Hacking Chinese Medicine - Class 5: Changing Times, Changing Vocabulary

Course overview

In ancient times, Chinese medical terms were often words about the weather such as Damp or Wind; these were often used to explain how someone’s illness came about through over-exposure to some climatic situation. If a problem was not due to the weather, the climate words were used anyway. In these metaphorical cases, they don’t actually help with our understanding of the problem. Today, very few of our patients are suffering from health problems associated with climatic excess but we still use the same old weather-based words to codify the treatment patterns, and it often makes our diagnoses and treatment names misleading. This course will explain how to work around these limitations and suggest better methods of communication.