ABSTRACT
Social work in health care is heavily influenced by Western medicine that focuses on illness, disease, germs, malfunctions, and disabilities. 1 Molecular and genetic investigation of the brain, however, can neither fully explain depression nor provide an adequate solution for life-style-related problems. Recent trends in search of alternative solutions to health and well-being from a total person perspective have laid the platform for health care professionals and social workers to look for guidance from traditional wisdom. Very few traditional medicines survive since Western medicine has prevailed. Chinese medicine is one of them (WHO, 2002). It survives not because Chinese herbs are especially potent. It is the unique philosophical and theoretical sophistication of Chinese medicine that brings our understanding of health and illness to new heights (Ng, 2003).
