Bamboo as Medicine

I just finished reading the most interesting article called “Bamboo as Medicine” By Subhuti Dharmananda, Ph.D., Director, Institute for Traditional Medicine, Portland, OR.

Asia has over 300 specie of bamboo (Zhu Ru) and many different parts of the plants are used in Chinese Medicine. The leaves are used for fevers, the inside whitish-greenish middle is used for convulsions and vomiting. Dried sap from the joints of bamboo are used for fevers and coughs with phlegm and even epilepsy. The stem of small bamboo are used in Japan for urinary retention and blood in the urine. The leaves can also be made into a beer. Not sure if that’s medicinal though. This article has excellent comparisons and characteristics on functions of the different specie, something I never learned in school. There are several species which are specifically for phlegm misting the brain. In Ayurvedic and Tibetan medicine bamboo has many uses including as an aphrodisiac. Since there’s no shortage of bamboo in the world and chemical constituents in bamboo are now known antioxidants, seems like a win-win situation to use bamboo as medicine.

One more bamboo fact. Bamboo was used in ancient China to make writing tablets. A wonderful Chinese SHL teacher I had back in Chinese Medicine College, when faced with a difficult student question on conflicting material, he would always answer with “Bamboo Problem. The meaning was: some very old bamboo reeds survived with ancient text about Chinese Medicine but some disintegrated and written words were lost forever. So bamboo as medicine is great but there’s a reason we don’t still use bamboo as writing tablets.

Check out this great article at: http://www.itmonline.org/arts/bamboo.htm