A Momentous Development in TCM
Advent of the System of Disease-entity Identification
The idea of conducting treatment of a disease on the basis of overall analysis of symptoms and signs, including the cause, nature and location of the illness and the patient’s physical condition, is the crystallization of thousands of years of medical practice in China and has served for centuries as the guiding theoretical principle of traditional Chinese medicine in both prophylaxis and disease treatment.
This type of treatment, which is based on initial identification of the pattern of the disease being treated and which stresses that the diagnosis be made by observing the organism’s reflection in its entirety, embodies a mode of clinical thinking that advocates individualization in diagnosis and treatment.
People of the modern era adore precise and objective data. They think that diagnoses and treatments in traditional Chinese medicine are vague, abstract and replete with subjectivities. For this reason, the Public Health Ministry of China has long since included in the “State Plan of Subjects for Priority Research” the topic of “How to raise the precision of Disease Pattern Identification in traditional Chinese medicine”.
differentiation and identification depend on for diagnostic work. They are called “syndrome manifestation”. The essential pathological character of the disease ascertained through differentiation and identification carried out on the syndrome manifestation is called the “disease-entity”. The name used in diagnoses formed by combining the designation of the location of the disease with the disease-entity is termed the “disease name”. Recognition of the disease-entity by differentiation of it from other items is the key to the success of identification, whereas determination of the disease name is the object striven for. The syndrome manifestation, the disease-entity and the disease name form a complex structure and constitute together the disease-entity identification system, which reveals the natural law that governs it and the substance and characteristics of the differentiation and identification work. It is a significant academic development in the science of traditional Chinese medicine.
TCM Intelligent Diagnostic-therapeutic
On the basis of the Quantitative Syndrome Differentiation Table and the principle of disease-entity identification, a databank has been established containing the knowledge of TCM syndrome differentiation and treatment; a computer operation program has been compiled according to the rules of logical thinking; and an intelligent computer-operated TCM diagnostic-therapeutic system has been brought into being. It is a huge system covering the entire area of traditional Chinese medical care, including fields, such as internal diseases, gynecology and pediatrics, for the purpose of helping traditional Chinese medical practitioners make diagnoses and carry out treatments.
The system has been so compiled as to contain 1,000 symptoms, 460 diseases, 60 disease-entities, 1,700 normative disease pattern models, 720 often-used traditional Chinese medicinals, and 670 traditional Chinese medicinal prescriptions. For the diagnosis and treatment of diseases and disease-entities, this intelligent system can provide 10 therapeutic projects to each applicant for diagnosis and treatment, so as to help doctors make the optimum diagnostic and therapeutic decisions.
