I have conducted extensive research throughout the years to collect reference data for hundreds of symptoms and diseases commonly treated in traditional Chinese medicine, which are the foundations of the modern strategies of diagnosis and treatment.
Reference data function as essential resources in clinical practice, mostly listed in chart form. When reference data are available to us anytime we need them, we are clinically ready all the time . As an example, when we are diagnosing migraine headache, we can enlist a reference data to see what syndromes are generally account for migraine headache.
In TCM diagnosis, the doctor needs to collect data from the patient by questioning the patient, observing the patient, and taking the pulses, etc. That is the first step in clinical practice, normally clinical consultation.
And then the doctor needs to determine what syndromes are established from the individual symptoms collected in the course of consultation. , Typically what a doctor does is to analyze the individual symptoms and come up with a syndrome.
Unfortunately, it is not easy to come up with a syndrome after consultation. This, from my point of view, seems to stand out as a most serious theoretical gap between symptoms and syndromes in TCM, which must be improved accordingly in order to make clinical practice in TCM a more complete system of discipline, namely to make it easy, accurate, and fast to follow smoothly.
