Chinese Traditional Medicine: A Practitioner's View

Extract

China had a system of medicine long before the advent of scientific medicine in the West. The first book about it, the Su Wen Nei Ching, was written about 300 B.C., and its detailed description of some medical phenomena cannot be surpassed even today. Despite the fact that much of the terminology is metaphysical, this traditional system of Chinese medicine is at the same time very much down to earth, being largely the result of minute observations. Consequently the symptoms of many diseases are much better described in traditional Chinese textbooks than in their modern scientific Western counterparts. Reading the Chinese books indeed opens up a new vista to a Western doctor, transforming the small range of obvious symptoms he learned at a Western medical school into a vast panorama of interconnected phenomena. It would seem that, with his reliance on laboratory procedures, the Western doctor may have been gradually losing this art of close observation; perhaps it is only artists who retain it today.