The Traditional Medicine of China :: China Chinese Culture Medicine Health Essays

The handed- vote down Medicine of China Traditional medicine of China has a long historical and cultural ground dating back almost 2500 years. The ancient Chinese people were adequateto reach a level of social st baron that included the ability to treat diseaseof emotional, physical, and spiritual origins. Although a belief in invigorate asthe ca substance abuse of disease has remained in China even to the personate day, the viewthat the body obeyed a natural order struck a chord in the intellectual elite ofancient China. It was this elite f either apart that refined and developed these ideasover many centuries.(1) The ideas that the ancient Chinese had about the organs of the body, andtheir functions, as well as the causes and development of disease, show boastfuldifferences when compared with Western medicine.(2) The Chinese do not think of theory, as we do in the West, as needing tobe proven to reach the highest degree of truth. A Chinese doctor shadower look a tthe kidney as a machine and think of it as a reflection of universe.(2) He canapply two different disease classification systems, cold deterioration or warm damagewhere he feels it is appropriate, without being deterred by contradictions in the midst of the two.(3)One (Western) method of gaining knowledge is analysis. It is the methodof breaking things into component move to understand the whole. This methodhas been applied in China, but not to the aforesaid(prenominal) level as in the West. Analysisis one of the measurable features of all western modern science and technology.In fact, the analytical approach is the bottom of western medicine, and it ispart of the Western mindset.(4)Analysis is not as important to Chinese medicine as in the West. Theancient Chinese did use analysis in their investigation of the human body, butto a lesser degree. Analysis provided some important insights into the workingsof the human body. The ancient Chinese knew, for example, that the stomach andintestines were organs of digestion, and that the lung drew air from theenvironment.(5) The origins of Chinas medical knowledge is not certain. They observedphenomenon, and identified relationships and patterns. They compared wholephenomena in the body, and watched how they related to each other.(6) This is shown by qi, an entity that Westerners find hard toconceptualize, since it does not fit any known scientific category.(7) Qi isthought to be the universal energy that runs everything, right down to the