East meets West: current issues relevant to integrating Chinese medicine

Chinese medicine (CM) practices, such as herbal medicine and acupuncture, are well known and established in clinical practice and research. This article takes a balanced descriptive approach to highlighting the opportunities and challenges that the integration of CM with Western medicine may bring.CM is a traditional medicine grounded in empirical observations that has developed over thousands of years. Acupuncture is perhaps the best known and studied CM treatment modality. Other common modalities include Chinese herbal medicines, moxibustion, and tui na therapeutic massage. In Western countries including the United States, CM is categorized under complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), and considered distinct from conventional biomedical approaches to treatment.CM has roots going back more than 2,000 years. Ancient medical texts have been refined and interpreted extensively over the millennia, giving rise to multiple, sometimes competing, branches of study and practice. The term “Traditional Chinese Medicine” refers to the modern standardized approach mandated by the Chinese government in the 1950s [1]. The goal was to preserve CM, which was perceived to be endangered at the time. Systematic terminology and formal academic training programs were developed to enhance the science of the field, and simultaneously certain mystical elements were purged.Since the integration of CM and Western medicine in mainland China in the 1950s, physicians in China have been cross-trained substantially in both disciplines. Western biomedical doctors are required to receive a significant proportion of CM training as part of their core medical education and many often acquire additional training [1]. Many CM schools devote at least one-third of the curriculum to Western medicine, and most have further shifted toward Western medicine in recent years [1,2]. As a result, many doctors in China are facile in the use of both Western medicine and CM in daily practice, sometimes utilizi