Clinical manual of Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture

This is one of the most useful books about traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) to come from a genuine Chinese source for many years. The authors, instead of slavishly following the usual method of presenting patterns of organ, pathogen, body fluid diseases etc., consider the symptoms patients actually present with. They discuss the TCM differential diagnosis with detailed clinical manifestations to help the reader make the diagnosis. Different treatment approaches, such as herbal formulae, single herbs, Chinese patent medicines, simple recipes, acupuncture and moxibustion, are detailed for each diagnosis.

This is the first book in which these reviewers have found a description of the TCM approach to back pain! Although the purists might argue that this is not TCM as it should be presented, it will be enormously useful in practice. It will also be a good learning aid for those trained in Western diagnosis, who can now make the conversion to TCM much more painlessly.

The book sets out the overall management plans for patients, but these cannot be relied on for describing the techniques which are acceptable in the West. For example, it recommends nursing the unconscious patient in the supine position whereas the recovery position is strongly preferred in the West; oral fluid replacement is not given as an explicit part of management of infantile diarrhoea, and IV fluids are not mentioned if the diarrhoea progresses to collapse. Another point along these lines is that there is no obvious discussion of the safety of the treatments suggested, yet the safety of Chinese herbal medicines in particular is an area of growing concern.