The Theory of Chinese Medicine : A Modern Explanation

291 Pages·2014·2.71 MB·English

by  Hai Hong

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Imperial College Press
ICP
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Published by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hong, Hai, 1943- author.
The theory of Chinese medicine : a modern interpretation / Hai Hong.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-78326-427-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Medicine, Chinese Traditional. 2. Philosophy, Medical. 3. Qi. WB 55.C4]
R127.1
610.951--dc23
2013042656
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copyright © 2014 by Imperial College Press
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means,
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Typeset by Stallion Press
Email: [email protected]
Printed in Singapore
About the Author
Hong Hai is Adjunct Professor and
Senior Fellow at the Institute of
Advanced Studies, Nanyang
Technological University (NTU).
Trained originally in engineering and
economics, he had an earlier career as
chief executive of a pharmaceutical
company before studying Chinese
medicine and the philosophy of sci-
ence, graduating with an MD (Beijing
University of Chinese Medicine), MPhil (Cambridge) and PhD
(London). His doctoral dissertation examining the scientific
basis for Chinese medical theory was written under the noted
philosopher of science and medicine John Worrall.
Professor Hong Hai has chaired the Singapore parliamentary
committee on health, and was a founding member of the
Ministry of Health’s TCM Practitioners Board and chairman of
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vi The Theory of Chinese Medicine
its academic committee. He practises medicine part-time at the
Public Free Clinic and the Renhai Clinic, which he founded. As a
pastime he started café Herbal Oasis which serves health teas and
foods and hosts salon-style seminars on physical and social
well-being.
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Foreword
Donald Gillies
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been criticised for
being unscientific. This book discusses this criticism in detail.
The author is not simply expounding TCM. He puts forward a
particular interpretation of TCM, designed to overcome some of
the difficulties, which have been detected in the system.
A fundamental problem is that some of the entities of TCM,
such as the meridians, do not correspond to anything, which
modern anatomists can observe, and internal organs have func-
tions quite different from those assigned by modern physiology.
The author tries to deal with this by developing what could be
called an empiricist/pragmatist account of TCM. This reduces
the entities postulated by TCM to observable functions, and
TCM theory is interpreted as comprising heuristic models.
The author then goes to argue that TCM in his interpretation
can be tested empirically using some of the methods of evidence-
based medicine. The author develops his particular interpretation
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of TCM in a clear and rigorous fashion, and gives a thorough
account of how TCM in this sense might be tested empirically.
This is a book which should not be missed by anyone with an
interest in Chinese medicine.
Donald Gillies is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Science and
Mathematics in the Department of Science and Technology Studies
at University College London. He has written extensively on the
philosophy of science and the foundations of probability, and in
recent years researched the application of philosophy of science to
medicine.
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Preface
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been criticized by some
scientists because the theory on which it is based involves abstract
entities like qi, jing and ‘meridians’ that are ambiguous and ill-
defined. The functions of the internal organs, which play such a
crucial role in modern medical understanding of human physiol-
ogy, are very different in TCM theory from those of modern
physiology. For the example, the ‘spleen’ in TCM governs the
entire digestion process, and the ‘kidney’ has functions in growth,
sex and warming of the body. These notions are at odds with the
functions of these organs in biomedicine.
Even harder to accept for the modern scientist are TCM
methods of therapy that are based on the yin-yang principle, the
model of the five elements, and the classification of illnesses
according to standard constellations of symptoms (TCM ‘syn-
dromes’). The validity of these methods and their usefulness for
therapy has yet to be satisfactorily proven by the methods of
modern evidence-based medicine.
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