in practice come with each report, and in writing before you buy if you ask.
The house
Four physicians, and a letter with your name on it.
Thirty questions and one photograph. A physician reads them, and writes back in English within 48 hours.