‘Syndrome’ in Chinese Medicine

A ‘syndrome‘ is what acupuncturists trained in classical Chinese medicine treat. They are different from Western-defined diseases or illnesses.

Acupuncturists and other practitioners of Chinese medicine are often asked to treat Western-defined illnesses.

By diagnosing an illness the Chinese way, they force themselves to consider the condition from a very different perspective.

 

 

 

Which is, after all, often why you are consulting them.

Once your acupuncturist diagnoses a syndrome, he will be able to suggest changes you can make to help yourself, in exercise, diet, nutrition and sometimes lifestyle.

Combined Syndromes

It is common to find someone has several at once: a few are listed above. For example, someone might have Heart Blood deficiency with Spleen deficiency.

In that case, choosing which was the primary cause would be important: it would probably be the Spleen deficiency. As the condition proceeded, other of these ‘building blocks’ might appear.

For example, Spleen deficiency, which has symptoms such as tiredness, poor digestion, loose stools and a tendency to worry, eventually leads to a condition not unlike anaemia, although the Chinese explanation for Blood deficiency goes rather further than does the Western medicine definition of anaemia.

Definition in TCM?

It’s a collection of signs or symptoms of energetic imbalance in a patient’s condition. Each syndrome will have been gradually identified over the millennia, as being associated with the malfunction of one or more zang-fu. All this comes down to us in the form of TCM theory. Or your acupuncturist might be trained to use the 5 Elements tradition. Or both.

Of course, acupuncturists trained the traditional Chinese way will also consider your health from the point of view of changes or problems in the flow of Qi along your acupuncture channels (also called acupuncture ‘meridians’). These produce another kind of syndrome.

What can be done with these building blocks?

Knowing the theory of Chinese medicine, how the zang-fu should work in health, and knowing how acupuncture points work, how herbs work, how the other forms of therapy work in Chinese medicine, you learn how to treat syndromes when things are failing.

For example, you learn which acupuncture points help Liver Qi stagnation, which has signs like those of stress (see the book mentioned below).

Many acupuncturists don’t use them!

This is often because they have not been trained how to use them. This may be because their training gave no credit to over 3000 years of experience and the assembled wisdom of Chinese medicine.

Indeed, many people who use acupuncture needles use them only as an adjunct to other methods of pain-control.

This can mean that their treatment fails to address an underlying reason for the patient’s condition which is then more likely to recur.