Contrary to popular belief Traditional Chinese Medicine is not defined by it's therapeutic modalities and pharmaceuticals. There are many forms of acupuncture and many of the medicinals (herbs and such) are not native Chinese. What distinguishes Traditional Chinese Medicine from other forms of oriental medical practices and from western bio-medicine is that within TCM diagnosis and the resulting treatment protocols are derived through the process of "pattern discrimination" and also disease diagnosis. A patient's patterns are determined by a combination of clincial signs and symptoms, including tongue and pulse diagnosis. The collection and analysis of these signs and symptoms and their distillation in to professionally standaradized patterns allow the practitioner to treat the whole person and to address the underlying imbalances that in the TCM perspective are the underlying causes of specific symptoms or disease processes.
The ability of the TCM practitioner to treat the whole person without side effects is entirely based on pattern discrimination. I take great pleasure within my practice to describe each patient's TCM patterns, how they came about and how we are going to treat them.
Monday, June 30, 2008
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