2. The Necessity of Integrating Chinese and Western Medicine

2. The Necessity of Integrating Chinese and Western Medicine

Chinese and Western medicine differ in form and content due to their distinct historical contexts. The former can only rely on logical reasoning based on external manifestations of disease and the relationship between humans and nature to diagnose and determine causes; the latter, however, utilizes advanced tools provided by modern industry—such as microscopes, electron microscopes, X-rays, ultrasound, electrocardiograms, and more—to penetrate deep into the human body and conduct direct, intuitive research on the essence of disease. For these reasons, Chinese and Western medicine exhibit the following differences:

From these three aspects of difference, we can see that both Chinese and Western medicine have their own strengths and weaknesses. If we combine the macroscopic understanding of Chinese medicine with the microscopic understanding of Western medicine, and integrate the emphasis on regulating the body’s reactivity in Chinese medicine with the emphasis on suppressing the pathogenicity of the pathogen in Western medicine, this will undoubtedly strengthen people’s further understanding of disease, thereby promoting the development of medical science. Moreover, we can hope that this will give rise to a “new pharmacology” that is neither purely Western nor purely Chinese.

Modern control theory holds that the human body is like a black box: any change inside the box, no matter how small, constantly transmits information to the outside. When Chinese medicine understands disease, it is akin to inferring and determining the internal changes of the black box based on this information; the more information available, the more mature the inference, and the closer the result is to accuracy. Western medicine’s understanding of disease, on the other hand, is like opening the black box and directly observing the internal structural changes. The task of integrating Chinese and Western medicine is thus akin to combining the internal structural changes of the black box with the analysis of external information, making the understanding of the black box’s essence more comprehensive and systematic. Recently, the Beijing Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine has, based on control theory principles, taken the treatment experiences of veteran TCM doctors such as Guan Youbo, treating symptoms and signs as informational data, standardizing them, and then inputting them into electronic computer systems, successfully applying them clinically. This marks a promising step forward in the integration of Chinese and Western medicine and the modernization of traditional Chinese medicine.