Need of Oriental Traditional Medicine Based on Science

The oriental traditional medicine is composed of various kinds of therapy including herbal medicinal therapy, acupuncturemoxibustion, and cupping, and its theoretical basis was already created and it’s developed steadily through a long history of thousands years. Nowadays, with the development of modern science and technology, the requirement of human is being increased day by day on the conservation of health and diminution of morbidity by increasing resistance against disease, and prevention and treatment of disease. Accordingly the scope of the oriental traditional medicine seems to be enlarged.

Ever-increasing interest and demand in the treatment by traditional medicine needs indispensably to maintain the scientific accuracy in treatment and innovate in therapeutic means and methods. Early in ancient times B.C. the oriental traditional medicine regarded human as a part of material world and established the theories on the essence of life phenomena and the laws of change and development to apply them to the conservation of health and activities for disease treatment. The present situation of dailyenlarging scope of traditional medicine requires overcoming some negative aspects from the contemporary limitation of the traditional medical theory and putting the traditional medicine on a scientific basis to intensify its propagation.

What are the shortcomings of the oriental traditional medicine, then?

The first is theoretical limitation. The oriental traditional medicine is based on yin-yang and five elements theory. It played a great role in recognizing and clarifying nature, society and human as a naïve materialism theory appeared B.C. and its superiority differs radically from western philosophy based on idealism. However, these days the study on material world is being intensified beyond cell level of a living organism by the tireless inquisition and efforts of the human being on life phenomena and it is a defect of traditional medicine to diagnose and treat a disease still depending on a medical philosophy created by ancient people. This shows that we should intensify scientific research works in order to update the recognition on the principle of the traditional medicine, solve the difficulties in western doctor’s understanding of the traditional medical theory, and widen the propagation of the traditional medicine..

The next importance is to innovate means and methods in treatment.

At present, a great advance has been shown in the treatment by herbal medicine through the successive studies on analysis, mechanism, quality control and form of traditional drugs. However, acupuncture and moxibustion therapy is faced with some difficulties in its propagation because it cannot avoid the negative aspects such as invasive injury, fear and pain during the treatment, even though it is superior therapy with accumulated experiences. From the present realistic requirement, in the past, we conducted some research work to investigate the indications of some acupuncture points and prescriptions, which are described in the traditional literature, for the purpose to reveal mechanism of acupuncture. Especially we have observed change in cerebral blood flow indices before and after acupuncture stimulation at 25 points located at Gallbladder Meridian, Bladder Meridian, Stomach Meridian and Governor Vessel which are described to be used for the treatment of brain diseases in the traditional literature. As a result, the influences of each acupuncture point on vascular compliance, hemodynamic resistance and blood flow quantity were different with respect to anatomical location of the point and the kinds of brain arteries.

Besides we obtained the conclusion that the effect of head points on regulation of cerebral blood flow was better than that of limb points and the effects of each point were different. These results provide a scientific basis for establishing an acupuncture treatment method based on modern diagnosis and indications of acupuncture without thinking by complicated and diagrammatical traditional medical theory and they also give a possibility to widen the application scope of acupuncture. In future, we will have to intensify the research work for convenience and scientific accuracy in point selection by investigating acupuncture indications for other viscera of various systems as well as brain diseases using modern medical method, and for minimum number of the points in use, reduction of acupuncture treatment hour and innovation in acupuncture.