Prevention as Priority: Uniqueness of TCM (Part Three)

Another outstanding feature that sets traditional Chinese medicine aside from many other medical systems is its emphasis on prevention. While this is not difficult to understand, many medical systems and their practitioners miss the point and concentrate their efforts and patients resource on dealing with symptoms and turn the whole thing into disease care rather than health care

There is a very important statement in TCM: Practitioners of the higher order treat diseases before they strike and a superior physician nips the bud of illness.

Prevention has several aspects to it. First of all, to be healthy you need to be one with nature and take measures to enhance your immune system. If you have a good defense there is no way that pathogens may invade and wreck havoc with your health. It is imperative that internal factor that may lead to diseases must be eliminated before you are completely safe.  In TCM there are many formulas and methods to help enhance the immune system and most TCM formulas have the power of prevention.

In traditional China a good doctor is one without many patients in the community. They tended to be advisers to the community providing guideline for healthy living including emotional health, nutritional health and medical health. Nutritional orientation of TCM and the frequent use of herbs in foods (medicated foods) are just the beginning of the emphasis in prevention.

Determine the root cause is the first guiding rule in treatment of diseases in Chinese medicine. It includes two aspects, one is to take precautions before disease strikes, and the aim of treatment is to eliminate the root cause of the disease.

So far as the patients are concerned, there is also the need for prevention even after a disease strikes. This is to intercept possible pathological changes. For instance, liver problems may lead to problems of the spleen, when the liver is out of order, it is important to protect and strengthen the spleen to prevent a possible vicious cycle.

As for the community where an epidemic is present, efforts are made to protect the people who are in danger but not yet sick. Many times in Chinese history communal campaigns were held to formulate high dosage herbal preventive and throw it into the communal wells form which people draw their daily water for cooking.  At the family level, in case of a flu or cold, everyone would drink some concoction with such well-known herbs as astragalus, licorice, isatis root, or cooking some vinegar and let the sour vapor fill the air.

There are at least two lessons we can draw from the reported ancient Egyptian inscription that we live off on one quarter of what we eat and our doctors live off the rest. One is that we should be careful with what we eat, and the other? Take your healthy care into your own hand and make sensible choices without relying upon those doctors who chase after diseases and Dollars and make health care disease care.

Beyond the horizon of conventional medicine, there are quite few medical systems that can offer very valuable alternatives for your good health and happiness. TCM is one, one that may help you keep out of disease’ way.