Traditional Chinese medicine (also known as TCM or T.C.M., Simplified Chinese: ä¸åŒ»å¦; Traditional Chinese: ä¸é†«å¸; pinyin: ZhÅngyÄ« xué) is a range of traditional medical practices used in China that developed over several thousand years. These practices include herbal medicine, acupuncture, and massage. TCM is a form of Oriental medicine, which includes other traditional East Asian medical systems such as traditional Japanese and Korean medicine. TCM says processes of the human body are interrelated and constantly interact with the environment. Therefore the theory looks for the signs of disharmony in the external and internal environment of a person in order to understand, treat and prevent illness and disease.
TCM theory is based on a number of philosophical frameworks including the Theory of Yin-yang, the Five Elements, the human body Meridian system, Zang Fu organ theory, and others. Diagnosis and treatment are conducted with reference to these concepts. TCM does not usually operate within a western scientific paradigm but some practitioners make efforts to bring practices into an evidence-based medicine framework.
History
Much of the philosophy of traditional Chinese medicine derived from Taoist philosophy, and reflects the classical Chinese belief that individual human experiences express causative principles effective in the environment at all scales. These causative principles, whether material, essential, or spiritual, correlate as the expression of the fates decreed by heaven.
During the golden age of his reign from 2696 to 2598 B.C, as a result of a dialogue with his minister Ch’i Pai, the Yellow Emperor is supposed by Chinese tradition to have composed his Neijing Suwen (?? ??) or Basic Questions of Internal Medicine, also known as the Huangdi Neijing. Modern scholarly opinion holds that the extant text of this title was compiled by an eponymous scholar between the Chou and Han dynasties more than two thousand years later than tradition reports, although some parts of the extant work may have originated as early as 1000 B.C.
During the Han dynasty, Chang Chung-Ching, who was mayor of Chang-sha toward the end of the 2nd century AD, wrote a Treatise on Typhoid Fever, which contains the earliest known reference to Neijing Suwen. The Chin dynasty practitioner and advocate of acupuncture and moxibustion, Huang-fu Mi (215 – 282 AD), also quoted the Yellow Emperor in his Chia I Ching, ca. 265 AD. During the Tang dynasty, Wang Ping claimed to have located a copy of the originals of the Neijing Suwen, which he expanded and edited substantially. This work was revisited by an imperial commission during the 11th century AD.
However, Classical Chinese Medicine (CCM) is notably different from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The Nationalist government at that time elected to abandon and outlaw the practice of CCM as it did not want China to be left behind by scientific progress. For 30 years, CCM was forbidden in China and several people were prosecuted by the government for engaging in CCM. In the 1960′s, Mao Zedong finally decided that the government could not continue to outlaw the use of CCM. He commissioned the top 10 doctors (M.D.’s) to take a survey of CCM and create a standardized format for its application. This standardized form is now known as TCM.
Today, TCM is what is taught in nearly all those medical schools in China, most of Asia and Northern America, that teach traditional medical practices at all. To learn CCM typically one must be part of a family lineage of medicine. Recently, there has been a resurgence in interest in CCM in China, Europe and United States, as a specialty.[citation needed] Jeffrey Yuen, allegedly of the 88th generation of a sect of CCM has lead this renewed interest in CCM.[citation needed]
Contact with Western culture and medicine has not displaced TCM. While there may be many sociological and anthropological factors involved in the persistent practice, two reasons are most obvious in the westward spread of TCM in recent decades. Firstly, TCM practices are believed by many to be very effective, sometimes offering palliative efficacy where the best practices of Western medicine fail, especially for routine ailments such as flu and allergies, and managing to avoid the toxicity of some chemically composed medicines. Secondly, TCM provides the only care available to some people when resources are inadequate to import Western medical technologies.
TCM formed part of the barefoot doctor program in the People’s Republic of China, which extended public health into rural areas. A large motivation behind the interest in TCM by both individuals in China and the PRC government is that the cost of training a TCM practitioner and staffing a TCM hospital is considerably less than that of a practitioner of Western medicine; hence TCM has been seen as an integral part of extending health services in China.
Attitudes toward TCM in China have been strongly influenced by Marxism and the May Fourth Movement. The notion of supernatural forces runs counter to the Marxist belief in dialectical materialism and strikes many Chinese as feudalistic and superstitious. Modern Chinese descriptions of traditional Chinese medicine tend to deemphasize the cosmological aspects of TCM and emphasize its compatibility with modern science and technology.
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