Both medicines
aim to help person to solve his health problem, but the way these
2 treatment modalities do it differs significantly.
Firstly, while Western medicine is focused on disease, the point
of interest in TCM is the patient himself rather than his desease.
Secondly, Western medicine performs diagnostic and treatment
procedures in accordance with biomedical information, derived from
reserach of human body, whereas TCM observed the nature and then
applied its rules in diagnostic and treatment strategies.
Thirdly, Western medicine puts complains and signs of disease,
gathered during physical exam, into existing frame of certain
medical condition and in case of mismatch between them the problem
with desicion making is occuring. TCM, to the contrary, gathers
all complains, signs and behavioural preferences and creats the
picture of disbalance, where each complain or sign has its place.
Finally, all treatment modalities of TCM successfully used in
unchanged form for thouthands of years, whereas Western medicine
in its modern form was formed only about 150 years ago. That is
why we periodically discover that the medication, which was used
by conventional medicine for some purpose for a long time, can
also be effective for completely different medical condition, like
in case with aspirin: apart from its well-known anti-inflammatory
properties it recently became popular by its anticoagulatory
properties.
