Use of traditional drugs in a hospital of Chinese medicine in Germany

✍ Scribed by Dieter Melchart; Klaus Linde; Wolfgang Weidenhammer; Stefan Hager; Jiazhen Liao; Rudolf Bauer; Hildebert Wagner

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 84 KB
• Volume: 8
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1053-8569
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-1557(199903/04)8:2<115::aid-pds412>3.0.co;2-i

✦ Synopsis

The frequency of use of traditional Chinese drugs was investigated in relation to Western and Chinese diagnostic classi®cations in a hospital for traditional Chinese medicine in Germany. All 1597 in-patients treated in the hospital between February 1992 and August 1993 entered a prospective observational study. About two thirds of the patients suered from chronic pain syndromes, the most frequent single diagnosis being migraine (n 244). All patients were treated with at least one of four Chinese therapies (traditional Chinese drugs, acupuncture, Tuina-massage, Qi-gong). 95.1% of all patients received traditional Chinese drug treatment, prescribed in complex prescriptions including 3 to 12 single drugs from a total of 305. Drug patterns prescribed to patients with the same Western diagnosis tended to be similar, but could dier strongly for single drugs in subgroups with distinct Chinese diagnoses. Studies evaluating traditional Chinese treatment strategies in patients classi®ed according to Western nosology should take into account possible diagnostic dierences according to Chinese nosology. The development of a reliable coding system for Chinese diagnostic classi®cations is a precondition for further crosscultural studies.