Danggui Shaoyao San

About

Danggui Shaoyao San first appeared 1,850 years ago as part of the chapter about pregnancy ailments in Zhang Zhongjing’s classic formula compendium on complex disorders, Essentials from the Golden Cabinet (Jingui yaolüe). It is one of several remedies in Zhang’s clinical textbook that combines the three Blood tonic herbs tang-kuei, peony, and ligusticum. Danggui Shaoyao San can thus be regarded as the best known classical precursor to the universal Blood tonic Siwu Tang (Four Substance Decoction), a stock item in most Asian pharmacies and food markets for the last millennium. Today, Danggui Shaoyao San is still popular among Oriental medicine practitioners who specialize in traditional gynecology and obstetrics, especially in Japan. Renowned for its overall safety and ability to “stabilize the fetus”, this remedy is often prescribed as a preventative therapy to ensure a healthy pregnancy and smooth labor. For the same reasons, Danggui Shaoyao San is often prescribed to increase fertility in female patients who exhibit symptoms of Blood deficiency and/or fluid accumulation. However, the simple yet concise design of this remedy also makes it suitable to treat a wide variety of deficiency related disorders that are not gender specific. The extremely high amount of peony in the original formula design—more than five times as much as tang-kuei—predestinates it for the treatment of disorders involving pain in the lower abdomen.