I would like to ask how Chinese medicine distinguishes symptoms from diseases. Although I have read relevant books, they are not very detailed or I don't understand them.

Symptoms are all kinds of discomfort that patients feel. This is a subjective description of the patient. Like a headache.

Symptoms are the symptoms reported by patients themselves and some signs obtained by doctors according to diagnosis (clinical data obtained by seeing, hearing, asking and cutting four diagnoses). For example, headache is accompanied by thick and greasy tongue coating, and the pulse is Confucian.

According to the symptoms, doctors can classify the patient's condition as some kind of "syndrome", such as headache, heavy headache, thick and greasy tongue coating, Confucian pulse, etc., and can distinguish it as "wet sleep"

However, a kind of symptoms with a certain incidence law and certain symptom characteristics, with a special term to summarize the signs, is the name of the disease.

The names of diseases in traditional Chinese medicine are different from those in western medicine.

The comprehensive diagnosis of modern medicine needs to include information such as location, etiology and disease nature, such as left renal ureteral calculi and left hydronephrosis.

The diagnosis of disease name in TCM is closer to the description of disease. As the above example, it can be directly diagnosed as lumbago (corresponding to the chief complaint).

So now the diagnosis of integrated traditional Chinese and western medicine is more comprehensive and clear.