Traditional Chinese Medicine Is a Way of Seeing
Traditional Chinese Medicine Is a Way of Seeing
Traditional Chinese Medicine is a medical tradition built around observation. It developed through thousands of years of paying close attention to the human being, not simply to the disease.
Before there were blood tests, MRI machines, genetic sequencing, or the ability to measure thousands of physiological variables, physicians had to become exceptionally attentive observers of the human being in front of them. They observed the face, the skin, the voice, the breathing, the tongue, the pulse, the appetite, digestion, sleep, temperature, pain, movement, emotional state, energy, and the ways these things changed over time.
But observation was not simply a collection of facts. The purpose was to understand relationships.
A headache might occur alongside digestive problems. Poor sleep might occur alongside anxiety and muscular tension. Fatigue might occur alongside changes in appetite, menstrual cycles, mood, or temperature regulation. Pain might change according to weather, activity, emotional state, or time of day.
The question was not simply, “What disease does this person have?” The question was also, “What pattern is this person presenting?”
That distinction is at the heart of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Medicine Begins With the Person
One of the things I value most about TCM is that it does not require every person with the same symptom to receive the same treatment.
Two people can walk into my office with headaches and present completely different pictures. One may have headaches associated with muscular tension and prolonged stress. Another may experience headaches alongside fatigue and digestive weakness. Another may have headaches that occur around hormonal changes. Another may have headaches accompanied by irritability, disrupted sleep, and a feeling of internal pressure.
The word “headache” tells me something. It does not tell me everything.
TCM developed an elaborate system of pattern differentiation precisely because the symptom alone was never considered sufficient to describe the whole person.
This is one reason acupuncture is not simply a matter of choosing a point for a symptom. The treatment is based on the pattern the practitioner is seeing.
The same acupuncture point can therefore appear in completely different treatment strategies, and two people with the same complaint may receive very different treatments.
The Body Is a Pattern, Not a Collection of Isolated Parts
TCM does not divide the human being into completely separate systems.
The digestive system, sleep, emotions, circulation, respiration, movement, hormonal cycles, energy, and mental state are constantly influencing one another.
This does not mean that TCM denies anatomy or physiology. It means that it developed a different way of organizing observations about the person.
This is where concepts such as Qi, Blood, Yin, Yang, Jing, Shen, and the organ systems of Chinese medicine become important.
These terms belong to the medical language of TCM. They are not simply interchangeable with modern biomedical terms.
Qi, for example, should not be reduced to “energy” in the electrical or biochemical sense. It is a much broader concept describing aspects of functional activity, movement, transformation, and vitality.
Likewise, the Liver of Chinese medicine is not simply the anatomical liver.
The language describes functions and relationships within the traditional medical model.
Trying to translate every Chinese medical concept directly into a modern Western physiological term can actually make TCM harder to understand.
It is a medical language of its own.
Where Did This Medicine Come From?
The roots of Chinese medicine extend back thousands of years, with medical writings emerging from a long tradition of observation, clinical practice, philosophy, and scholarship.
The Huangdi Neijing, or Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon, became one of the foundational classical texts of Chinese medicine. It established important concepts concerning physiology, pathology, diagnosis, treatment, prevention, and the relationship between human beings and their environment.
The tradition continued to develop through successive physicians and medical texts.
Acupuncture and herbal medicine were refined. Diagnostic methods became increasingly sophisticated. Different schools of thought emerged. Physicians debated theories, developed new approaches, recorded clinical observations, and passed knowledge from one generation to the next.
What we now call Traditional Chinese Medicine is therefore not a frozen medical system from 2,000 years ago. It is the result of a very long history of development.
TCM and Taoism
To understand the intellectual landscape from which Chinese medicine emerged, it is also useful to understand Taoist thought.
Taoism profoundly influenced Chinese culture, philosophy, medicine, cultivation practices, and ideas about health and longevity.
The Taoist orientation toward nature is particularly relevant.
Life is understood through movement and relationship: activity and rest, expansion and contraction, growth and decline, heat and cold, fullness and emptiness.
Health is not imagined as a condition in which nothing changes. Health is the capacity to respond appropriately to change.
This is one reason the concept of balance in TCM is more interesting than the modern wellness version of the word.
Balance does not mean remaining perfectly still. It means being able to move between states appropriately.
We need activity, but we also need rest. We need nourishment, but we also need digestion and transformation. We need stimulation, but we also need recovery. We need engagement with life, but we also need periods of withdrawal and restoration.
The body is constantly adjusting.
