Posted by Hombre on September 4, 2010, at 0:23:31
In reply to Re: TCM » Hombre, posted by Phillipa on September 3, 2010, at 10:39:48
> Seriously what about those who have had to have their spleens removed due to mostly trauma car accidents etc. What changes when you do not have a spleen my nephew doesn't Phillipa
The ancient Chinese, in addition to lacking the scientific knowledge we now have, did not believe in dissecting bodies. Also, doctors were hired to keep people healthy. If the got sick, that was considered a failure. The imperial doctors had the difficult task of keeping the royal family healthy. If they failed, they were executed.
What resulted was an exquisite sensitivity to the body's physiological functions by using such methods as pulse diagnosis, observing the tongue, the face, the eyes, detecting odors, the sound and quality of the voice, and listening to what the person spoke about. I'm sure there were many more methods that have slowly been lost over time due to the "modernization" of Chinese medicine after the cultural revolution. From the very beginning, the emotions and the spirit of the person were also considered part and parcel of the whole person and his health.
Although the ancients had some knowledge of basic anatomy and anything else that might have been revealed through battelfield injuries and accidents, they had to use their imaginations to put together the rest. Based on the Daoist beliefs that the body was a microcosm of the universe, various theories were introduced to explain what was going on. There are a lot of allusions to nature and other metaphors incorporating things like the 5 elements of nature and even viewing the body as a cooperative group, with certain functions acting as governors and others the workers. While we now know much more about the details of the body's anatomy and physiology, we've lost the idea of seeing everything as whole working together.
The organs in Chinese medicine really refer to sets of physiological functions. For instance, the liver can be seen as representing the sympathetic nervous system. When we are over-stressed we might start to see symptoms attributed to over-dominance of the sympathetic nervous system. In this case, the Chinese medicine liver has nothing to do with the anatomical liver. On the other hand, the liver is said to store blood. There may be some correlation there to the actual liver.
While we may have a hard time swallowing the old terminology, it is complete in an of itself--that is, the inter-relationships of physiological functions and the treatments used to correct imbalances are mostly accurate and work. They might as well have called the liver the "blix" or any other term. It just so happens that they used words that are similar to what we now use to label the anatomical organs. The subtlety and sensitivity that allowed people to observe the body and its functioning over many, many centuries led to the theories that are still used to diagnose and treat illness.
I can't do the history of Chinese medicine justice. My main point is that we shouldn't confuse the Chinese medicine organs with the organs we studied in A & P class. But we shouldn't throw out all the theory because of this, either. We can't make a 1-to-1 connection between the CM organs and certain physiological systems either, mostly due to the reductionist way we classify and study things.
Since your nephew lost his spleen, he may have lost some function, but since the CM spleen encompasses several functions involving many organs, it's not like he lost all functionality.
A good book, written by an M.D. that later studied CM during the 80s in San Francisco, is "Optimal Healing". She eventually opened one of the first integrative clinics. She shares her experience of being completely baffled by the traditional theories and eventually making some connections between what she knew of physiology and how the ancients chose to explain things. She also goes into detail about what she thinks CM is good for and where western medicine is superior. It is probably one of the few books that really sticks to modern, medical theories in explaining the classical theories of CM. Again, she it's not like she just translates everything over 1-to-1; that's just not possible, but she does show the value of CM and how an open mind can help doctors to provide more options for their patients.
poster:Hombre
thread:961091
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/alter/20100812/msgs/961231.html