TCM: 10 Health tips from Traditional Chinese Medicine
updated the 6 October 2015 à 23:02
Persistently catching a flu or feeling under the weather? It may be a sign of your body being out of balance. Here are 10 tips from TCM experts that’ll help to solve your ailments.
A ‘Made in China’ label may be associated with low prices and shoddy quality, but Chinese medicine is bucking that trend by attracting throngs of foreigners to consult traditional doctors. Traditional Chinese Medicine, or TCM for short, has been around for decades, playing an essential healing role in ancient China long before Western medical practices took off. Comparatively, TCM tends to focus more on healing and detox, usually prescribing patients with a combination of – admittedly strange-tasting – natural herbs.
While Western medicine views ailments in isolation, TCM believes that an ailment is merely the manifestation of an imbalance of your being, and it is the root problem that needs correcting instead. The imbalance can range from the intangible, like your Qi (energy flow), to a concrete homeostatic imbalance. As such, practitioners focus on gradually nursing your body back to health and balance, which can take a longer time than Western medicine.
If you’re wondering which one is better, our answer would be a firm neither. There are people who staunchly vouch for the efficacy of either camps, but we believe that each has their merits and shortcomings. Perhaps what’s best would be to view TCM as a long-term, complementary alternative to Western medicine.
After all, taking a month to recover from that nasty flu might mean that our jobs are long gone before we get out of bed.
Yijie Zhang
