Traditional Medicine in Asia

The age-old wisdom of the people of
every country has been crystallized into
different systems of traditional medicine,
each nation having its own system/s. Some
of these traditional systems are wellestablished,
supported by theories and rich
experience and recorded in writing, such
as the Indian system of Ayurveda, the
Muslim system of Unani, traditional
Chinese medicine, ancient Greek medicine
and the systems that evolved from it, and
the humoral theory and therapy of Latin
America. But traditional medicine in some
other parts of the world has merely been
practised and handed down verbally from
generation to generation, without any
written record. Whether sophisticated or
not, the systems of traditional medicine
served as the only means of health care
for ages, till modern biomedicine came into
being.
In contrast to modern biomedicine,
which was founded on the basis of
modern natural sciences, most traditional
systems of medicine originated in and
developed according to the principles of
ancient schools of philosophy. A
description of their characteristic features
follows.
Harmonization of traditional and modern medicine
Harmonization of
traditional and modern
medicine
Zhu-fan Xie
Common features of
traditional medicine systems
Basic theories of various
traditional systems
There are similarities in the basic theories
of various systems of traditional medicine.
Ayurveda considers human beings in their
totality, in their subtle relationship with the
universe, and postulates the theory that a
human being is a microcosm of the
universe. Therefore, there is a close
relationship between the two. Ayurveda
believes that the human body and all matter
in the universe are made up of the five great
elements: earth, water, fire, air and ether.
All the physiological processes in the
human body and the pathogenesis of
various diseases can be explained by the
three doshas: motion (vata), energy (pitta)
and inertia (kapha). (1) In ancient Greece,
the authors of the Hippocratic Corpus all
presumed that bodily processes, health and
disease could be explained in the same way
as other natural phenomena. According
to the Hippocratic humoral system, all
things are composed of the four elements
– fire, air, earth and water – and are formed
by the union of matter, as well as the four
qualities of hot, cold, dry and moist. The
115