Fundamental Precepts of Oriental Medicine

The concepts and point of view of Oriental medicine are quite different from those of the Western world.  To understand a little better it helps to look at some of the underlying precepts of Oriental medicine.

‘Treat the Person, Not the Disease’

In Oriental medicine it is said that we treat the person not the disease.  Two of the implications of this way of practicing are that it leads to a truly holistic form of medicine, and secondly, there is near freedom from side-effects.

1. Truly ‘Holistic’

The gaze of oriental medicine expands outward from a sign or symptom to encompass the whole body. In fact signs and symptoms cannot be understood in isolation; they are interpreted in the context of the organism as a whole.  Thus, information about all aspects of the body are woven together to create a picture of the state of balance of the person.  From this point of view relationships are more important than causality. This approach provides a framework to look beyond the physical body and understand how imbalance fits into the overall picture of a person’s life

2. Freedom from Side-effects

Because we consider the whole person, rather than just the imbalances they may be experiencing, treatment is necessarily tailored to the individual.  This includes care with acupuncture and herbs as well as diet and lifestyle recommendations. All aspects of care customized to the person so there is little chance of side-effects.

‘Doctor as Gardener’ vs ‘Doctor as Mechanic’

In the view of Oriental medicine the practitioner would be conceived of as being like a gardener. In the West there seems to be the tendency to think of those in the medical profession as mechanics: we seek care when there is a problem and things are not running smooth, we want a quick explanation and an even quicker remedy so that we can continue to drive as we always have. A human being defies such simple conceptions. It is estimated that at any given moment there are six trillion reactions taking place in the body.  Further more, all of these reactions and processes are coordinated with one another.  Faced with this level of complexity it is clear that if the human mind were in charge of all this the body could not live for more than a few seconds. 

Perhaps the realization of this truth lead Voltaire to comment that the role of the physician is to “…amuse the patient while nature cures the disease.”  A doctor doesn’t heal a person anymore than a gardener makes a garden grow.  The role of the gardener is to be an ally to the garden; to encourage conditions that allow the garden to flourish, remove some weeds, and keep the paths clear.  In the same way, the doctor sets the stage and makes conditions ripe for healing to take place.

‘People are a microcosm of the natural world’

Chinese medicine and many other ancient wisdom traditions have known for thousands of years what quantum physics has recently discovered: that we are not separate from the world around us.  This can be illustrated by the concept of a ‘fractal’, which is being used to predict such complex phenomena as coastline erosion.  A fractal is a shape that is self-similar at all levels of magnification.  What this means is that if one were to magnify a part of this it would still retain the characteristics of the whole. Examples of this abound; consider that the vein structure of a leaf mirrors the branch structures of the tree.

This connectedness can be seen in Oriental medicine in many ways.  Two in particular are that metaphors of the natural world are used to explain processes within people, and that a part of a person can be used to understand the whole.

1.  Metaphors of the natural world:

Diverse metaphors of nature are used to explain human physiology and pathology.  The flow of rivers from their source to the sea is compared to circulation within the body.  This is reflected in many of the names of acupuncture points. Climatic factors such as wind, dryness, fire and cold are used to understand pathological situations in people. For example, the characteristic of wind in nature is that it moves from place to place, changes rapidly, and makes the tops of trees sway.  Conditions as varied as wandering joint pain, skin diseases like urticaria, allergies, tics and tremors can be compared with ‘wind’ in our internal climate.

2.  A part reflects the whole:

Two of the main diagnostic techniques in Oriental medicine employ a portion of the body to examine the state of the whole.  These are tongue and pulse diagnosis.  Over centuries of observation practitioners of Oriental medicine mapped out correspondences between different areas of the tongue and different parts of the body.  Further development of tongue diagnosis lead to examining the color of the tongue, the coating and it color, texture and distribution, and other distinguishing features to understand the internal state of the body.  Pulse diagnosis involves feeling the pulses on three different positions on each radial artery at the wrist. Each of these positions reflects the state of a different system in the body.  In addition to these correspondences there are 28 different adjectives that are used to describe the quality of the pulses with such names as: slippery, wiry, and choppy.  When skillfully interpreted these techniques can reveal an amazing amount about a person’s state of health.