Supreme Healing Methods of the Great Chinese Warriors

The arts of practicing medicine and fighting may seemingly make for strange bedfellows, especially to westerners. But, in China, these two arts have been closely associated for almost 2,000 years.

The assimilation of these skills by Chinese warriors derived from centuries of civil dissension and brutal combat. Injured warriors needed to return to the battlefield and resume their combat duties as soon as possible. Aside from direct warfare, even the training process for armies using the martial arts was physically brutal and taxing. Broken bones, joint dislocations, sprains, strains, and contusions occurred frequently in both training and combat. The above factors largely contributed to the ingenuity used to make treatment of these injuries as effective and simplistic as possible. Shaolin monks, martial arts masters, and Taoists spent centuries on the development of herbal formulas to treat anything from a fractured bone to puncture wounds.

Considering the modernization of medicine through antibiotics, analgesic medications, and anti-inflammatory medications, it might be easy to assume that societies of the past suffered great loss of life from even the most minor injuries. However, this is a far from accurate assumption. The Chinese cleverly turned to the properties of herbal substances to cease infection, pain, and the inflammatory process and help regenerate tissue.