Today's market is flooded with diverse health products, some of which genuinely benefit human health. Take medicinal pillows, for instance: by embedding different herbs within the pillow, they exert varied effects on the body. These herbs interact with the body through skin contact and sensory stimulation, influencing nerves, muscles, joints, and sensory systems like smell and taste. This allows the body to absorb the "medicinal properties," thereby achieving therapeutic and preventive effects. Naturally, medicinal pillows come in many varieties, each with distinct functions.Below, let's explore medicinal pillows with unique therapeutic properties.
Magnetic Stone Pillow: Features embedded magnetic stones within a wooden pillow. Ancient texts record that sleeping on such a pillow enhances vision, enabling one to "read fine print at night," demonstrating early knowledge of magnetic therapy. Magnetic stones stimulate local blood circulation, accelerate blood flow, promote metabolism, and boost immunity.Magnetic stone pillows are suitable for conditions such as hypertension, headaches, dizziness, neuralgia, blurred vision, and impaired eyesight.
Chrysanthemum Pillow: This pillow is made by stuffing dried chrysanthemum flowers into a cloth bag. Li Shizhen discussed in his Compendium of Materia Medica that "using chrysanthemum as a pillow improves eyesight."Chrysanthemum flowers possess a slightly cold nature, offering benefits such as clearing heat, dispelling wind, calming the liver, and improving vision. They are suitable for headaches, dizziness, colds with fever, boils and abscesses, wind-heat red eyes, blurred vision, and high blood pressure. There are also medicinal pillows primarily made with chrysanthemum flowers, supplemented with appropriate amounts of mung bean skins, black bean skins, and other ingredients.This pillow offers therapeutic benefits for headaches, migraines, dizziness, and neurasthenia stemming from hypertension, sinusitis, otitis media, and ocular disorders. Mung Bean Pillow: Mung beans possess a cold nature, clearing heat, detoxifying, preventing heatstroke, quenching thirst, promoting urination, and reducing swelling. Thus, they provide anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects for headaches, brain heat, red eyes, and sore throats.Tea Leaf Pillow: Sun-dry used tea leaves from tea shops, mix in a small amount of jasmine tea, blend well, and stuff into a pillow. Tea leaves contain aromatic oils, caffeine, theophylline, theobromine, and tannins. They are cold in nature and bitter in taste, offering benefits such as reducing internal heat, clearing heat, detoxifying, improving vision, relieving summer heat, sterilizing, and promoting urination.It can invigorate the mind, relieve fatigue, aid digestion, and promote urination. Therefore, tea leaf pillows offer significant therapeutic benefits and are suitable for conditions such as hypertension, neurasthenia, dizziness, blurred vision, cold headaches, and rhinitis.
Five-Leaf Pillow: This pillow blends equal parts dried mulberry leaves, bamboo leaves, willow leaves, lotus leaves, and persimmon leaves. Since all five leaves possess bitter and cold properties, they share the functions of clearing heat, reducing fire, and calming the mind. Thus, it is highly suitable for treating heat-related conditions such as high fever, headache, summer heat-induced dizziness, red and blurry eyes, and sore throat.
Eye-Brightening Pillow: Filled with equal parts white chrysanthemum flowers, mung bean skins, buckwheat hulls, mulberry leaves, and cassia seeds, this pillow treats blurred vision, eye redness, and tearing.The aromatic essence of these fruits, combined with the stimulating, analgesic, and wind-dispelling properties of tangerine peel; the heat-reducing and lung-moistening effects of pear peel; the qi-nourishing and blood pressure-lowering benefits of apple peel; the heat-clearing and irritability-relieving qualities of persimmon peel; and the heat-clearing and summer-heat-relieving properties of watermelon peel, make the Five Peel Pillow suitable for treating neurasthenia, dizziness, brain congestion, irritability, and shortness of breath.
External Application Pillow: A medicinal pillow that can be used for resting or applied directly to affected areas. For conditions like cold-type stomach pain, abdominal pain, or menstrual cramps, a small pillow filled with warming herbs such as turmeric, zedoary, curcuma, cloves, cinnamon twigs, and cassia bark can be placed under the head or applied to painful areas to dispel cold and relieve pain.
For patients with muscle soreness, lumbar muscle strain, or degenerative spondylitis, a small medicinal pillow filled with Aconitum carmichaeli, Aconitum kusnezoffii, Asarum sieboldii, Cinnamomum cassia, Cinnamomum cassia bark, Clove, Curcuma zedoaria, Curcuma longa, Lindera aggregata, Cyperus rotundus, and Borneol can be used. It has the effects of dispersing cold, promoting blood circulation, reducing inflammation, and relieving itching.