What Does a TCM Doctor Actually Do?
A TCM consultation is much more than deciding where to put needles.
The practitioner takes a detailed history and looks at the person’s current pattern.
Sleep, digestion, appetite, energy, pain, emotional state, menstrual history when relevant, temperature, thirst, elimination, lifestyle, medications, previous illnesses, and other aspects of health may all become clinically relevant.
The tongue may be examined. The pulse may be assessed.
The practitioner may ask questions that seem unrelated to the original complaint until the relationships between them begin to emerge.
This is part of the diagnostic process.
The goal is to create a picture of the person’s current state.
Treatment then follows that picture.
What Does TCM Include?
Traditional Chinese Medicine is not acupuncture alone.
A practitioner may use acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, dietary therapy, Tui Na, cupping, Gua Sha, Moxibustion, movement practices, and other methods depending on the person’s presentation.
Acupuncture is one component of a much larger medical system.
Chinese herbal medicine is another major branch of the tradition, involving individualized formulas rather than simply choosing one herb for one symptom.
Dietary therapy applies Chinese medical principles to food and eating patterns.
Tui Na uses hands-on techniques to work with the body.
Cupping and Gua Sha provide additional forms of bodywork.
Qi Gong and Tai Chi developed within the broader Chinese traditions of movement, cultivation, and health maintenance.
The practitioner chooses among these tools according to what the person needs.
What Does “Holistic” Actually Mean?
I use the word holistic carefully because it has become so broad that it can mean almost anything.
For me, it means that the person is not reduced to the symptom.
If someone comes to me because they are experiencing pain, I want to know about the pain. But I also want to know what their sleep looks like, how they digest food, how they move, how they recover, what their stress load looks like, what has changed in their life, and what their body has been doing before the symptom appeared.
The purpose is not to turn every problem into a psychological problem or to assume that one hidden emotional cause explains everything.
It is simply to recognize that a human being is an interconnected organism.
That is a very old idea. It is also an idea that continues to become increasingly relevant as modern medicine learns more about the relationships between physiological systems.
TCM Is Not “Against” Modern Medicine
I don’t think TCM needs to be positioned against Western medicine in order to have value.
Modern medicine is extraordinarily good at many things. Acute care, surgery, infectious disease, emergency medicine, imaging, pathology, pharmacology, and the management of serious disease are areas in which contemporary medicine has capabilities that are indispensable.
TCM brings a different clinical lens.
It is particularly interested in patterns, function, individual variation, prevention, and the changes occurring within a person over time.
These approaches do not have to become the same thing. They can simply be different ways of looking at the same human being.
A person can have a laboratory result, a medical diagnosis, an acupuncture diagnosis, and a lived experience of illness at the same time.
None of those necessarily cancels the others.
What Does It Mean to Become a Doctor of Chinese Medicine?
Becoming a licensed practitioner of Chinese medicine in the United States requires substantial professional education, although exact requirements vary by state.
In California, acupuncture and Chinese medicine education includes extensive study of both Chinese medicine and biomedical sciences. Students study anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, diagnosis, clinical medicine, acupuncture, herbal medicine, and other areas of professional practice.
The education is not simply learning where to put needles.
It is learning how to evaluate a person, recognize patterns, understand pathology, determine when acupuncture or Chinese medicine is appropriate, recognize when referral is necessary, and practice within the legal scope of the profession.
That matters.
A person seeking acupuncture should know who is providing it and what their education and licensure actually are.
Titles and credentials can be confusing because licensing and professional designations differ from state to state.
The simplest question is often the most important:
Is this person licensed to practice acupuncture in the state where I am receiving treatment?
Why I Still Practice This Medicine
After years of studying Chinese medicine, the thing that continues to interest me is not that it has an answer for everything.
It doesn’t.
What interests me is the way it teaches us to look.
It asks us to slow down enough to notice patterns.
It asks us to pay attention to changes rather than only fixed categories.
It asks us to understand symptoms within the context of the person experiencing them.
It recognizes that the body is constantly adapting and that treatment can be individualized accordingly.
And it gives practitioners a language for observing aspects of health that can be difficult to describe when we reduce the human being to a diagnosis.
That is what I mean when I call TCM a whole-person medicine.
Not because it has to defeat another form of medicine.
Not because every ancient concept needs to be translated into a modern scientific discovery.
And not because it needs to make extravagant claims about what it can accomplish.
It has survived because generations of practitioners found value in learning how to observe the human being in front of them.
That is still where medicine begins.
