03/19/2020
Chinese medicine has been battling epidemics for centuries (repost, original: ).
From Covid-19 (2020) to SARS (2002) to the countless epidemics in early history, facing off with deadly transmittable diseases has been a recurring story in Chinese Medicine.
Historically, the battle was fierce and often pyrrhic. By the Ming Dynasty (1300-1600s) countless outbreaks had mercilessly ripped through the country.
The Ming dynasty Chinese medicine doctor Wu You-Ke witnessed this age and sought to break through its suffering. “Wu saw with his own eyes the seasonal epidemics and the misery of many people dying. He travelled in and out of the affected areas and made observations of the diseases and doctors’ experiences” (1).
Wu saw a distinct problem: the current standard of care, understanding of the illnesses, and treatments were woefully inadequate and worse, ineffective. People were dying in masses. What worked in the past was no longer applicable. He sought innovation: new treatments for new diseases.
His ideas catalyzed a paradigm shift in the way Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) approached epidemics from that point forward.
Whilst it’s common knowledge in our day, 400 years ago Wu You-Ke postulated these epidemic diseases were caused by factors outside of the current scope of existing disease-causing agents. In other words, the culprits were things that doctors hadn’t even known existed. He asserted that “there was actually a multitude of individual pathogens, each with its individual characteristics and manifesting its own species of illness. This was a revolutionary idea for Chinese medicine, a notion of transmissible fever-inducing pathogens that was akin to the germ theory of diseases” (2).
Wu believed these pathogens invaded the body through the mouth and nose, directly affecting the lungs and stomach. Even without a microscope, he understood that the disease is transmitted person-to-person, and he stressed prevention of transmission through the use of makeshift face-masks and quarantining the epidemic affected-population from the regular sick population in hospitals. CONTINUED IN COMMENTS BELOW ⬇️⬇️⬇️
