As practitioners of life cultivation, when we are sick, we may visit a herbal medicine doctor to seek professional help. Learning some basic theories of herbal medicine and some technical terms of herbal medicine will help us to choose a herbal medicine doctor, understand what the herbal doctor said, understand the disease, and cooperate with the doctor to find faster and better recovery under the guidance of the herbal doctor.
Herbal medicine and Western medicine are two different systems of medicine. In layman’s terms, herbal and Western doctors use their own set of skills, and the methods are different, but the purpose and effect are the same. Western doctors use a method of meticulously analyzing the human body layer by layer to check for lesions, so various checkups are performed, and the more inspections become more detailed.
The method of herbal medicine practitioners is just the opposite. It cannot analyze layer by layer, but uses the method of observing the external manifestations of the patient’s whole body (such as changes in expression, tongue, pulse, etc.) to infer the patient’s internal lesions.
Therefore, herbal medicine practitioners need to look at the patient’s external systemic comprehensive reaction. This is called a syndrome in herbal medicine, and it will be treated. This is what traditional herbal medicine doctors often say about syndrome differentiation and treatment. Facts have proved that as long as the symptoms of the systemic reaction are cured, those local diseases will also be cured to varying degrees.
03 Choosing a traditional herbal doctor
If we are sick and choose to see a doctor of traditional herbal medicine for treatment, how should we choose a suitable doctor? We have many ways of doing so. We may choose to go to a large hospital, a small hospital, a traditional herbal medicine hospital, or a private clinic.
01 Referral
We may ask our relatives and friends to recommend a herbal medicine doctor, someone they have treatment from, and someone they feel at ease. This is your best bet.
At this point we have to bear in mind whether we are seeking a general practitioner or a specialist. If we do not know what our health problems are, or if we have several health issues, it may be better for us to seek the advice of a general practitioner to make sure what our health issues are, and then we seek out the specialist later.
In mainland China, seeking the advice of a traditional herbal medicine doctor is still very prevalent. They have Traditional Chinese Medicine Medical Schools, hospitals, and clinics. They also have drug stores that sell medicinal herbs with herbal medicine doctors on site. They also have private clinics with only a few doctors or retired doctors.
The public hospitals are accredited based on their qualifications. You may want to visit the most accredited hospital. In general, they have the most accredited herbal doctors.
They have a term called lao zhongyi, meaning old Chinese medicine doctor. They also have a term called ming zhongyi, meaning famous Chinese medicine doctor. However, they do not mean to tell us those doctors are necessarily old or well known.
02 Time devotion
We want to find a traditional herbal medicine doctor who has the time to see and treat patients. Some Chinese physicians in some hospitals are well-known and so they are very busy. They do not have time to talk to us about our health issues.
It would be better to find a well-known traditional herbal medicine doctor who has retired from the hospital and now has nothing to do but to open a private clinic for treatment of patients in mainland China. There are also quite a few of these kinds of doctors in the United States and Canada. They may practice with their own clinics. They may be associated with Chinese Herbal Stores and practice onsite.
Contact us if you need a referral.
03 Communication
We want to visit a traditional herbal medicine doctor who will talk to us about our health issues. We not only want them to treat our illnesses, we also want to learn from them what our illnesses are, and how to take care of them.
Of course, if you learn about traditional herbal medicine and how they work from this website, it will help you to communicate with the herbal doctor. Remember that the doctor also has to make a living, so we should not ask him to spend all his time on us.
04 Mentality
Do we choose medical practitioners for treatment based on the fee they charge? What is the profit-motive of the practitioners?
End of part six of a multipart series of posts on herbal doctor.
Subscribe below and choose to receive an email each time we publish a post, to receive daily or weekly digests of all of our latest posts, or select to receive no emails but to read our posts in the WordPress.com Reader. Your subscription is the force for us to proceed further.
MUSTANG HOLISTIC WELLNESS 