A note from 5,100 meters

A short note from higher up than any letter this year. As you read this, our research team — professors and graduate students from the TCM university — is at 5,100 meters in the Tibetan mountains. Oxygen tanks by night. Fieldwork by day.

Why they are there.

Wildcrafted is a word that has softened in the modern trade. It should mean three things: the herb grew where the classical text said it grew, was harvested at a rate the population absorbs, and left the ecosystem no thinner than the year before. It often means none of those things now — and once an herb is ground into powder, the difference is invisible to anyone who was not on the mountain.

The only way to know is to go. Not to a warehouse. To the mountain.

What they are looking at.

The team is walking transects across the growing grounds of the herbs the pharmacy depends on — Du Yi Wei, Hong Jing Tian, Qiang Huo, Cang Zhu, Chai Hu, Gan Cao, Zi Su, Ge Gen, Huang Qin, and the Tibetan Chang Pu that grows only above certain altitudes. They measure plant density. They count seedlings. They mark whether this year's harvest has left the population intact for the next. They do this annually. Where a species is thinning, we do not source from it, whatever a supplier will offer.

Why this matters for the practice.

An herb that grew at altitude, in the wind, in the cold, in its native ground, is not the same herb as one grown for yield at low elevation. The classical texts assumed a wildcrafted supply. The formulas were built for what grew where it was supposed to grow. When you prescribe a Xiao Yao San or an Er Miao San, the effect the tradition documented depends on the ground the herbs were pulled from — and on someone having verified, that year, that the ground still held them.

We insist on this because practicioners can tell, and their patients can tell.

What I recommend.

Every formula in the pharmacy sources through this standard. Below, four the team is verifying at altitude this week — an old formula for each of four common patterns, each built on herbs the mountain still holds.

With respect,
Dr. Lan
Your Herbal Pharmacist

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Four formulas from this ground