ABSTRACT
The history of Chinese medicine can be divided into three main stages: ‘period before systemization: knowledge accumulation through practice’, ‘period of systemization and autonomy’, and ‘period of differentiation and development since the eastward transmission of western sciences’. There are three kinds of relationship among Chinese medicine theory and practice: stimulation, obstruction, and discrete. Chinese medicine is a kind of knowledge which involves both physical and metaphysical. Compared to Western medicine, Chinese medicine is characterized as ‘empirical medicine’ by those people studying modern science, who think of theoretical foundation of Chinese medicine as weak while practicality as strong. The theory of ‘Yin-Yang and Wu-Xing’ provides referable knowledge foundation of complex system dynamics. The practice of knowledge and action in Chinese medicine itself is extremely important. It’s inappropriate to evaluate one kind of knowledge theory as right or wrong in an over-simplistic way.
