In traditional oriental medicine, as in many other so-called alternative medicines, symptoms are perceived as the apparent face of a disease.
Thus, the first sign of a pathology is due to a functional imbalance that has laid the bed of acute or chronic illness. For example, low immune defenses are an obvious entry point for various health problems. It is therefore logical to want to keep them high, so for the patient and the practitioner, it is necessary to give importance to the preventive field. In allopathic medicine prevention does not really exist and it is mixed up with screening which only consists in indicating whether one is already affected by the pathology, and the only interest remains to be able to treat as soon as possible.
Preventive solutions and treatments are found in alternative medicines. Many problems have a functional origin and it is possible thanks to the traditional oriental medicine to detect if a functional problem is pointing the tip of its nose, and to treat it before it degenerates into pathology.
By regularly performing an energy assessment (3-4 times per year) the patient can avoid many problems, if he is willing to follow his treatment and recommendations …
Technically, assessment in traditional oriental medicine is basically carried out to highlight the deficiencies of the different physiological systems, through interrogation, palpation of the body, pulse, and observation of the language among others.
We find bad habits such as food, for example, because of industrial foods or (healthy) foods that are not adapted individually, disrupting the digestive system (high toxins, difficult digestion, swelling, etc.), and leading to pathologies that can affect several other organic systems. Moreover, cardiologists today consider obesity as an inflammatory disease. There are also bad behavioral habits generating stress and weakening the nervous system.
Everything is linked and works together in the body. Our physiology is modified under the influence of what we undergo to our organism. Bad habits are the vectors of the deficiency of the different systems that compose us.
This is why it is important to take into account the recurrent problems that each one of us is aware of, because in the end they end up causing greater disorders and lead to a more or less complicated pathology to treat.
Then we must mention the case of symptomatic treatment: if the ground of origin is not corrected, the disease will reappear, either in the same form or in another form of expression.
We all have, because of habits or constitutional fragility, a “ground”, understand a gateway to problems.
As a practitioner detecting a patient’s ground can be a very difficult affair to manage if it does not come out of the conventional recipes of treatments. The patient’s ground is often masked. First of all by the symptoms, because these can be the same in very different diseases. Then, because for a same disease, a symptom can be generated by different mechanisms.
A simple example: vomiting after a meal. The reflex is to attribute it to an external cause such as a food poisoning, or an indigestion because of having eaten too much. But it is rarely attributed to an internal disorder as a hypo-function of the digestive apparatus itself, or a problem of the nervous system. And yet, it is these last cases that are mostly involved in this kind of spontaneous disorders, and rarely the quality of the food. One of the possibilities open to the practitioner to distinguish where the cause comes from is the functional diagnosis. In traditional oriental medicine there are many references to whether it is an internal or external cause. Finally, changing a chronic ground takes time. I did not say many sessions, but the time between sessions. Regularity of treatments is what is important.
Gilles Goncalves
Gilles Goncalves, Osteopath, and graduate of the hospitals of Oriental Traditional Medicine in Vietnam and in oriental China, Doctor of Medicine awarded a diploma of the AMCC and the founder of the Institute Hóa Thiên Ðuong.
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