the Anywhere Clinic

I can't find any information on the properties of fennel leaves or stalks, but pepper, like we thought, is spicy hot, goes into stomach/large intestine (i.e. yangming) meridians, and seems mostly good for warming 'cold heart & abdomen' i.e. epigastric symptoms (e.g., vomiting clear fluid, undigested food in stools, nausea & hiccups with inability to eat). Patient may have "limbs cold as ice." Black pepper (like green/white tea) is the raw unripened least processed form. White is considered stronger than black and better for medicinal purposes; they don't say anything about pink peppercorns, I assume they didn't have them in ancient China.

 

They do have a separate section on Sichuan peppercorn, which is warm instead of hot, goes into spleen, lung, and kidney, and is better at killing parasites. (Pepper is good for "warming the middle and descending the qi, resolving phlegm...harmonizing the stomach" while Sichuan peppercorns are good for "warming the middle and dispelling cold, eliminating damp, stopping pain, killing parasites and resolving fish-related poisons.") It's got a lot of phosphorus and iron, which pepper doesn't have. I can see the painkiller aspect; if you eat something with enough Sichuan peppercorn in it your tongue actually goes numb temporarily. They actually advertise this 'numbingly spicy' as a hallmark of authentic Sichuan cuisine, maybe so you can't taste how spicy the food really is?

 

I wonder what this book would say about ghost pepper if they knew it existed.