Notes on Chinese Medicine
Welcome to my Notes
For Chinese herbal medicine students & practitioners - a place for careful, well-sourced writing on the the medicine in asia, classical texts, the language of the medicine, and how the ideas work in the clinic.
1. Currents of Thought in Chinese Medicine
| Part 1: Two Thousand Years of Disagreement
Chinese herbal medicine is usually taught as one settled system. Its history says otherwise. For two thousand years, physicians have argued about what disease is, how to diagnose it and how to treat it, and those arguments are why the medicine looks the way it does today. This video sets out to introduce this extremely complex, but extremely influential idea in Chinese Herbal Medicine research - that of schools, schools of thought and practice - that there are currents of ideas which influence clinical reasoning that we can place into clear buckets or different approaches to treating illness which sometimes compete, sometimes contradict but also stir up discussion and room for debate and progress. Chinese medicine practitioners already know a lot. We know our formulas, we know pattern differentiation, we know channel theory. What we very likely don't know — because there’s almost nothing in English at a foundation level— is the history behind all of that.
