Chinese medical vocabulary and jargon

February 25, 2020

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has only the scientific approach that over the last century when the government Chinese has developed its policy of cohabitation of the two medicines (western and traditional). Thus, the TCM has not yet adopted the language technique that accompanies the research and scientific validation process, and which allows to describe with precision the complex systems from the real – from the visible to the infinitely small – and to define the laws of biochemistry. 

TCM still retains plain, concrete language today. It was originally a language perfectly suited to reflect knowledge multidisciplinary where all knowledge should lead to a possibility Action. This language could not be dissociated from a way of life where the arts of cooking, of healing, of painting, of calligraphy and doing health exercises … It translates a world in which man true – one who wants balance and health for himself and others – must accept responsibilities so much public than family, while seeking to penetrate meaning deep in life. This is why medical texts are never purely technical or mechanical. So even if they are essentially composed of pragmatic therapeutic recipes and processes, they are always imbued with strong philosophical overtones. 

To account for abstract, invisible or partially realities hidden (a fever or a bacterial infection, for example), TCM employs an intuitive and speculative approach, and uses terms which designate, symbolically or by analogy, realities completely concrete.

You will say that a person suffering from a cold is the victim of a Wind, because this is often done at the time of a change climatic accompanied by wind or by exposure to a draft. The Wind also symbolizes the power of Air which carries a pathogenic factor and makes it penetrate. We will then qualify it as External wind. It looks like a person who suffers from tremors that she is suffering from an Internal Wind because her symptoms appear of what the wind causes: gusts of wind, trembling of the leaves, etc. The Wind is therefore an image that serves as a concrete and analog starting point to denote a specific set of pathological symptoms, and which is used to classify them in a category or to associate them to a clinical portrait. 

These images can be refined more and more: we will speak of an external Wind or internal, of a direct attack of Wind, of a Wind-Heat attacking the Lung or Wind-Humidity attacking the Surface, each expression designating particular clinical realities and different, calling for specific treatment. Language TCM is old but practical. Being imaged, it has the advantage of be easily understood and used by people who possess little medical knowledge.

However, an effort must be made not to interpret the terms in a scientific perspective, nor take them literally. Be affected cold in the heart does not mean that the heart is physically cold, but that it has characteristics associated with the Cold such as a certain lack of force, or when the functions it controls are affected in the same sense, causing symptoms like a weak pulse, decreased appetite, fatigue, decreased libido, etc.

We must always remember that these are images and analogies, a bit like when we say we have caught a cold (caught on the fly?) or that we have heartache (while suffering from digestive disorders). And if the Chinese terms seem too simplistic, we can remember that our medical terms sometimes go overboard on the contrary: if you have idiopathic alopecia, it means that you are losing your hair and the cause is unknown …

Many Chinese concepts have no equivalent in our vocabulary. For example, the word Fei refers to a specific entity comprising the lungs and functions that biomedicine would attribute to other organic structures (like the heart) which together make up a organic sphere that TCM holds responsible for breathing, of the synthesis ofEnergy acquired, from the transmission ofEnergy defensive and the dissemination of Organic liquids around the body (sweat, nasal secretions, etc.). For lack of anything better, we call this entity the Lung (with a capital letter), even if it does not correspond to this that means the word lung in French. Likewise, the Wind is a term used to designate not only the phenomenon meteorological, but also a pathogenic factor and different types of conditions; and Air understands the physical constituents air (oxygen, nitrogen, water vapor, etc.), but also its constituents energetic and vibratory.