Educational information, not medical advice — ask your doctor or midwife.
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Qin Jiao Bie Jia San is a classic Chinese herbal formula. It is one named recipe of about eight herbs, not a mix you build yourself. Its English name is Large Gentian and Soft-Shelled Turtle Shell Powder.
It is used in Chinese medicine for a low fever that creeps up in the late afternoon or at night. The same picture includes night sweats, a dry cough, thirst and slow weight loss.
Old texts tied that pattern to long wasting illness. The formula has been in use for nearly 700 years, but we found no published human trials of the formula itself. A long history of use is not proof that something works, so treat this as traditional, not proven.
No one has shown how this formula acts in the body.
In Chinese medicine terms, it is said to clear heat that sits deep in the body and to build up yin. Yin means the body's cooling, moist side. Practitioners also say it frees stuck qi, or energy, in the chest and sides.
Lab and animal work on the single herbs shows some fever-lowering and swelling-lowering effects. That work does not tell us what the whole powder does in a person. The mixture itself has not been tested in a good human trial that we could find.
Most often you will meet it as a loose powder, or as a tea made by boiling the herbs.
Common forms are raw herbs to cook at home, a fine powder stirred into warm water, granules that dissolve, and pills or capsules sold as a patent medicine.
Quality varies a lot. Some imported patent medicines have been found to hold lead, mercury or hidden drug ingredients. Buy only from a seller who tests each batch and will show you the test result.
The formula comes from Wei Yi-Lin's book Shi Yi De Xiao Fang, written in 1345 during the Yuan dynasty in China.
It was aimed at 'steaming bone fever', a slow deep fever with night sweats and weight loss. Doctors of that time used it for long illnesses that today would often be called tuberculosis, a lung infection.
It is still taught in Chinese medicine schools and still appears in standard formula textbooks.
See a doctor within a few days if you have night sweats most nights, a fever that keeps coming back, or weight loss you did not plan. These can be signs of infection, thyroid trouble or a blood problem that needs testing.
Stop the formula and see a doctor the same day if your skin or the whites of your eyes turn yellow, your urine goes dark, your stools turn pale, or you feel unusually sick and tired. These can mean liver injury.
Get urgent care if you cough up blood, bleed and cannot stop it, bruise all over, or become short of breath.
Evidence grades and traditional-use labels are explained in our methodology. Nothing here is medical advice.
Reviewed by the HealisticMD editorial team How we grade evidence →
The published evidence for Qin Jiao Bie Jia San is weak or absent. That usually means no controlled trial has tested it, not that a trial found it ineffective — the two are different, and we grade only what has been published.
What it is typically used for, usual dose, cautions, and the study behind it where real trial data exists.
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