Disclaimer: This book is intended solely for academic exchange and sharing ideas. It does not constitute medical advice on the use of medication. If you are not a medical professional and need treatment, please consult a qualified doctor and follow their instructions!
Selecting medicines based on verified indications means choosing the appropriate drugs according to clinical symptoms. Traditional Chinese medicine encompasses numerous clinical symptoms and patterns of illness. One disease may involve multiple patterns, and one pattern may have many symptoms, so any account is inevitably liable to overgeneralization. The medicines listed under each pattern are selected only because they can treat that pattern. In actual clinical practice, other effects of each medicine must also be taken into account, and other drugs combined with it as appropriate to the cause of the illness and any accompanying patterns. As early as the time of the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, the fundamental principles for composing prescriptions were set out as the sovereign, minister, assistant, and envoy roles. It also stated that medicines should be combined appropriately and dosages carefully considered according to the severity and urgency of the condition. As stated in the Treatise on the Most Important Truths in the Plain Questions: "The medicine that treats the main illness is the sovereign; those that assist the sovereign are ministers, and those that support the ministers are envoys." "One sovereign and two ministers make a small prescription; one sovereign, three ministers, and five assistants make a medium prescription; one sovereign, three ministers, and nine assistants make a large prescription." "One sovereign and two ministers make an odd-numbered prescription; two sovereigns and four ministers make an even-numbered prescription; two sovereigns and three ministers make an odd-numbered prescription; two sovereigns and six ministers make an even-numbered prescription." "Treatment may be gradual or urgent, and prescriptions may be large or small."
