Abstract: Objective To explore the treatment rules in ancient diet-therapy prescriptions for stomachache using data mining. Methods Diet-therapy prescriptions for stomachache in Chinese Medicinal Diet Dictionary, Full Recording of Food Therapy Recipes of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Dictionary of Traditional Chinese Medicine Prescriptions were collected. The information of source, composition, and taking time were extracted. SPSS Statistics 22.0 was used for frequency analysis and cluster analysis. The Apriori algorithm in SPSS Modeler 18.0 was applied to analyze the association rules of food. Results Seventy-five diet-therapy prescriptions were collected, including 60 kinds of food. Galangal（6.7%）, japonica rice（5.8%）, and dried ginger（5.8%）were used frequently. In terms of food performance, the property was mainly warm; the flavors were mainly sweet, pungent, and bitter; stomach meridian, spleen meridian and lung meridian were the main meridians. There were 11 kinds of dosage forms, of which congee was the most（24%）. The most common taking time was on an empty stomach（24%）.The main syndromes were cold evil invading the stomach and deficient cold of spleen and stomach. Three cluster groups were obtained by cluster analysis. For cold stomachache, the common food combination was wheat flour and pepper. For deficient cold of spleen and stomach, common combinations were ginseng and dried ginger, tangerine peel and pepper, galangal, amomum tsao-ko. For liver and stomach qi stagnation, the common combination was ginger and tangerine peel, and licorice. Conclusion In traditional Chinese medicine, when treating stomachache, more attention is paid to warming the middle and nourishing deficiency, regulating the balance of the rise and fall of the qi, selecting “dredging” based on pathogeny, choosing food according to syndrome differentiation, advocating combined use of food with cold property and heat property, making good use of “pungency and sweetness transforming into yang”.

Key words: stomachache, data mining, treating rule, diet therapy, dietary care