1. The Inevitability of Integrating Chinese and Western Medicine

1. The Inevitability of Integrating Chinese and Western Medicine

Throughout its historical evolution, Traditional Chinese Medicine has always been closely intertwined with the medical traditions of other cultures around the world during the same periods. Renowned physicians of each era have skillfully absorbed the essence of foreign medical knowledge, adapting it for their own use and thereby enriching the content of traditional TCM and promoting the development of Traditional Chinese Medicine. For example, Zhang Yangjing’s use of karela in the Treatise on Febrile Diseases and Miscellaneous Disorders was an import from abroad; Sun Simiao’s Thousand Gold Prescriptions incorporated elements of India’s “Five Sciences” and included more than ten prescriptions from the Hu people’s medical tradition. In Wei Yilin’s Universal Effective Prescriptions, extensive theories and formulas from Arab medicine were introduced, with ingredients such as strychnos nux-vomica, fenugreek, psoralea corylifolia, frankincense, myrrh, and amomum villosum all being imported from overseas. The Warm Disease School’s insightful theory that warm diseases enter the body through the mouth and nose has been attributed by some to the introduction of Western medicine into China during the Ming dynasty. Meanwhile, the writings and achievements of Wang Qingren, Ju Rongchuan, and Zhang Xichun clearly reflect the incorporation of certain Western medical ideas, resulting in a synthesis with traditional TCM theory. In short, throughout the history of TCM development, pioneering physicians have never rejected the infusion of advanced foreign medical thought from their contemporaries. Today, global medical advances are occurring at such a rapid pace that medicine has progressed from a microscopic to a macroscopic, systems-oriented stage. When we seek to develop Traditional Chinese Medicine, failing to consider integration with modern medicine would be tantamount to forfeiting the most direct and effective pathway available.