Henry C Lu

Data-Based Constitutional Therapy in Traditional Chinese Medicine (1) Henry C Lu

A Chinese doctor in the 18th century said, "When people have the same disease and are treated in the same way, some may recover while others may get worse instead of recovery. Why is that? It may be attributed to different physical conditions." 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 refers 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. In TCM diagnosis, the doctor needs to collect data from the patient by questioning the patient, observing the patient, and taking the pulses, etc. which is the first step in clinical practice. And then the doctor needs to determine what syndromes are established from the individual symptoms. Typically what a Chinese doctor can do is by reasoning or speculation. Unfortunately, to come up with a syndrome through reasoning alone may be too subjective or unreliable. This, from my point of view, seems to stand out as a most serious theoretical gap between symptoms and syndromes in TCM, which must be improved accordingly in order to make clinical practice in TCM a more complete system of discipline. Human beings may be created equal, but individuals have different physical conditions or body types. When it comes to selecting prescriptions, the prescriptions selected must be in line with their particular physical conditions or body types.