The needle and the herb are two hands of one medicine. Where acupuncture moves the qi of the meridians, the herbal formula reaches the interior — warming, draining, building, harmonising — matched to the same constitution and pattern read at the pulse and the abdomen. In the classical Japanese tradition this is Kampō: the living use of the formulas of the Shāng Hán Lùn and the Jīn Guì, chosen by body-type and presentation rather than by disease name.
Under the direction of Ikeda Sensei's teaching 池田政一
Masakazu Ikeda has spent a lifetime putting the classics back to work. He graduated from the Meiji Oriental Medical Institute in 1968 and has practised acupuncture, moxibustion and herbal medicine ever since, teaching apprentices and lecturing in Japan, Australia and the United States. He is academic director of the Meridian Therapy Association of Japan, and still sees patients on Shikoku. He reads the Nan Jing, Su Wen, Ling Shu and Shang Han Lun not as antiquities but as instructions, and proves them daily in a clinic.
What distinguishes his work is that he refused to let the two halves of the medicine drift apart. In most modern training, acupuncture and herbal medicine are taught by different people, from different books, using different language. Ikeda Sensei treats them as one system: a single constitutional reading, taken at the pulse and the abdomen, which yields both the points to needle and the formula to give. His writings map constitution, pulse, abdomen, point and formula onto one another until they become a single coherent method.
The herbal side of Sage Medicine is not a separate discipline bolted onto the needling. It follows that method — the same reading of pulse, abdomen and presentation that decides where the needle goes decides which formula is given.
In that method the constitution is sorted first: liver, spleen, lung or kidney deficiency, each in a heat and a cold form. From that reading follow both the root treatment at the points and the formula that supports it. Root and branch, needle and herb — one judgement, made twice.
Andrew Fraser has studied under Ikeda Sensei over many years. What is dispensed here is chosen the way he teaches it to be chosen: by the person in front of you, not by the name of the complaint.
Books 著作
Ikeda Sensei has written over thirty-five books in Japan. Only a small part of that work has been translated, which is one reason the method is better known in Japan than outside it.
In English
- The Practice of Japanese Acupuncture and Moxibustion: Classic Principles in Action — Eastland Press, 2005. Translated by Edward Obaidey. The one book to start with: constitution, pulse, abdomen and treatment set out as a single method, with case records. Eastland Press ↗
- Traditional Japanese Acupuncture and Moxibustion: Theory and Practice — with Somei Okabe.
- Integration of Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine: Theory and Practice — the argument this page is describing, set out at length: one constitutional reading yielding both the points and the formula.
- Shou Kan Ron: Clinical Applications of the Shang Han Lun — the cold damage formulas read for use rather than for scholarship.
In Japanese
His best-known work is a handbook series giving clinical readings of the classics — not commentary in the scholarly sense, but instructions for using them at the table:
- 素問 — Basic Questions
- 靈樞 — Divine Pivot
- 難經 — Classic of Difficulties
- 傷寒論 — Discussion of Cold Damage
The remainder — the greater part of his output, including the constitutional and formula material this dispensary works from — exists only in Japanese, and in the seminar teaching passed to his students.
Teachers of the Transmission →The dispensary 藥局
A small dispensary is being prepared — a working set of classical formulas, prescribed after consultation and dispensed to the person they were chosen for. Not a shop of remedies for complaints, but the ordinary furniture of a practice: a dozen formulas that between them meet most of what walks through a clinic door, and the willingness to modify any of them when the person in front of you does not quite fit.
Each carries an English name chosen for the state it works toward rather than the state it was met in — and behind that name, the formula under its own name, its constituents, and where it comes from. A patient reads Roam; the label carries 逍遙散, and the page behind it carries Zhuangzi, from whose first chapter — 逍遙遊, free and easy wandering — the formula takes its name.
That is not decoration. A formula that has been given for eight hundred years arrives carrying its reasons, and those reasons are worth handing on with it. Most of what is sold in this field has had its provenance stripped somewhere along the way. Here it is written on the packet.
How it will work
Formulas are dispensed to patients of the clinic, after a consultation — by pulse, abdomen and presentation, in the manner already taught here. Standard preparations are supplied as they come from the maker, relabelled and explained. Where a formula needs adjusting for the person, it is compounded by hand and labelled for them alone.
Every preparation carries instructions written for that formula: how to take it, what to notice over the first weeks, what helps and what undoes it, and when to stop and get in touch. Those pages sit behind a code on the label, so nothing is lost between the room and the kitchen bench.
In preparation · not yet open