How to use traditional Chinese medicine to soak your feet for health care

First identify your body constitution and choose the corresponding prescription, and then use the correct soaking method. With the help of warm water to relax the muscles of the feet, the bias of the medicine can be transmitted to the whole body along the meridians, adjusting the balance of qi, blood, yin and yang. Indiscriminately taking medicine and soaking it is not only useless, but may also add burden to the body.

A while ago, Aunt Zhang from the community came to see me and said that her old sisters said that she could soak her feet in safflower mugwort leaves to ward off the cold. She had been soaking her feet for a week because her hands and feet were cold in the winter. As a result, her gums were so swollen that she couldn't even eat, and she suffered from insomnia for several days. When I asked about it, I found out that she was often constipated and had a bitter taste in her mouth. She had a typical body constitution with heat at the top and cold at the bottom. Using warm safflower mugwort leaves directly aggravated the rising deficiency fire. Later, I added 10g of Phellodendron cypress and 15g of Achyranthes bidentata to the original recipe to bring down the heat. After three days of soaking, the swollen gums disappeared, and even the ankles that had been cold before were warmed up a lot.

Many people have also lied to me before, saying that foot soaking with traditional Chinese medicine is an IQ tax. The skin barrier is so thick that medicine cannot penetrate at all. This is actually only half correct. We usually use herbs with sufficient volatile components for foot soaking, such as the volatile oil of mugwort leaves and gingerol of ginger. Their molecular weight is small, and the hot water relaxes the pores of the feet, which can completely enter the peripheral circulation through the epidermal gap. What's more, there is a saying in traditional Chinese medicine that "foot is the root of the six meridians". The feet are distributed with dozens of acupuncture points corresponding to the internal organs. Even if the medicine does not enter the blood, warm stimulation of the corresponding acupoints can also play a role in dredging the meridians. Of course, those who say that foot soaking can cure diabetes and high blood pressure are even more outrageous. Health care is health care and cannot replace taking medicine. There are even some cases where foot soaking is absolutely not allowed. For example, severe diabetic foot patients have poor skin sensitivity and are prone to burns and ulcers. For people with varicose veins in the lower limbs, soaking for a long time will aggravate the dilation of blood vessels and make the foot soak more swollen. These are all minefields that must be avoided first.

In fact, ordinary people do not need to use complicated and expensive medicinal materials for daily health care. If you are a little girl who is usually afraid of cold and has abdominal pain when visiting your aunt, cut 3 slices of ginger and add 6 split jujubes and cook for 10 minutes. Pour it into a foot bath bucket and control the temperature at 40 to 40 degrees Celsius. 2 degrees is enough, soak for 15 minutes, the back will be slightly warm, just don’t soak until you are sweating profusely, which will dissipate the body fluid, qi and blood. There was a little girl who soaked for almost an hour to get rid of the cold. When she got up, she felt dizzy and almost fell down. This is a typical case where qi is lost with the body fluid. If you have a hot and humid constitution that is prone to sweaty feet, smelly feet, and small blisters, don’t use warm products such as ginger and safflower. Take 10g of Sophora flavescens and 5g of dried alum and boil them in water. After soaking for a week, your feet will sweat less and even the itchiness will disappear.

By the way, it’s best to wipe the seams of your feet with a dry towel after soaking them. Especially for people with heavy moisture, don’t let them dry naturally. On the contrary, it is easy for the moisture to wrap on your feet, which is not worth the gain.