Vomiting Nonstop After Pregnancy, Spinning Head, Everything Comes Back Up?
Patient search terms: morning sickness / vomiting during pregnancy / can’t stop throwing up / dizzy from vomiting / everything comes back up / bitter taste in the mouth
Medical terms for this condition: severe pregnancy vomiting (妊娠恶阻) · liver fire attacking the stomach · rebelling fetal qi
The opening: pregnancy should be joyful — but this expectant mother was vomiting herself to pieces
The doctor in today’s case is Doctor Zhu Danxi of the Yuan dynasty — one of the Four Great Masters of Jin-Yuan medicine, a physician who prized reasoning above all. Today’s case is about something every expectant mother knows well: morning sickness.
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Vomiting after pregnancy is common — for most women it’s a normal reaction. But the vomiting in this case was not ordinary morning sickness. It was vomiting to the point of dizziness, blurred vision, and being completely unable to eat. Some people say she even threw up bile. At that level it’s serious — a doctor must be called.
Who was the patient? Nearly thirty — in ancient times, that was a “late-age mother”
The patient was nearly thirty years old, and she had just entered her second month of pregnancy.
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Don’t laugh — in ancient times girls married in their early teens, so having a baby at thirty was considered very late. Today, a thirty-year-old pregnancy is perfectly normal, but back then, at that age, the body’s reserves were no longer so generous. Doctor Zhu Danxi will come back to this point again and again.
The symptoms: vomiting until the world spun, unable even to take water
Two months into the pregnancy, the vomiting began — and it was extremely severe: dizziness and spinning vision, unable to eat — she was dizzy, threw up everything she ate, and completely lost control.
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Vomiting at this level is torture. Some pregnant women vomit so hard that bile comes up. When you can’t keep down food or water, you quickly become depleted — and the baby is in danger too.
The first doctor’s approach: she’s pregnant — quick, build her up!
The family called a doctor right away. The doctor took one look and thought: she’s pregnant — we must not use strong medicine carelessly! And look how weak she is; we can’t risk harming the fetus. So he decided to tonify and stabilize the pregnancy, prescribing ren shen (ginseng), bai zhu (atractylodes), plus chuan xiong (ligusticum), chen pi (tangerine peel) and fu ling (poria).
The result? After five to seven days of tonics, she only got worse — the vomiting intensified.
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Here’s where the trouble started. The first doctor’s thinking wasn’t entirely wrong — this patient really was deficient, and “tonify” was the right direction in general. But he missed one thing: fire. When a patient has liver fire, piling on ginseng and atractylodes isn’t nourishing the body — it’s pouring oil on the flames.
Doctor Zhu Danxi takes the pulse: taut as a guitar string — this came from anger
The tonics had made things worse, so the family urgently called Doctor Zhu Danxi. When he felt the pulse, he found it wiry (xian) — taut like a guitar string, tightly stretched — and the left pulse was weak.
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: A wiry pulse points to the emotions — this is the signature of liver qi. Doctor Zhu Danxi concluded: this woman’s condition came from accumulated anger — sometime during the pregnancy she had flown into a rage over something, and the liver qi surged upward. On top of that, she was carrying a child, and fetal qi also surges upward. Two currents of qi pushing up together — how could she not vomit? Using ginseng and atractylodes at this moment was like adding fuel to a liver-fire blaze. The more she was tonified, the worse she got.
First prescription: a tiny pill made from a single herb
Doctor Zhu Danxi was unhurried. He opened with a simple formula: take twenty-four pills of Yiqing Wan, sent down with Fu Ling Tang (Poria decoction).
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: The fu ling in the decoction drains dampness and strengthens the spleen and stomach. The Yiqing Wan is even simpler — the whole formula is one single herb: huang lian (coptis), which specifically drains heart and liver fire. Doctor Zhu Danxi used this little pill for exactly this condition: severe pregnancy vomiting caused by heat. There’s a refinement here: huang lian is bitter and cold, and taken directly it injures the stomach. So Doctor Zhu Danxi ground the coptis into powder and formed it into pills using steamed dough (zheng bing) — the dough is made of flour, and this excipient protects the spleen and stomach, keeping the cold nature of coptis from harming the stomach. You see — even a single herb is handled with layers of care.
A setback: the vomiting eased, but the mouth turned bitter and sour
After five days of the pills, the vomiting improved somewhat. But when Doctor Zhu Danxi took the pulse again, it was still rapid (shu) — beating fast — and the patient’s mouth was dry and bitter.
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Remember this rule of thumb: if the mouth is dry and bitter, the patient basically has liver fire. A bitter taste rarely appears in any other condition — it’s almost always a sign of liver fire. So Doctor Zhu Danxi knew at once: the liver fire hadn’t been cleared yet.
There was another detail: the woman would drink just a little porridge and her mouth would turn sour.
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: What’s that about? Doctor Zhu Danxi explained it very clearly: stagnant qi was lodged between the diaphragm — dampness was stuck in the chest and diaphragm. When dampness blocks the area, eating starchy food makes the mouth turn sour easily. Have you ever had this experience? Some people drink the same shan yao (Chinese yam) powder and it tastes sweet — others sip it and the mouth fills with sourness, and they wonder if the powder has gone bad. It hasn’t. It’s the dampness in your body. Chinese medicine says the spleen opens into the mouth — whatever is wrong with the spleen and stomach shows up in the mouth. Another example: people whose kidney essence is severely depleted find everything tastes salty — even a little salt is unbearable. That’s the kidney protecting itself, telling you not to eat salty food, because your kidneys couldn’t take it.
