What is Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Good For?

Almost anything you see your GP for could be treated with Chinese Medicine. The following is a list of illnesses that we often treat at this Centre, but we cannot list all the various diseases we have treated.

Mental concerns including Anxiety, Fear, Phobias, Lack of Confidence, Depression and Mania
Respiratory problems including Asthma, Bronchitis, Pleurisy, Pneumonia
Musculo-skeletal and joint disease including Arthritis and Rheumatism
Skin Disease including Eczema and Psoriasis, rashes, acne, warts, etc.
Fatigue syndromes, including post-viral fatigue and myalgic encephalomyelitis
Pain including Headache, Backache, Toothache, Gynaecological, Musculoskeletal
Insomnia
Infertility
Digestive including Heartburn, Indigestion, Irritable Bowel, Constipation, Ulcerative Colitis, Ulcers, Oesophagitis, Mouth ulcers,
Neurological and Nerve, including sciatica
Diseases such as colds, coughs, measles, mumps, hepatitis
Diseases of Pregnancy, including morning sickness: and after the birth, problems with mood, depression, lactation, and so on.
Addictions: including stopping smoking and problems of withdrawal
Weakness, lethargy, tiredness, and other continuing problems following acute disease

Recent Cases
Constant headaches, day and night. Three acupuncture treatments to strengthen the 'Kidney' energy, using mainly points on the back, and inside calf, reduced the frequency to only occasional. Several more treatments and the patient felt no pain for at least a month at a time.

Post viral fatigue: the patient, a mature student, had been debilitated since a period of considerable stress some years before, following an acute illness. Treatment was to remove what in TCM is called Invasion of Damp, and to tonify the Spleen. Acupuncture points were used mainly on the back, abdomen and legs.

Acute back pain from constant driving. This was categorised as a form of stagnation of Qi and Blood. Cupping, massage, acupuncture and herbs were used. There was substantial improvement after the first acupuncture treatment, and the patient now comes about once a month for a 'top-up'. It is unlikely that the problem will completely disappear because it is caused by repetitive sitting/driving which tends to produce the stagnation. Exercise helps greatly: so does eating the right foods.

Eye pain and loss of vision, from constant computer work. Deficiency of Liver Blood, with some Liver Qi stagnation and Liver Yang excess. Although she received several acupuncture treatments to clear the extreme pain and improve the vision, the main benefit came from using herbs to strengthen the Liver Blood, remove the stagnation and pacify the Liver Yang. Advice was also given about lifestyle and foods to avoid, and other foods to eat more.

Pain
Types of Pain
Pain occurs on four levels: spiritual, mental, emotional and physical. Although the following focuses on physical pain, the theory applies to all kinds of pain and discomfort. Distinguishing between them helps the practitioner decide on the best method of treatment. The first two ways in which discomfort or pain is categorised are 'deficiency' and 'excess'. A third, large, category covers the invasion of the body by external pathogenic factors, meaning catching a virus or a bug.

Deficiency-type pain occurs when there is not enough energy in the mind, body or meridian. This pain is usually dull, and is better for comforting, rest, pressure, massage, touch, or warmth, and worse for depletion, exertion or cold.

Excess energy-type pain is more often throbbing, or hot or burning, and is worse, or at least no better, for sympathy, touch or pressure. This often occurs from a recent accident or trauma, or with fever or strong thirst, or during acute illness in someone with a strong constitution.
Excess-type can also occur from stagnation, especially of cold, when the pain is usually stabbing or needle-like, and is also worse in the cold.

Pain due to invasion by a bacteria or virus is a big subject. If, for example, you have influenza, you may feel dizzy, tired, aching, shivery or hot, thirsty/thirstless etc. Pain here may come from a variety of causes, for example invasion of a pathological factor such as 'wind', the symptoms of which can change as the illness penetrates deeper into the body. It can cause discomfort almost anywhere in the body, and the symptoms may move around: blowing 'hot and cold'. The changeability of these symptoms leads to its being called 'wind-type'.

Other external pathogenic energy pains include those caused by damp, dryness, summer heat, cold, and heat, or combinations of these. Acupuncture and Chinese herbs can be surprisingly effective when dealing with them.

You may wonder what happens to the virus or 'bug' causing an illness when you have successful treatment with TCM? The ancient Chinese didn't see the bug, of course, because they didn't have microscopes. But they did see its effects, and the effects are what they described as being due to external pathogenic factors such as 'wind', 'heat', 'damp', 'cold', 'dryness', and 'summer heat', for more on which see Causes of Disease.

They developed ways of treating these effects that by clearing the body's way of being ill, also made it impossible for the virus or bug to find a secure footing.

