A Clinical Study on the Diagnostic Principles in the Oriental Medicine

Abstract

There are two principal therapeutic methods in the Oriental medicine viz, the physical and the chemical methods, of which the latter corresponds to the “Kanpo Medicine” and the former to the Oriental physiotherapy.
In the systems of clinical examination of the Oriental physiotherapy, all of the exterior informations given by a sick body are accepted to be represented by signs on the twelve meridians. And when abnormality is found in a system of “Keiraku” and “Keiketsu, ” a simple and mild physical energy is to be applied to the said system in order to adjust an unbalance in the function of the living body.
The most significant difference between the Oriental and the Western medicine exists in the therapeutical system of diagnosis characteristic of the former.
There, all of the informations given by a sick body are directly correlated to the therapeutic principle. In detail, the over-all informations are firstly put in correspondence to some of the symptoms and signs of the twelve meridians (namely the pattern of the sickness image) and further classified into someone of the five levels in the light of the Principle of Five Components (WUHANG) on the Five Elements. In other words, the systems of the clinical diagnosis in the Oriental medicine are considered to be intensively based on the Five Elements Theory constituting its fundamental principle of classification and the clinical categories supported by the Theory of Twelve Meridians.
Although the conceptional constraction of the Oriental physiotherapy is generally accepted to be accomplished to apply only to the practice, there remained many oburities in its actual conception, at least lacking its scientific substantiation upon logical treatment.
The author has studied the validity of the diagnostic systems used in the Oriental medicine from the standpoint that the clinical and therapeutical systems of the Oriental physiotherapy are based on a “traditional hypothesis” worthy to be investigated.
(1) The informations of the Oriental physiotherapy are divided into four groups (system). The first group (Symptom system) consists mainly of the subjective complaints of a patient and partly of signs, where 122 informations are used in total. The second group (Five Component System) is further divided into 9 sub-groups each of which consists of every 5 informations corresponding to 5 patterns (Elements)-namely, fire, earth, metal, water and wood-, where 45 informations are used in total. the third group (Keiketsu System) consists of palpation findings of YU-BO system, where 24 informations are obtained. The last group (Puls System) consists of pulse information, surperficial and deep, full or vacant, where 24 informations are obtained in total.
In this study, separate diagnoses on 200 cases of inpatients with miscellaneous diseases have been made in the manner of the Oriental medicine starting from the individual informations and compared with those made in the manner of the Western madicine. Consequently, there is seen scarce tendency that a specified name of sickness corresponds to a specified name of “Keiraku.”
(2) The frequency of appearance of symptom systems corresponding to each Keiraku ranges from to 70, giving a wide distribution. χ²-test indicates that only 9 of the total (122) informations are on the level of significance (p less then 5%) to be useful for grouping of symptoms.
(3) Factor analysis of symptom systems has not revealed the presence of the twelve classification of the Keiraku sickness described in the classics of the Oriental medicine.
(4) Mutual comparisons of the individual 5 way diagnoses derived from every information source have been made only to give a poor coincidence as a whole, of which max. is 30% and min. is 13%.
(5) The Five Component Theory of the Oriental physiotherapy proved to be statistically scarcely significant.