Second prescription: open the qi and dry the dampness, while draining fire harder
This time Doctor Zhu Danxi’s formula was comprehensive: chuan xiong and chen pi to move qi, zhi zi (gardenia) to clear fire, sheng jiang (fresh ginger) as a counterweight — fearing the formula was too cold, he added ginger to protect the stomach — and fu ling again to drain dampness and strengthen the spleen. At the same time, the Yiqing Wan was increased to fifty pills.
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: This is how you open the road — dampness is stuck at the chest and diaphragm and the qi mechanism is blocked. Draining fire alone won’t do it; you first have to open the qi passage, then add the fire-clearing herbs. Once the road is open and the fire is cleared, only then can the medicine be absorbed.
After more than ten doses, all the remaining symptoms settled — the vomiting, the bitter mouth, the sour mouth — all resolved.
Recovery: one small problem remained, and then Doctor Zhu Danxi said something astonishing
The symptoms were gone, but one issue remained: her appetite hadn’t returned — she could only eat half her normal amount, and soon after eating she was hungry again.
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Doctor Zhu Danxi said there was still fire — the liver heat hadn’t fully settled. When there’s fire, the body’s functions run fast; in Chinese medicine this is called xiao gu shan ji (消谷善饥) — “digesting grain quickly and always hungry.” What you eat is digested rapidly, so you’re hungry soon. At this point Doctor Zhu Danxi had the woman take twenty pills of Yiqing Wan with plain boiled water, and after another twenty days, every symptom vanished.
By all rights, with the illness cured, everyone should have celebrated. But when Doctor Zhu Danxi took her pulse at this stage, he found: both hands were calm and even — yet the left pulse was extremely weak. He knew in his heart, and said plainly: this pregnancy will not hold — the fetus could not be kept.
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Why? This woman was older, and her upright qi (zheng qi, 正气) was already insufficient. During the pregnancy she had flown into a rage, and liver fire, riding on fetal qi, had surged upward. On top of that, the first doctor had mistakenly used tonics and poured oil on the fire. Fire disturbs the fetus — it may not have miscarried right then, but the fetus had already been damaged. Doctor Zhu Danxi saw this long before, but he didn’t say it aloud — he focused first on treating the mother.
Protecting the mother: the most important principle in this case
Since the pregnancy couldn’t be saved, Doctor Zhu Danxi’s strategy was: protect the mother first. Now that the liver qi was calm and the fire was cleared, he finally began using ren shen (ginseng) and bai zhu (atractylodes) to build the woman up — to restore her upright qi and prevent the body from collapsing after the miscarriage.
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Notice the order: while liver fire is raging, never tonify; only after the fire is cleared may you tonify. Doctor Zhu Danxi tonified with ginseng and atractylodes for a month — and then the pregnancy ended on its own — and the mother came through calm and unharmed, her body unaffected. In that era, to manage a case this way was no small feat.
A bonus lesson: why do you get “heat” every time you take tonics?
The most valuable part of this case is how Doctor Zhu Danxi laid out the relationship between tonifying and draining. Where did the first doctor go wrong? He tonified at the very moment the liver fire was blazing.
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Many people today know the feeling: every time you take a tonic, you get “heat” — a little huang qi (astragalus) makes your teeth ache; take any nourishing supplement and fire flares upward. There are two main situations. First: you have liver fire — fire on top of tonics means pouring oil on the flames. Second: yin deficiency — your yin fluids are insufficient, but you’ve taken warming yang herbs; yin can’t match the yang, and the fire grows larger. So before taking tonics, examine yourself: if there’s liver fire, first soothe the liver, regulate the qi, and drain the fire (Jia Wei Xiao Yao Wan — “Augmented Free and Easy Powder” — plus a foot soak works well), open the qi mechanism, and then the tonic can go in; if there’s yin deficiency, nourish the yin first. There’s also a third situation: the spleen and stomach are extremely weak with heavy dampness — “deficient people cannot be tonified”; the roads are blocked, so the tonic can’t be transported. In that case, follow Doctor Zhu Danxi’s example: use fu ling to drain dampness, chuan xiong and chen pi to move qi — open the road first, then tonify. If you ignore these two points, you’ll flare up every time you take a tonic — and you’ll blame the tonic, when actually the order was wrong.
Epilogue
In this case, sadly, the baby could not be saved — but Doctor Zhu Danxi preserved the mother through it all, keeping her safe and well. That is the measure of a true physician. I hope you remember this principle: the tonifying method must be used after clearing the obstacles — first clear the fire, first open the road, then nourish. That is the real lesson Doctor Zhu Danxi left us.
What to take away: if a pregnant woman is vomiting violently with a bitter mouth and a taut pulse, don’t reflexively reach for tonics — check for liver fire first. And for anyone who flares up with every tonic, the cure is often not a different tonic but a different order: clear the fire, open the passages, and only then build the body up.
Arranged from Doctor Luo Dalun’s explanation of Doctor Zhu Danxi’s case records.