In general, one treats deficiency pain by strengthening or tonifying; excess one treats by dispersing; invasion from outside one disperses at first, and may tonify afterwards.

This is a very brief introduction to how disease is classified in Chinese medicine, and if you are interested to learn more, see the section Eight Principles: then read the section on Qi and Blood.

Disease Prevention
We provide suggestions for improving health and avoiding disease. This includes, nutrition, diet, exercise, lifestyle, habit patterns and sometimes, even, vocation.

Nutrition
Foods and herbs have been carefully classified over the centuries as to their energetic qualities. For example, whereas maltose (yi tang) is occasionally used to tonify the Spleen, because it is said to enter the Spleen meridian and to be slightly warm (it also soothes the digestion and moistens the lungs), cane sugar, the white stuff we like in our tea and on food, is damaging to the Spleen because it is cold in nature, like bananas. These foods, cane sugar and bananas, come from hot latitudes, and though they contain carbohydrate and help Qi, they are cooling: they are potentially damaging as foods for people living in cold climates if taken in excess. Maltose, made during malting, is used in drinks such as Horlicks. (Horlicks also contains quantities of cane sugar.)

More seriously, fruit is cooling, meat is heating. People suffering from coldness should eat warming foods, such as hot porridge made from oats, which are warm and sweet, unlike wheat, which is cold and sweet. But if you have good circulation, or in the middle of a hot summer, it is better to eat neutral or cooling foods.

Tea, Indian variety, is cooling: coffee is warming. Both contain caffeine, especially coffee, and too much of this can be damaging. The Indian subcontinent has made a fortune out of our British tea habit, which is comical because we have a cold climate and take tea to warm us up. Actually it makes us pee, cools us down, and ensures that we want another cup! Not until ice cream was invented did we get our own back. Ice cream is full of fats, and although it cools us down initially, it warms us up later, ensuring we want some more!

Chicken is warming and tonifies the Qi. Beef kidney is warming and tonifies the Yang. Beef liver is neutral but tonifies the blood, whereas pork kidney tonifies the Yin.

Many new foods contain substantial quantities of chemicals, or have been refined or processed during manufacture. These foods need to be newly assessed because the general assumption in describing food is that it comes from organic sources and is produced according to stable farming practices and traditional cooking methods. An advantage of this is that foods produced this way will also have good nutritional qualities from the Western Scientific or nutritional viewpoint.

Vitamins and Minerals
One possible reason (there are others, such as fashion) for the increase in our Western interest in and need for vitamins and minerals is that soil intensively farmed usually means soil to which has been added Potassium, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and not much else, because these chemicals help plants grow big, fast.

Plants, like us, need up to 70 minerals, and modern scientists over the last 40 years keep having to revise upwards their estimates of the importance of these micronutrients. Putting in three and taking out up to seventy different nutrietns long-term doesn't lead to healthy plants, so food producers have to add all sorts of conditioners, fungicides, pesticides, herbicides and preservatives to prevent illness in the plant and then, after harvesting, keep it safe to eat. ‘Safe’ to eat doesn’t necessarily mean it is nutritious! (The UK Government’s Food Safety Agency looks first at food safety: nutritiousness is a distant second.) Organic farmers claim that if grown on healthy, mineral and micro-organism rich soil, plants fight off disease more easily.

It remains to be shown that organic food is bad for us long-term, or that processed food is good for us long-term. Unfortunately, short-term interests have usually overcome long-term prudence. The Chinese didn't have this problem, at least until very recently. (This is not to say that organic food is always better than non-organic food. Organic food grown on poor soil may be nothing like as good as non-organic food grown on really good soil, with all the pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals removed along with their ill-effects before the food is prepared for consumption.) But food quality these days should include the quality of the soil from which the food came. If the plants lack those nutrients, so shall we! Many preventable diseases arise where we lack an essential nutrient.

Food is more complicated even than this. All foods have what in Chinese Medicine is called an ‘energetic quality’. Some foods are heating, others cooling, some drying others moistening. If you suffer from a damp, cold condition – for example, some kinds of muscular pain are classified as being of damp, cold origin – then you would be unwise to eat foods that are cold and damp, because they will exacerbate your condition. Fortunately, this energetic effect in food is often mild, at least compared to herbs, and certainly as compared to drug medication. We would need to eat a particular food intensively and exclusively to discover its effect, and few people would undertake this, so food is generally safe. But if we are ill, eating the right foods for our condition, and avoiding the wrong foods for it, can make a big difference, and help us recover much faster than otherwise.

Overall, eating the wrong foods weakens us. Eating the right foods will strengthen us. Our health varies imperceptibly all the time, and we can gradually change it by what we eat. Our individual constitutions may be fairly unchanging, but we can often iron out problems before they happen, by eating right. Then food will be our first medicine!