Posted on November 8, 2012, Thursday

GROWING up in Kuching as a boy, my first contact with medical treatment was of the herbal Chinese type. The services of Western medical science were expensive, and unaffordable in my youth, so Chinese medicine was the only medical care that we could have access to.

We never had enough money to see the handful of doctors in practice in Kuching, in those days. Of course, modern private medicine can also be hugely expensive today because of the burgeoning cost of healthcare, even though we now have many more doctors around us.

Now that I am grown up, and older, I suppose I have more faith in Western medicine. But I still retain a lingering love for Chinese medicine.

If you need some form of surgery, then it is clearly better that you consult a Western-trained doctor. But if you are plagued by one of many nameless, inexplicable and un-diagnosable ailments, then it may be better that you consult a traditional Chinese physician.

Just recently, I went down to see a friend, who is also a traditional Chinese medical practitioner. He is not cheap, but his medicines are always gentle.

By now, we all know about the weaknesses of Chinese medicine. It is poorly documented and may not yield results as quickly as Western medicine. But many of us have found it really works, in a gentle fashion, and seldom carries negative side effects.

Chinese medicine is based on its own particular cosmology. There is the usual balance between yin and yang, the polar opposites that rule our lives, based on their interplay.

The principles of traditional Chinese healing work according to a unique method, and can be understood mostly by people from the East. This art of healing is so ancient that its practitioners must have learned a tremendous empirical body of knowledge, through many centuries of trial and error.

Chinese medicines are made up of herbs, fruit, leaves, roots, bark and animal parts, mostly indigenous to China. They each have their own properties, and any student of the healing art will take many years to study the principles of Chinese medicine.

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Chinese traditional medicine