Chinese Medicine: Starting with Daily Intelligence

Chapter 616: Chapter 616: Fifty Brave Men

The old woman’s voice caught in her throat as she wiped away a tear. "But he’s my son. How could I bear to send him to a place like that? I’ve heard that even sane people are driven mad in there..."

Li Xu nodded, signaling for the old woman to calm down.

He turned to the man, his voice rising slightly as he said sternly, "Don’t just sit there in silence. You’re a grown man. Don’t you want to get better?"

"Look at your mother. Her hair is all white. At her age, she has to watch over you every day, constantly on edge, terrified that something might happen to you. Can you really bear to let her worry like this forever?"

Those words seemed to strike a sensitive nerve deep within the man.

His cheek twitched slightly, and the hand on his knee clenched into a tight fist.

After a long moment, he finally spoke.

His voice was hoarse and he stammered slightly, a clear sign he hadn’t spoken much in a long time. "It’s... it’s been five years."

"How often, roughly?" Li Xu pressed.

The man fell silent again, as if resisting the painful memories.

Li Xu didn’t press him, just watched him in silence.

After a long pause, the man finally said sullenly, "At first, an episode would happen once every couple of weeks. Later... it became more and more frequent. Now, I have an outburst every two or three days. Each time... I basically just raise hell until I’m completely exhausted and have no energy left. Then it stops."

"Did something happen before this started? Something that triggered your condition?" Li Xu asked.

This was the key.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, treating mental and emotional disorders requires finding the "heart knot"—the root emotional blockage.

As the saying goes, "a disease of the heart requires medicine for the heart." If you can’t find the source of the emotional storm, medication alone can’t cure the root of the problem.

The man fell silent again. He bowed his head even lower, and his body began to tremble.

"My wife... ran off with another man..."

The old woman at his side glanced at her son, sighed in resignation, and finished the sentence for him.

As his mother said those words, the man’s body went rigid. His breathing instantly grew ragged, and veins bulged on his forehead. It was obvious he was in extreme emotional turmoil.

The old woman had put it simply,

but as men, Li Xu and Hu Qiming could instantly fill in the blanks.

Five years ago, the man would have been twenty-five or twenty-six, an age when a man is in his hot-blooded prime.

He would have just gotten married, perhaps still basking in the bliss of newlywed life, and then...

The result... he was cuckolded.

For any man, this was the ultimate humiliation.

Beyond the emotional betrayal and pain, it was a crushing blow to his pride.

Especially for an introvert with immense pride, that kind of humiliation was worse than death.

He wasn’t the type to cause a scene, to drag the woman back for a beating, or even to drown his sorrows with friends.

He could only bottle it all up inside.

All the anger, shame, and resentment—he suppressed it all.

This caused his Liver Qi to stagnate, and over time, that stagnation transformed into Fire.

This nameless fire raged inside him, growing ever stronger until it eventually flared upward to harass the Heart, clouding his mind and throwing his spirit into disarray. This was the origin of his "mania."

Li Xu stood up and walked over to the man. "Hold out your wrist. I’m going to take your pulse."

The man stiffly extended his hand.

The pulse was wiry, rapid, and forceful, like a tightly stretched string vibrating beneath his fingers.

It was a classic sign of exuberant Liver Fire and Phlegm-Fire harassing the Heart.

"Open your mouth. Let me see your tongue."

The man complied, opening his mouth.

His tongue was a deep red, with a greasy yellow coating.

Li Xu sat back down, having already reached his conclusion.

’It’s just as I suspected,’ he thought. ’A classic case of mania due to Phlegm-Fire harassing the Heart.’

"How did you handle his last manic episode?"

Li Xu turned and asked Hu Qiming.

Hu Qiming answered, looking a bit embarrassed. "He suddenly started screaming and trying to smash things in the lobby. The security guards couldn’t restrain him, so I had him injected with a sedative. That’s what finally calmed him down."

From a Western medical perspective, it was an acute psychotic episode, and sedation is the standard procedure.

Li Xu nodded, then immediately shook his head.

"Actually, for patients whose mania is caused by emotional repression, these intermittent episodes are, in a way, the body’s attempt to save itself. It’s an instinctual release."

Li Xu explained, "He’s been suppressing it for too long. He’s not an expressive person by nature and normally has immense self-control. The reason he has these episodes is that the pressure inside the ’pressure cooker’ of his mind has built up beyond what his reason can contain. The lid can no longer hold, so it explodes."

"Mm."

Hu Qiming nodded thoughtfully. "It’s like when someone is furious. They might say things without thinking, curse, or throw things—actions they would never normally take."

"Often, once those emotions are vented, even if you regret it later and think you acted ridiculously, that pent-up energy is gone, and you actually feel relieved."

Li Xu continued, "So, in some cases, if you just indiscriminately give the patient a powerful sedative right off the bat, forcibly suppressing their emotions..."

"It’s like a pressure cooker that’s just about to vent steam, but you take a hammer and slam the lid back on, maybe even plugging the valve shut."

"The result is that the pressure doesn’t dissipate. It just gets compressed deeper and packed in tighter."

"The next time it erupts, the pressure will be even greater, and the explosion will be even more violent. That’s why the frequency of his episodes has been increasing."

Upon hearing this, realization dawned on Hu Qiming, along with a pang of self-reproach. "So, my previous actions... I was trying to help, but I just made things worse?"

The old woman understood as well and asked anxiously, "Doctor Li, then... what should we do? We can’t just let him keep having these fits, can we? It’s one thing when he’s at home, but what if he goes out and hurts someone?"

"Acupuncture."

Li Xu considered for a moment before laying out his treatment plan. "We’ll start with moxibustion on the Juque and Xinshu acupoints. One is the Front-Mu point of the Heart, and the other is the Back-Shu point of the Heart. One on the front, one on the back; one Yin, one Yang. Together, they can unblock the Heart Qi, calm the spirit, and drain the Phlegm-Fire that is harassing the mind."

"Moxibustion?" Hu Qiming was taken aback. "What kind? Gentle moxibustion, or...?"

"Direct moxibustion," Li Xu said decisively. "Start with fifty cones."

"Fifty cones?!"

Hu Qiming sucked in a sharp breath, his eyes going wide.

A "cone," or *zhuàng*, is the unit of measurement for moxibustion.

One cone refers to a single moxa pillar, about the size of a date pit, being burned completely on the skin.

For general wellness, a typical moxibustion treatment might involve three to five cones. For treating an illness, perhaps seven or eight.

But fifty cones?

That would take several hours, maybe even the better part of a day!

And the heat from moxibustion is no joke.

It’s one thing for a short period, but for that long, the heat penetrates deep into the skin and bone. The searing pain is something most people absolutely could not endure.

It could easily burn the skin, causing large blisters or even infection.

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