There’s a common myth that western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine are at odds. This is not true. Both aim to restore health and prevent disease. The differences between the medicines also bring about strengths. If you know about the strengths of each medicine, then you can make intelligent choices and get the best health care.
One of the ways the two medicines differ is in the way they identify and categorize health problems. This article will explain this difference and help dispel some common myths about incompatibility between the two. I also show why both medicines are correct within the context of their own system.
Since Chinese medicine has been around so long, it long ago established its own methods by which to diagnose and treat health problems. Diagnosing involves taking into account the constitution of the person, the disease mechanism itself, and finally the patient’s reaction to the disease. This is why Traditional Chinese Medicine is called a holistic medicine.
Western medicine has its own diseases categories too. Patients fall into these categories based on their presentation of signs and symptoms, lab results, and medical history. Then based on this, the doctor tells you that you ‘have’ diabetes, the flu, and so on. This method is a good way to discern disease-causing mechanisms. Also in the case of specific pathogens, for example H1N1, western medicine shines by being able to exactly identify the pathogen!
This article is mostly about the differences in those categories and the criteria for fitting in those categories. What western medicine calls hypothyroid doesn’t have one exact corresponding category in Chinese medicine. What Chinese medicine calls blood deficiency doesn’t correspond to any one disease in western medicine. How does this work and what does it mean?
Diagnosing in Chinese medicine starts by trying to break down the patients problems into lists of simple complaints. The categories of disease in Chinese med predate labels such as diabetes, hypothyroid, hypertension, etc…, so the problems need to be understood in common terms that simply reflect what the person is experiencing. For example, the diabetic might be constantly thirsty, or maybe fatigued and have to eat often or they might faint. Excessive thirst, fatigue, and fainting are problems that can be dealt with in Chinese med, but ‘diabetes’ is too… general.
Here is an example of what the process might look like: Person A comes to see a Chinese medicine practitioner and tells them about their problems:
- hypertension,
Acupuncture at Afshin's clinic
- acid reflux, and
- sciatica,
After a bunch of questions, a practitioner might come to understand person A’s problems in Chinese medicine terms like this:
a. gets headaches, especially when angry or stressed,
b. burps up sour liquids after eating, especially greasy foods, and
c. has pain from lower back shooting down back of one leg on certain movements.
Interestingly, and this is important, if person B comes in and ‘has’ the same 1, 2 ,and 3 problems above, after questioning, his Chinese medicine breakdown might look like this:
d. no headaches, tired easy, gets severely dizzy sometimes ‘for no reason’,
e. vomits sour once in a while, especially after salad. Doesn’t eat meat or greasy foods.
f. pain from lower back shooting down side of one leg on certain movements, especially in the morning.
Here is a big point of this article: while in western medicine, both persons A and B ‘have’ the same western-medical-defined problems, in Chinese medicine they are entirely different cases. Does this mean different treatments in Chinese medicine for persons A and B? Most likely. There’s several more steps to diagnosis first, so far we’ve been looking at how the perspective on disease has to shift depending on which medicine is being used.
So this all is one of the reasons why its hard to answer questions like: does acupuncture/Chinese-medicine treat …lupus? The answer is that Chinese medicine definitely treats things like headaches, fatigue, painful and swollen joints, fever, swelling, hair loss, blood-clotting, skin lesions and so on… but we can’t truthfully say that its treating Lupus because that is a badly formed question!! The rest of the answer is that after adequate courses of treatment, someone with lupus might be symptom free and might never experience those problems again. So was the lupus treated? Well, if you never have the problems again, then …
After re-framing the problem in terms that Chinese medicine can understand, then the practitioner asks a bunch of questions and does some sort of body analysis to diagnose you in Chinese medicine terms. The body analysis is most often taking your pulse, and looking at your tongue. In my practice I also feel your abdomen. There are other methods too. The way this information is interpreted is a huge subject, but lets just say it leads to a diagnosis that is specifically true in the context and practice of traditional Chinese medicine.
So a person could ‘have’ hypertension in the western medical context, and its also true that they ‘have’ whatever the Chinese medicine diagnosis is also.
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