Healing power of age-old therapy
TCM as an art
Dr Chang does agree that TCM needs to be modernized.
But its modernization should put more emphasis on improving prescription preparation with the help of modern science, he suggested.
For example, traditionally, Chinese medicine has been made through decocting medicinal herbs and this is unscientific.
First, the herb quality can't be guaranteed because there is a possibility that the herbs have been contaminated by blackbeetle, mice or dust in the purchasing and storing.
Second, different herbal substances in a prescription may dissolve under different temperature or with different solvents.
Thus, when mixing the herbs in the boiling pot, some medical substances may vaporize or dissolve while others may not.
Chang once pioneered a medical programme to apply freeze-drying technology to improve TCM.
Under his guidance, researchers tried to extract all the medicinal substances in the different solutions of water, oil, and alcohol. Then following the formula, the substances were mixed in varying proportions. The mixture was then frozen and dried at temperatures below minus 40 C. A powder then results easing the consumption of the medicine. "The method could save a lot of medicinal herbs because it could obtain the maximum amount of effective substances," Chang claims. "Also the quality of the medicine is much more consistant and increases its storage ability to 100 years," he claimed.
Some other methods could also be applied, such as putting all the medicinal herbs together and leavening them to ferment.
Despite the varying preparation methods, one thing is always the same: following the traditional basic principles of TCM.
Chang believes medicine is a kind of art, not pure science, because the diseases doctors encounter are not like problems in non-living machines but live human beings.
From the very beginning, the emphasis of TCM was on art and morals and the doctors' mission to diagnose the symptoms and prescribe a formula most suitable for their individual conditions.
"TCM and Western medicine belong to different medical cultural systems. So the physical basis and working mechanisms of TCM should not be explained by Western medicine," he said.
According to Chang, the spread of TCM medicine to the world has not followed the successful introduction of acupuncture.
When Nixon visited China in 1972, he also took Chinese acupuncture to the United States, which later created a significant stir in the Western medical world.
Each year, many overseas students have come to China to study acupuncture. Acupuncture schools and colleges have also opened throughout the world.
"Acupuncture is one of the most indigenous arts of physical therapy in Chinese medicine. The success of its rapid spread in Western countries has been largely attributed to the conservation of its original cultural essence instead of being Westernized," said Chang. Enditem.
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