Chinese vs Western Medicine

Western medicine can be seen as an illness suppressor, but not as curer. Western medicine gives its patients a specific medicine, causing their patient’s illness symptoms to fade away in a relatively fast way. However, the illness is still there, and that could be lethal in the patient’s life. Also, patients that have taken western medication for long periods of time could develop other health problems (because of the medication) that can even be worse than the health problem they already have. Thus, in Western medicine, if you want a specific part of your body to get better, there is a potential risk of other parts of your body to develop a problem too (Huang 2013).

 

On the other hand, Chinese medicine treats people as a whole and in an individual way. An article in a website called Gaia stated that “What makes Eastern medicine so different than Western is that instead of prescribing a ‘one size fits all’ for all patients with certain symptoms, Eastern medicine looks at the needs of each individual and unique body and acts accordingly.” (Gaia Staff 2015).

 

This means that a doctor in Western medicine would treat two different patients that suffer from the same disease in the same way. On the contrary, a Chinese medicine doctor would treat those two different patients that suffer from the same diseases in a completely different way because Chinese medicine doctors treat and understand each of their patients as an individual. That is why Chinese medicine has a personalized approach (Gaia Staff 2015).

 

In Chinese medicine, when a patient has a health problem, it means that that patient’s body and energy are in an unbalanced and in a disharmonious state which influences the entire body organs. Thus, their goal is to restore their balance and energy, by following an individual treatment, with the aim of curing not only a specific disease but the whole body. So, we can say that Chinese medicine has a medical system that targets the root of the disease, while at the same time it aims to cure the entire body and to prevent it from any other complication. Many people chose to have a combination and Chinese and Western medicine, which could be an excellent idea as long as both doctors know what medications and treatments you are trying (Huang 2013).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Important things to consider:

• You should not stop using Western medicine because Western medicine is the best option in situations that require surgery or in traumatic injuries and lethal infections and illness. However, there are other situations in which Chinese medicine is the best choice because there are a lot of health problems in which Western medicine only offers a temporary improvement of the symptoms through medication, but the disease still remains in the patient’s body. Some examples are depression, stress, allergies, asthma, menstrual pain and irregularity and many others.

• Make sure you are treating yourself with Chinese medicine with a qualified and experienced practitioner (Schoenbart & Shefi 2007).

​

Below is a very interesting video about this topic called: "MD discuss Clinical Application of Acupuncture: Energy Medicine (Purdue Pharma)." Which was published by Dr. Huang on YouTube: