Diagnostics and Therapeutics of Modern Diseases in Traditional Chinese Medicine

In order to treat patients successfully, a practicing doctor must know three essential things: first, the nature of the patient's physical conditions, which refers to their body types; second, the nature of the disease under treatment, which refer to the differentiation regarding syndromes of diseases; third, the nature of therapeutic agents in use, which refer to the therapeutic effects of formulas, herbs, acupuncture points, and foods, etc. Historically speaking, before Yellow Emperor's Classics was published the documents listed over 50 symptoms and diseases without syndromes. In Yellow Emperor's Classics, over 300 symptoms and diseases are mentioned with some syndromes mentioned, such as cold syndrome, deficiency syndrome, and hot syndrome, etc. A famous doctor said, "Any doctor who fails to seek the truth of differentiating between syndromes, merely vainly hoping to attain wishful herbal remedies, is not a real doctor in the truest sense of the term." As the number of syndromes have continued to increase, close to 300 in total, syndromes differentiation become a serious and complicated issue in traditional Chinses medicine. On the one hand, a disease must be traced back to its syndrome before it can be properly treated. Therefore, in Chinese medicine, a doctor treats syndromes, not diseases as such. One the other hand, a given symptom or disease under treatment may reach over 10 or 20, or even more syndromes, how can traditional method of syndromes differentiation by reasoning and speculation achieve it. In April 1984 a national conference of traditional Chinese medicine was held in China. Again in May of the same year, another similar conference was held again, just two years before my college was established. At both national conferences, over seventy experts from twenty-seven organizations attended to discuss the important issue of differentiation with respect to syndromes.