Publisher's Synopsis
In TCM diagnosis, the doctor needs to collect data from the patient by questioning the patient, observing the patient, and taking the pulses, etc. which is the first step in clinical practice. And then the doctor needs to determine what syndromes are established from the individual symptoms. Typically what a Chinese doctor does is to analyze the individual syndromes through reasoning and come up with an integrated syndrome. Unfortunately, to come up with an integrated syndrome through reasoning alone may be too subjective or unreliable. This, from my point of view, seems to stand out as a most serious theoretical gap between individual symptoms and integrated syndromes in TCM, which must be improved accordingly in order to make clinical practice in TCM a more complete system of discipline. Sometimes the same disease attacks different people who are then treated in the same way and by the same medicine; but more often than not, some of them recover after treatment, others remain the same, still others even get worse. Why is that? The reason is that even though the same disease attacks, nevertheless it attacks different people. In what way are people different? It is maintained in traditional Chinese medicine that people are different mainly in their constitutions, called physical conditions. People are broadly classified into six types of physical conditions, each of which displays distinct signs and symptoms and requires certain remedies for their good health. In a very important way, diagnosis of syndromes is to identify the patient's physical conditions through. For example, if a patient is diagnosed as 400kx lung energy deficiency (C), it means the patient's physical conditions belong to (C).
