Why Chinese medicine sounds wacky to Western ears

It’s hard not to laugh when your acupuncturist states dryly that your Lung has been invaded by Wind-Damp. Yet, on a miserable winter’s day when you’re coughing so much it hurts and your brain feels too full of fog to think, the notion that the weather has annexed your body really resonates.

In general, Chinese medicine describes and focusses on how the person with the symptoms feels. It makes the patient’s subjective experience the main thing.

In Western medicine, the same condition may be described as “bronchitis”. Translated into English, this means that the airways in the lungs (bronchi or bronchioles) have become inflamed (that’s the “itis” bit). The term describes what the onlooker would see if they cut you open. In general, Western medicine describes and focusses on what the onlooker can observe or measure. It makes the onlooker’s objective view the main thing.

Just as Western medicine has become very good at measuring things from the outside (cells, viruses, chemicals in the body), Chinese medicine has become very good at describing how things feel on the inside. For example, Western medicine believes that pneumonia can trigger hallucinations. A Chinese medicine practitioner believes that a patient who reports seeing ghosts but doesn’t seem too bothered by it, may be at risk of developing respiratory problems even before they develop a cough.

These different approaches equip Western and Chinese medicine to treat different things: Western medicine is great at gunning down germs and doing things like eradicating smallpox. Chinese medicine is great at building people up. In scientific trials, acupuncture outperforms Western medicine when it comes to treating chronic pain and soothing anxiety.

Apart from its affinity for describing subjective experience, Chinese medicine sounds wacky because we use English when we talk about it. You may look a little dubiously at your Western GP if they used the English translation of Latin medical terms. For example, if you were pregnant, vomiting a lot and starting to become dehydrated, you may be told that you have hyperemesis gravidarum. Sounds important. Sounds serious. Translated, it literally means “lots of vomiting in pregnancy”. No news there, then.

I sometimes wonder if Chinese medicine would have been adopted into Western mainstream medicine sooner, had it been translated into Latin.