On blood stasis and Ao Yi Patch

On the pattern most fragmented in one language and named precisely in another. The Western clinic recognizes it in pieces — endometriosis, uterine fibroids, painful periods, post-partum retention — without a single unifying name. The classical TCM read is one pattern, and older.

The clinical picture

A patient in her thirties or forties comes in with periods that have become progressively more painful. The blood is dark and clotted. The pain is sharp and fixed in position, worse at night, worse when she is cold. Her energy drops in the second half of her cycle. Her mood follows. Her gynecologist has offered surgical evaluation, or hormonal suppression, or watchful waiting. She has come here for the fourth option.

The TCM pattern

Blood stasis in the lower jiao — xue yu (血瘀) — held by the cold that reaches the uterus most easily when the yang is thin. In classical language the chong (冲) and ren (任) channels have knotted, and the free flow of the monthly cycle has been disrupted where it begins. The pain is not diffuse; it is fixed, because stasis is fixed.

The formula the tradition built for this

Ao Yi Patch — our Miao minority medicine formulation of nineteen herbs, developed for exactly this kind of deep, cold, blood-stagnation pattern. Safflower, dragon's blood, ox-knee root, and spatholobus vine among them — all classical blood-moving herbs, layered with warming ginger and borneol to reach the lower jiao through the skin.

The teaching

For the blood-stasis pattern in the lower jiao, the pair to know is SP6 — San Yin Jiao (三阴交), Spleen 6 and CV4 — Guan Yuan (关元), Ren 4 — the two most treated points in the gynecological pattern.

SP6 sits three cun above the tip of the medial malleolus, in the depression on the posterior border of the tibia. It is the meeting point of the three yin channels of the leg — Spleen, Liver, Kidney — and reaches directly to the uterus. Place one patch on each side, bilateral.

CV4 sits three cun below the navel on the midline. It is the classical point for warming the uterus, tonifying the Kidney, and supporting the blood-moving work of SP 6 in the lower jiao. One patch, applied directly.

Three patches together. Apply the day before the cycle begins and continue through the first three days. Check the skin at four hours. This is not for use during pregnancy.

Between visits

Show the patient how to place the three patches herself in your office so she can carry the protocol at home through the first three days of every cycle. The cycle does not wait for her next appointment. Catching each one — not just the ones that happen to fall on a treatment day — is what shifts the pattern over three cycles rather than ten.

What I recommend

For the blood-stasis cycle pattern — Ao Yi Patch on SP6 (bilateral) and CV4 across the first three days of the cycle. Combine with daily Copeia Tea for the blood the pattern draws from, Purple Star for the Liver constraint that often accompanies painful periods, and Microgard for the ground. Reassess at three cycles. Patients often notice the color and consistency of the flow shift first.

With respect,
Dr. Lan
Your Herbal Pharmacist

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Four formulas for this pattern