Dr. Anna Bäck
Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine
Licensed Acupuncturist
Traditional Chinese Medicine Is a Way of Seeing
Traditional Chinese Medicine is a medical tradition built around observation. It developed through thousands of years of paying close attention to the human being, not simply to the disease.
Before there were blood tests, MRI machines, genetic sequencing, or the ability to measure thousands of physiological variables, physicians had to become exceptionally attentive observers of the human being in front of them. They observed the face, the skin, the voice, the breathing, the tongue, the pulse, the appetite, digestion, sleep, temperature, pain, movement, emotional state, energy, and the ways these things changed over time.
But observation was not simply a collection of facts. The purpose was to understand relationships.
A headache might occur alongside digestive problems. Poor sleep might occur alongside anxiety and muscular tension. Fatigue might occur alongside changes in appetite, menstrual cycles, mood, or temperature regulation. Pain might change according to weather, activity, emotional state, or time of day.
The question was not simply, “What disease does this person have?” The question was also, “What pattern is this person presenting?”
That distinction is at the heart of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Medicine Begins With the Person
One of the things I value most about TCM is that it does not require every person with the same symptom to receive the same treatment.
Two people can walk into my office with headaches and present completely different pictures. One may have headaches associated with muscular tension and prolonged stress. Another may experience headaches alongside fatigue and digestive weakness. Another may have headaches that occur around hormonal changes. Another may have headaches accompanied by irritability, disrupted sleep, and a feeling of internal pressure.
The word “headache” tells me something. It does not tell me everything.
TCM developed an elaborate system of pattern differentiation precisely because the symptom alone was never considered sufficient to describe the whole person.
This is one reason acupuncture is not simply a matter of choosing a point for a symptom. The treatment is based on the pattern the practitioner is seeing.
The same acupuncture point can therefore appear in completely different treatment strategies, and two people with the same complaint may receive very different treatments.
The Body Is a Pattern, Not a Collection of Isolated Parts
TCM does not divide the human being into completely separate systems.
The digestive system, sleep, emotions, circulation, respiration, movement, hormonal cycles, energy, and mental state are constantly influencing one another.
This does not mean that TCM denies anatomy or physiology. It means that it developed a different way of organizing observations about the person.
This is where concepts such as Qi, Blood, Yin, Yang, Jing, Shen, and the organ systems of Chinese medicine become important.
These terms belong to the medical language of TCM. They are not simply interchangeable with modern biomedical terms.
Qi, for example, should not be reduced to “energy” in the electrical or biochemical sense. It is a much broader concept describing aspects of functional activity, movement, transformation, and vitality.
Likewise, the Liver of Chinese medicine is not simply the anatomical liver.
The language describes functions and relationships within the traditional medical model.
Trying to translate every Chinese medical concept directly into a modern Western physiological term can actually make TCM harder to understand.
It is a medical language of its own.
Where Did This Medicine Come From?
The roots of Chinese medicine extend back thousands of years, with medical writings emerging from a long tradition of observation, clinical practice, philosophy, and scholarship.
The Huangdi Neijing, or Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon, became one of the foundational classical texts of Chinese medicine. It established important concepts concerning physiology, pathology, diagnosis, treatment, prevention, and the relationship between human beings and their environment.
The tradition continued to develop through successive physicians and medical texts.
Acupuncture and herbal medicine were refined. Diagnostic methods became increasingly sophisticated. Different schools of thought emerged. Physicians debated theories, developed new approaches, recorded clinical observations, and passed knowledge from one generation to the next.
What we now call Traditional Chinese Medicine is therefore not a frozen medical system from 2,000 years ago. It is the result of a very long history of development.
TCM and Taoism
To understand the intellectual landscape from which Chinese medicine emerged, it is also useful to understand Taoist thought.
Taoism profoundly influenced Chinese culture, philosophy, medicine, cultivation practices, and ideas about health and longevity.
The Taoist orientation toward nature is particularly relevant.
Life is understood through movement and relationship: activity and rest, expansion and contraction, growth and decline, heat and cold, fullness and emptiness.
Health is not imagined as a condition in which nothing changes. Health is the capacity to respond appropriately to change.
This is one reason the concept of balance in TCM is more interesting than the modern wellness version of the word.
Balance does not mean remaining perfectly still. It means being able to move between states appropriately.
We need activity, but we also need rest. We need nourishment, but we also need digestion and transformation. We need stimulation, but we also need recovery. We need engagement with life, but we also need periods of withdrawal and restoration.
The body is constantly adjusting.
What Does a TCM Doctor Actually Do?
