With a history of more than three thousand years, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has formed a unique system to diagnose and cure illness. The TCM approach is fundamentally different from that of Western medicine. In TCM, the understanding of the human body is based on the holistic understanding of the universe, earth, and human body, and the treatment of illness is based primarily on the diagnosis and differentiation of syndromes.
Chinese medicine is a complete medical system that is capable of treating a very wide range of conditions. It includes herbal therapy, acupuncture, dietary therapy, and exercises in breathing and movement (tai chi and qi gong). These may be combined together in the course of treatment
Chinese medicine deems that a diseased state is an imbalance of yin and yang in a body. It aims to understand and treat the many ways in which the fundamental balance and harmony between the two may be undermined and the ways in which a person's Qi or vitality may be depleted or blocked. Clinical strategies are based upon diagnosis of patterns of signs and symptoms that reflect an imbalance.
Comparing with pharmaceutical drugs, Chinese herbal medicine is far less likely to cause side-effects, much more safe, safety, can correct internal imbalances and encourage body’s self-healing process. TCM addresses the root cause of a disease and not merely treat its symptoms
Besides the philosophical concepts that differ considerably from infection-based principles of medicine and health, the methods employed by traditional Chinese medicine are also quite different. If allopathic Western practitioners could be described as interventionist depending on synthetic pharmaceuticals, TCM methods are mostly natural and noninvasive. For example, where Western physicians might employ surgery and chemotherapy or radiation for a cancer patient, a TCM physician might use Chinese herbal medicine etc.