ABSTRACT
The time of decocting plays an important role in ensuring the clinical efficacy of Chinese medicine decoction and the quality of traditional Chinese medicine, but from ancient times to the present, the judgment of the endpoint of Chinese medicine decoction has always been a technical problem. In this paper, the decocting time and the judgment methods in the Chinese medicine classics "Treatise on Febrile Diseases" and "Treatise on Differentiation and Treatment of Epidemic Febrile Disease" were analyzed. Certain laws of decocting time were found. It was demonstrated that the main factors affecting the decocting time were the disease, the efficacy of the prescriptions, the drug properties, and the characteristics of the medicine, etc. Combined with modern research results, the judgment method of the endpoint of traditional Chinese medicine decoction was expounded, hoping to seek a reasonable scientific basis for the boiling time of Chinese medicine decoction and the extraction process of modern Chinese medicine preparation, and provide a theoretical basis for ensuring the clinical efficacy of Chinese medicine decoction and the quality of Chinese medicine preparations.