TCM - Traditional Chinese Medicine
Chinese medicine is a very old medicine. The origins go back 4 - 5000 years. That's a long time to gain experience. There were many different currents and teachings - China is big, so there was a corresponding wealth of experience and many teachers who represented different views.
But what seemed to be common is the view that the patients are the focus. This means that the therapy is adapted to the patient and not the patient to the therapy.
If someone is very weak, easily feels cold, anxious, and has hardly any reserves while suffering from a problem—let’s take migraines as an example—then the TCM therapy will be different from someone who is very strong, always feels too warm, and storms into the practice with a flushed, angry face—who also has migraines.
Therefore, the therapies can be very different.
In Chinese medicine, a distinction is usually made between the underlying cause and the symptom it triggers. To stick with the example above: Weakness, due to a lack of certain elements, can lead to specific problems; but too much strength can do the same.
So, the goal is usually to treat both: the fundamental issue and the symptom it causes. This approach differs from conventional medicine.
That is the approach. How well it is implemented in reality is another question.
And I think that is justified.
Why? If someone comes in with acute severe pain, to the point where they can barely move, they are—at least in my experience—not in the mood for a cozy, lengthy conversation where we start at the very beginning and slowly approach the current state of affairs after 45 minutes. They would rather be free of pain after 45 minutes, instead of hearing that we might discuss it in 5 weeks after 10 treatments.
It is completely different in cases of long-term migraines, for example. Here, one must ask more thoroughly and try to understand the cause of this symptom. A migraine therapy should primarily aim to prevent migraines from occurring at all; but to do that, I must understand the cause in order to treat it. Pain relief during an acute attack is then only an emergency measure.
Emotions also play a different role here. In conventional medicine we also know the direct effect of emotions on the organs, let's take stress gastritis as an example.
In TCM, feelings play a much larger role. Each organ is assigned certain feelings. However, every organ can also be influenced or disturbed by feelings. Let's take the liver as an example: anger, rage and frustration... something has gone over your liver.
This means they also play a clearly prominent role in diagnosis and therapy.
Chinese medicine distinguishes between cold and heat, internal and external, yin and yang, and excess and deficiency. These criteria form the basis of every diagnosis. Additionally, pulse and tongue diagnosis are also considered.
In ancient China, one could not simply ask the patient, especially a female patient, to undress for an examination. Instead, the pulse could be felt, or the tongue could be observed. Over centuries, this necessity was turned into an advantage and refined to the point where much more information could be derived, making it an integral part of diagnostics.
Causes are viewed differently here, as is the diagnostic approach.
Sure, a damaged back with pain remains a damaged back with pain. But how did it happen? And more importantly: how can it be healed?
Let’s say you had the pleasure of helping with a move. It was a chilly day, but you were sweating and stood in the corridor of a train. You have had back problems before, and you are older than 20. On top of that, you are currently experiencing some stress.
The next day, you can barely move.
Many people are familiar with the phrase: "this cold seeps into my bones." The same applies to moisture.
Simple warmth can help. What happened? The combination of cold and moisture put strain on your back. The stress... we know the phrases "it breaks my back" or "I can't carry this burden anymore."
These factors—cold, wind, and moisture—are considered in TCM. But so is emotional tension. The therapy in this case would likely include not only acupuncture but also warmth, such as moxibustion.
As a second step, one would then ask why these back pains developed in the first place. The goal would be to identify the underlying weakness that allowed the pain to manifest. If someone were completely healthy, cold and moisture would not have been able to settle into the back and cause such an effect. If the person's defense system and energy were strong enough, this would not happen.
One of the main differences to conventional medicine is the way knowledge is collected.
For a long time, Chinese medicine did this purely empirically through observation, literally over thousands of years. Gaining experience through studies is relatively new in this type of medicine. Since China has opened up more, significantly more studies have been carried out.