ICMART

The mainstream of medical care in the 21st century (or “will things work out that way?”)

Prof. N. Nickolaev – M.D., Ph.D.
Latvia

These days when seeking medical help from a clinic specializing in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TOM), don’t be surprised to see that the doctors not only apply the traditional techniques of “observing, listening, enquiring and taking the pulse”, but also use computerized devices such as the Electrodermal Screening Device (EDSD) and the Pulse Screening Device (PSD), just as Western medicine utilizes electrocardiographs and tomographic scanners

If one seeks diagnosis and treatment at a general Hospital which has a TCM ward, you may receive a double diagnosis, one from the perspective of Western medicine and one from the perspective of TCM.

After beginning his Western treatment, a doctor of TCM may prescribe a regimen of Chinese medicine to ameliorate the possible side-effects of the Western medical treatment…

Not only in the realm of medical care, but also in the laboratory and in clinical research, researchers are investigating traditional medicines in the hope of striking gold.

Their ambition is to find more effective ways to deal with the many hard-to-treat illnesses which currently afflict human beings.

The more optimistic among them predict that integration of TCM and Western medicine will become pan of the mainstream of medical care in the 21st century.

In the clinical practice of Chinese medicine, when a patient has a headache, the doctor often puts an acupuncture needle into his fingers. This sort of things leaves doctors of Western medicine shaking their heads in amazement. Sometimes, too, a doctor of Chinese medicine diagnoses a patient as having “excessive liver-fire”… But when a Western doctor tests the patient’s liver, he finds nothing out of the ordinary, leading to a different kind of head-shaking…

The obstacles to exchanges between Chinese and Western medicine aren’t merely those resulting from the differences between the Chinese and English languages. Instead the problems derive from the radically different theoretical bases the two systems operate from. What common points of understanding can be found, upon which to base communication?

Will things really work out that way???