How does a Chinese doctor see a patient

I was very lucky at that time, I had just graduated from university and then had the honor to work as a clinical assistant in a medical clinic, which had dozens of national famous old Chinese doctors enjoying the State Council allowance. I basically had at least a week's worth of copying from each of them, and had very in-depth conversations with them.

Later I found that the way these old gentlemen look at the disease is different from the way we young doctors who just graduated look at the disease, they look at a big picture, they look at the direction of the development of the disease and the trend, look at the general trend. It's like being a stockbroker, you're actually looking at the trend of this broader market. Not the symptoms that are localized at a certain time.

At that time, we young doctors would ask many, many questions. For example, if you had a headache, we would ask if the headache was on the left side, or on the right side, in front of you, or behind you, and then determine which meridian was causing the pain, right?

For example, it is presumed to be Liver Depression and Qi Stagnation. Then you will be asked whether you are usually easy to anger, pain in the liver area, and also whether your breasts will rise before menstruation, whether you have menstrual cramps, and so on. This is all learned through books, and we would follow this set of dialectical patterns to judge.

But I've seen a lot of old gentlemen who look at it this way.

How are you eating? Do you sleep well? How are your bowels? How's your mood these days? Of course, he knows whether you are in a good mood or not. It's all about eating, drinking, pooping and sleeping.

This seems to be something that is not so directly related to the specific symptoms, and it is not possible to argue whether it is the liver or the heart, whether it is a blood deficiency or a gas deficiency, whether it is phlegm or cold. But in fact, we say that Chinese medicine treatment, in fact, the treatment is the person's or the treatment of this. This is actually the basic life state of the human body.

So in the treatment we have two ideas.

The first one is that because there is a lot of discomfort in any person nowadays, whether it's on the surface or on the inside, he will have a bunch of symptoms, and if he's seeing a Western doctor, he may see three or even seven departments.

When you look at Chinese medicine, you can also identify a lot of evidence, so the way we think about it now is that there are so many problems that you can identify a lot of evidence. Then we can deal with these certificates. This is like a game of "whack-a-mole". The gopher will come out from time to time, and we will hit it with a rubber mallet, and when we hit it once, it will yelp and then shrink back. But that didn't last long.

This is the first way to treat the disease, and this is the first way to think about conditioning.

The second way is that we just need to bring the body's functioning back to normal. That is to say, after the human body he himself into the normal state, the human body will not themselves to regulate these symptoms off? This reasoning is very simple. But it is very important.

That is, no matter whether Chinese medicine or Western medicine, it is actually the second doctor.

The first doctor is the patient himself. Western medicine calls it immunity, and Chinese medicine calls it positive energy. In other words, the doctor is mobilizing the body's positive qi, letting it work, and then regulating all the symptoms.

Then the problem is simple. Let's also just say that we just need to raise the correct qi. And how do you raise the right up? That's just to make the human body, the machine, run properly. That's the fundamentals.

So then I found out that after the old man saw this disease, after a week, two weeks or three days the patient came back. He was still asking these questions.

Did you have a better appetite? Do you still burp after eating? Or will the stomach pain be relieved a little bit? He's still concerned about all this eating, drinking, and sleeping, and your spirit, your physical strength, your mood, including how relaxed you are mentally and physically.

When all of these fundamentals are improving, the patient's original disease actually we don't even have to think about it, his original liver if it's a bruise will certainly be a little better, the heart of the qi will certainly be a little more open. Whether it's the bladder meridian or the kidney meridian, where it's not clear, it will definitely be a little bit clearer than it was. This idea seems to be less precise, but in fact it is a comprehensive solution.

This is a very important, but also very classical, classical Chinese medicine, the idea of conditioning.