E1. team 2wk

What's the difference of oriental medicine and western one?

Western medicine explains human body's function and disease based on anatomy knowledge so diseases are considered to arise due to some changes from body's specific part and treatment is also done for the part. Therefore, the disease name comes from the anatomy's part name.

And when treatment, useful medicine to diseased organs is prescribed according to the name of the disease. For example, we think of disease that one of body parts such as stomach, heart and etc gets bad so medicines must be used to operate for each bad part.

Otherwise, oriental medicine thinks of human body as a united one, each organ and tissue is closely connected and moved, accordingly diseases are defined that human body make change from a reason, that change is a body's response status for many reasons of internal and external so even if many symptoms arise, that each symptom is considered as not individual but those have close connection. Therefore, there is not change of feature or examination numerical value but self symptom only can also show off the disease sign.

Oriental medicine looks at so called yin(negative), yang(positive), heo(weakness) and sil(strength) as human body's very basic life symptoms and based on discerning these yin, yang, heo and sil. The status weaken by disease response is evaluated as a yin symptom and the opposite as a yang symptom. Therefore, even for the same cough, same medicine is not given but prescribed differently according to the difference of yin, yang, heo and sil.

Medical stuff of oriental medicine has many kinds of ahinimal, plant, mineral and etc but plants such as leaf, root, tree skin, tree fruit and etc are largely used. Some of these are original used but almost ones are dipped into alcohol or salt water etc, fried to increase the effect or remove poisonous elements and variously used according to partially processed method.

Effective component of western and oriental medicine has different concept. Oriental medical stuff is used as original natural shape. That is a merit and characteristic. Poisonous stuff is also got rid of the poisonous by appropriate mixture, the work of effective component strengthened and so on. There are lots of interesting phenomenons. Safety of western medical stuff is not surely secured. But the safety of oriental medical stuff comes from the experiences applied to thousands and hundreds of patients so there is few side effect.

FEspecially Daegu holds oriental festivals every year and sells many kinds of medical stuffs based on this oriental medicine. Next time, I will introduce these festivals in Daegu!