East Asian Medicine refers to the diverse traditional health care practices indigenous to East Asia including but not limited to Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Mongolian, Tibetan and Indonesian medicines. East Asian medicine has been referred to as Oriental medicine, and includes but is not limited to traditional Chinese medicine, or TCM.

History & Philosophy
The Huang-di Nei-jing or Inner Classic of the Yellow Emperor is one of the oldest known medical texts. This classic of Chinese medicine is similar in status and content to the Hippocratic Corpus, the basis of early western medicine. The text is a constructed conversation between the Emperor Huang-di and his physician, Chih-po. Though compiled well after the death of Hippocrates, the name Hippocrates in the early Chinese’ mono and di-syllabic pronunciation would be Chih-po.

Like Hippocratic texts, the Nei Jing works from a world view of the body as part of nature, resonant and interacting with the forces external to it. Health reflects a balance of internal and external influences. Illness is a manifestation of imbalance.

Observation remains key to assessing the nature of the imbalance, and the appropriate intervention. Early Western medicine used treatments to counteract imbalanced states and this was called counteractive medicine, or allopathy. East Asian medicine uses similar counteractive therapies in a more specific framework of relationships between organs, channels and substances such as Qi, Blood, Phlegm, Food, and Fluid. These relationships pair internal organs and their associated functions with meridians or channels that course through them to the body’s surface and extremities. An illness may present in one area but be accessible to treatment of an entirely different part. Treatment involves various forms of stimulation on and just under the skin. Multiple intentional sites or points are chosen for type of stimulation based on the presenting disorder.

The most recognized of the techniques used in East Asian medicine is acupuncture but it is not the oldest. The Ma-wang-tui texts found in the Han tombs buried in 165 BC, written around 200 BC, indicate points on the body for bloodletting and direct moxibustion (see below), with no reference to acupuncture needling. While the first text to refer to acupuncture needling is written in 90BC, it is thought that acupuncture was adopted somewhere in the late second or first century BC.

The approaches that follow maintain a belief that a life lived in harmony with nature accrues wisdom through time and appropriate aging is not accompanied by illness. Self-cultivation and regard for others fosters peace within the person, family and community.

Content last modified on Nov 20, 2008