A TCM consultation is much more than deciding where to put needles.
The practitioner takes a detailed history and looks at the person’s current pattern.
Sleep, digestion, appetite, energy, pain, emotional state, menstrual history when relevant, temperature, thirst, elimination, lifestyle, medications, previous illnesses, and other aspects of health may all become clinically relevant.
The tongue may be examined. The pulse may be assessed.
The practitioner may ask questions that seem unrelated to the original complaint until the relationships between them begin to emerge.
This is part of the diagnostic process.
The goal is to create a picture of the person’s current state.
Treatment then follows that picture.
What Does TCM Include?
Traditional Chinese Medicine is not acupuncture alone.
A practitioner may use acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, dietary therapy, Tui Na, cupping, Gua Sha, Moxibustion, movement practices, and other methods depending on the person’s presentation.
Acupuncture is one component of a much larger medical system.
Chinese herbal medicine is another major branch of the tradition, involving individualized formulas rather than simply choosing one herb for one symptom.
Dietary therapy applies Chinese medical principles to food and eating patterns.
Tui Na uses hands-on techniques to work with the body.
Cupping and Gua Sha provide additional forms of bodywork.
Qi Gong and Tai Chi developed within the broader Chinese traditions of movement, cultivation, and health maintenance.
The practitioner chooses among these tools according to what the person needs.
What Does “Holistic” Actually Mean?
I use the word holistic carefully because it has become so broad that it can mean almost anything.
For me, it means that the person is not reduced to the symptom.
If someone comes to me because they are experiencing pain, I want to know about the pain. But I also want to know what their sleep looks like, how they digest food, how they move, how they recover, what their stress load looks like, what has changed in their life, and what their body has been doing before the symptom appeared.
The purpose is not to turn every problem into a psychological problem or to assume that one hidden emotional cause explains everything.
It is simply to recognize that a human being is an interconnected organism.
That is a very old idea. It is also an idea that continues to become increasingly relevant as modern medicine learns more about the relationships between physiological systems.
TCM Is Not “Against” Modern Medicine
I don’t think TCM needs to be positioned against Western medicine in order to have value.
Modern medicine is extraordinarily good at many things. Acute care, surgery, infectious disease, emergency medicine, imaging, pathology, pharmacology, and the management of serious disease are areas in which contemporary medicine has capabilities that are indispensable.
TCM brings a different clinical lens.
It is particularly interested in patterns, function, individual variation, prevention, and the changes occurring within a person over time.
These approaches do not have to become the same thing. They can simply be different ways of looking at the same human being.
A person can have a laboratory result, a medical diagnosis, an acupuncture diagnosis, and a lived experience of illness at the same time.
None of those necessarily cancels the others.
What Does It Mean to Become a Doctor of Chinese Medicine?
Becoming a licensed practitioner of Chinese medicine in the United States requires substantial professional education, although exact requirements vary by state.
In California, acupuncture and Chinese medicine education includes extensive study of both Chinese medicine and biomedical sciences. Students study anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, diagnosis, clinical medicine, acupuncture, herbal medicine, and other areas of professional practice.
The education is not simply learning where to put needles.
It is learning how to evaluate a person, recognize patterns, understand pathology, determine when acupuncture or Chinese medicine is appropriate, recognize when referral is necessary, and practice within the legal scope of the profession.
That matters.
A person seeking acupuncture should know who is providing it and what their education and licensure actually are.
Titles and credentials can be confusing because licensing and professional designations differ from state to state.
The simplest question is often the most important:
Is this person licensed to practice acupuncture in the state where I am receiving treatment?
Why I Still Practice This Medicine
After years of studying Chinese medicine, the thing that continues to interest me is not that it has an answer for everything.
It doesn’t.
What interests me is the way it teaches us to look.
It asks us to slow down enough to notice patterns.
It asks us to pay attention to changes rather than only fixed categories.
It asks us to understand symptoms within the context of the person experiencing them.
It recognizes that the body is constantly adapting and that treatment can be individualized accordingly.
And it gives practitioners a language for observing aspects of health that can be difficult to describe when we reduce the human being to a diagnosis.
That is what I mean when I call TCM a whole-person medicine.
Not because it has to defeat another form of medicine.
Not because every ancient concept needs to be translated into a modern scientific discovery.
And not because it needs to make extravagant claims about what it can accomplish.
It has survived because generations of practitioners found value in learning how to observe the human being in front of them.
That is still where medicine begins.
Dr. Anna Bäck
Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine
Licensed Acupuncturist
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