In Oriental medicine diseases have been explained as the products of Oketsu, Suidoku or Shokudoku. Oketsu means the stagnation of disordered blood, which should appear in various febrile diseases, women in childbed, contusions and individuals of hereditarily idiosyncratic constitution. Suidoku means intoxication caused by disturbances of water metabolism, while Shokudoku means intestinal autointoxication caused by unbalanced diet. Each of these three factors causes in its turn various specific diseases respectively.
In “Shang han lun” and “Chin kuei yao lüeh” (217 A. D.) of Chang Chung-ching are given many formulas for combatting Oketsu, Suidoku and Shokudoku, and they have been used successfully.
There are some different principles of healing Oketsu, namely; to bring disordered blood circulation into normal condition, to restore disordered blood and remove the stagnation, and to dissolve blood clots to normalize blood circulation.
In the last case of the above three various drugs of animal origine are used in combination with those of vegetable origin. They are, for instance, leeches, gadflies, opisthoplatia orientalis, larvae of coprides species and others. It is interesting that worn-out dish rags and dirty straw mats were used as remedies for contusions. The animals providing such drugs live mainly in dirty mud or decomposed matter, that is; they are resistant to dirty or decomposed environment. The others such as leeches or gadflies contain anticoagulant substances.
Throughout the history of Oriental medicine so called “sympathetic drugs” have been used, which share the thought of “Similia similibus curantur” with Homöopathy.
A series of studies by Dr. Knisely and others in the last 40 years or so on “Sludged blood”, coagulation of red blood cells in blood vessels, seems to provide some available explanations of Oketsu. A new way of healing diseases with blood coagulation could be found out through clinical studies of Oketsu on the basis of the traditional context of Oriental medicine.
