ABSTRACT
Number of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients tend to increase in middle and older aged people. They have shown a certain degree of improvement with various Western medicine treatments including smoking cessation guidance, rehabilitation, home oxygen therapy, inhalation therapy and so on. However, it is a clinical problem that some elderly people have acute exacerbations frequently due to infectious diseases and have poor prognoses. This time, we experienced an elderly COPD patient with type II respiratory failure. He was repeatedly hospitalized and needed treatment with a ventilator temporarily. We conducted Kampo medical examination on him, and diagnosed that he had cold state in the lungs. So, we administered ryokankyomishingeninto to him. As a result, he recovered dramatically, and he was never hospitalized again due to respiratory failure for a long time. It is suggested that ryokankyomishingeninto may be effective for some COPD patients who have cold state in the lungs.
ABSTRACT
The source of ryokankyomishingeninto, which has been used for chronic respiratory and nasal diseases by using “sunken pulse” as an indication, is the Jin-kui-yao-lue text. We, however, experienced a case of allergic rhinitis presenting with “floating pulse” successfully treated with ryokankyomishingeninto. On the basis of this case, we investigated efficacy with ryokankyomishingeninto in 16 other patients who visited our outpatient clinic from January 2007 to March 2008, and who had the all of same remarks in pulse diagnoses and nasal symptoms, such as nasal obstruction, and rhinorrhea or respiratory symptoms such as wheeze and shortness of breathing. As a result, ryokankyomishingeninto improved symptoms in all these patients. All the adult cases had a “stuck feeling in pit of stomach”. Furthermore, they had either a “water dabbling sound in the stomach”, or “cold area on the epigastrium”.