Case 1:

Shortly after I got my first practice together as a clinical herbalist I made some very good friends out inChina Town, San Francisco and established some very good Chinese  bulk herb trading. Suddenly I had all the legendary herbs I studied about over the last few years at my finger tips and not a moment too soon!

I didn’t have many patients yet so I had some time do a little upkeep around our little ranch. We have a chicken coop made out of that old style corrugated steel that a lot of roofs are made out of and I thought those poor chickens could use another window. After marking the window space  I started cutting it with a jig saw. Things were going fine until I heard that unmistakeable sound of an Arizona Dust Devil right behind me! There were quite a bit of big metal shavings all over the freshly cut window ledge and the twister picked them up and fired them at me like a machine gun! I felt something go into my eye.

It didn’t hurt that much and I figured it would wash it self out so I finished the window hole and went in to check my eye.

I got one of those magnifying mirrors and a magnifying glass to look at my eye and here was this little spike with about a quarter of an inch of it sticking out from the middle of my eye right in the cornea!

Tweezers were the first thing I tried but the metal in my eye must have became barbed from the cutting action of the saw because it would not pull out. It just kind of stretched my eye and man did it hurt! I thought about just yanking it out fast but I realized I might pull a large bit of my eye out with it and besides I almost stabbed my eye with those tweezers the first time! I tried to pull it out with a magnet sense it was a piece of steel, but that hurt worse with no luck getting it out.

Suddenly I remembered all the stories I heard about raw San Tian QI powder and how the Chinese used this for many kinds of injuries. Mostly it is used to direct the blood, stop bleeding with out clotting, and yet speed up blood flow where it is needed. All this while helping stop pain. Almost, I thought, like it had a mind of its own.

I remembered hearing how it is issued to Asian soldiers for stopping bleeding from bullet wounds and that in many cases it somehow could pull or push or “float” the bullet to the surface due to the “directing” of blood from this herb.

I hadn’t seen a “doc” in 10 years or more and I wasn’t going to start my new practice off by going to one now!

 I decided to use some raw Tian Qi powder and boil it in water until It became a nice warm “goo”  then place it into my eye. I then covered my eye with a stick-on bandage and decided to go to bed and see what happens the next morning.

When I woke up the bandage had fallen off and I could not open my eye. It was cemented together by the Tian Qi that had dried like glue on the outside of my eye. It was as hard as a rock. I put some hot water on it and kept knocking off pieces of the “cement” until I could feel my eye start to open. Then I realized I had crunchy pieces of Tian Qi inside my eye. I washed them out with a cloth and got the old magnifying mirror out. The spike was gone.

I looked at the rag with the crunchy stuff on it and there was a little metal spike with a definite barbed edge! It would have to have been surgically removed along with a small piece of my eye but the floating, moving, and directing action of the Tian Qi gently some how “wiggled” the barbed steal out of there. My eye felt great and I was prouder then I could be of that Chinese San Tian Qi root!

I wonder if I would still have all of my eye if I had gone to a doctor?

 Case 2:

       Only a few weeks later I was building some rustic Southwestern furniture in my shop (which was what I did along with playing Country Music before I became an herbalist) I was ripping some old barn-wood boards on my table saw and apparently I had missed removing an old nail out of one of them.  Suddenly, something hit me in the middle of the forehead and knocked me to my knees! I became unconscious for a few seconds and when I got up there was a nifty stream of blood running down me. I came in the house and scared my wife to death!

We washed everything out and didn’t see any piece of nail in my head but it just did not want to stop bleeding. I covered the hole with Tian Qi powder and the bleeding stopped almost immediately. I also drank a little Tian Qi tea as it is related to Ren Shen or Panix Ginseng. I thought this would help with the pain (I really had a headache!) and also I thought it would speed up the  healing. I only felt a tingling numbness in my head with very little pain.

The next day the wound had not clotted over but yet the bleeding had stoped and there was only a light pink bit of fluid around the wound.  I thought I would wash it out and put some more Tian Qi on the hole. As I was washing it I heard something metallic hit the tile floor. I looked down and it was not a nail at all. It was a large tooth from the saw blade that broke off from hitting the nail and had hit me like a bullet!  The saw blade had been turning at about 10,000 RPMs. My head healed without a scar in about 4 days.

 I hate to think what a doc would have done.

Case 3:

I don’t know why but I guess I have always been a little accident prone.

Also somebody said things happen a lot in threes! Well this next incident happened about a year later when I was again at the table saw. I was ripping some boards for more shelving for my herbal supply this time!

It was getting a little dark and I had not turned the lights on yet but I only had one more shelf to make so I cut it. After the cut, I reached down to move a piece of debris from the saw table and since it was almost dark, I stuck my left thumb right into the spinning saw blade! It knocked me back against the wall and when I looked at my thumb, part of it was just hanging by a piece of skin.

I held my thumb back in place, walked into the house and once again I scared my wife to death. However she was getting a little used to it.

I thought about how Tian Qi has a way of “directing” blood flow and figured that if I just put a lot of Tian Qi powder between my two thumb pieces and some how “weld” or “cement” something around my thumb to hold it in place It would grow back together. I new  that Comfrey root powder mixed with vodka was the perfect cement. I used to call this “Liquid Stitches” and had used it to heal and hold deep cuts together on patients. It would dry soon so I covered my thumb with it and made a kind of protective brace with two sticks and some tape and went to bed.

 The next morning it was leather hard around my thumb and it didn’t hurt all that much. Later that day it dried much harder and since the comfrey cement was all the way around my thumb it started to cut my circulation off a bit so I peeled it off slowly to change the “cement”. I noticed that my thumb sections were already starting to "net" together so I put more Tian Qi around the raw areas and cemented around it again with the “Liquid Stitches” Comfrey glue. I kept this up for about two weeks.

 There is only a slight dent in my thumb now and it is now  just a little shorter then the other one since a little “meat” was taken off the thumb from the saw. My thumbnail was never lost and I have good feeling in my thumb except for a tiny bit of tingling in spots when I touch it just right.

I wonder what an E.R. doctor would have done and if I would still have my whole thumb?