Traditional Medicine

Nowadays, it is common for people to expect to live up to eighty years old or more, compare to people who live in eighteenth century mostly live up to forty years old. In 2000, the infant mortality rate falled by eighty percent since 1950 and between 1970 and 1992, infectious diseases nearly halved. These statistics clearly show that modern medicine has advanced so much alongside with the new treatments and marvelous surgery (Porter, 1997). Medicine has become one of the most important aspect of humans, which no other species acquire. The root of medicine may be found in the philosophical and religious traditions it have grown out of.

“Traditional medicine is the sum total of the knowledge, skills, and practices based on the theories, beliefs, and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness” ( World Health Organization, nd).

Modern medicine mostly used in today hospital is Western medicine, which is believed to be originated from Ancient Egypt medicine about 500 years ago. This claim is supported by the archeological evidence in “medical instruments, art pieces and at least seven medical papyruses” in Ancient Egypt ( Carlos, 2005).

Modern medicine and Traditional medicine are different in terms of their philosophy, their medical tools and their treatments to the disease. “Western medicine is based on biomedical science” which emphasizes on collecting data and evidence.Due to analytical and reductive methods, Western medicine is very efficacy in comprehending “the structure and function of the human body and diseases-causing agents such as bacteria, fungi, protozoa, virus, etc” (Zhange, nd). Thanks to collective scientific data from anatomy, histology, cytology, ultra-structure, molecular biology and sub-molecular biology, the Western biology has been provided with “the clear and detailed view of the physical and chemical structures of body”. Moreover, within few years scientists have gained a lot of insight about our fundamental gene make-up (Zhange, nd).

The progress in today’s health care has contributed tremendously in the quality of modern people’s life, setting the Western medicine to be the most famous medicine in the world. Despite how advanced the Western medicine has accomplished, its weakness to cope up with clinical disease is still seen because its “unified therapeutic strategy”, treating one disease with one treatment, cannot meet the variety of people since people are different. Another weakness of Western medicine is that its linear and reductive methods, focusing on “its sub-system alone” does not fit the real human body, which is “open, large, and complex system.

Traditional Chinese medicine or TCM was created in the old day in the absence of scientific data but it is a product of an accumulated clinical observations gathered over century of practice. Traditional Chinese practitioners treats the patient’s body as a whole during the course of disease and aims to restore the person in the balance state. In TCM, a healthy person is a person who has balance within body and with the natural environment outside the body (Zhange, nd). However, in TCM, the physical symptoms and signs, called output, and pathogenic factors, herbs, diet and treatment, called input are observed without the detail of what is happening inside the body system. Moreover, the decision about the diagnosis and treatment are individualized for each patient and the same protocol may not be able to repeat for other patients. Therefore , the efficacy of TCM strongly relies on the the skill and experience of the practitioner (Zhange, nd).

The seriously ill girl in China who needed to undergo “an open heart surgey” in hospital in Shuighua. She chose to take the acupuncture instead of painkilling medicine or agesnestic. She will be concious during the whole surgery. The doctor said acupuncture is more friendly than agenestic because it give less harm to the body. After the intensive surgery, she recovered well and faster. Moreover, the acupunture is a fourth time cheaper than agenestic. In UK, acupuncture is booming. A million of people in UK take acupuncture each year. Some people are convinced that acupuncture is working and modern medicine has failed. For example, the girl who suffered from NA, after tried the conventional medicine but got no better result. However, after taking acupuncure a few week, she felt normal again. Acupunture beleived that our illness come from the imbalanbce of your life energy. The Che or life energy, the Chinese believe, is the universal energy that run through everybody.

Therefore, acupuncture is the art to manipulate the life energy. The acupuncture prationioner can tell or diagnose the patient’s health problem by merely looking at the tounge such as what the colour each different part of the toung. The noodel in each different part of the body will help the patient differently. In certain hospitals in China, the patient are given the choices between the modern medicine or the tradition medicine or combing both Western medicine and traditional medicine moderately. In Western medicine the body is seen as the machine in which when something goes wrong, the part inside the machine need mended. But in Chinese medicine, the body is seen as the whole system and when the body goes wrong, the the body need to be recovered to the balance state. the In the morning in China, people perform the Tai, which they believed it can help to keep their body in balance.

In today’s modern hospital, the doctor has a serveral ways to diagnose the patient depending on your symtoms. One of the most novel medical methode ,thanks to the advance in the today technology, is the nuclear medicine, using nuclear substances to “image the body and treat disease” (Freudenrich, nd). It helps the doctors see both the physiology and the anatomy of the body in order to make diagnosis and treatment.