One fundamental difference between conventional medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine is the way we look at our medicinal substances.

I can compare conventional medicine to individual sports, and tcm to team sports. How? Allow me.

Let’s say we are sending athletes to the olympics. In individual sports, we select the best candidate for a particular event. This guy for boxing, that guy for weightlifting, etc.

Same with western medicine. Hypertension? This drug. Diabetes? That drug.

In team sports, you don’t necessarily put all the best individual players together. You have to think of what kind of team you want to put together, what individuals would best fill in the roles needed to assemble such a team, and also consider how the individual players enhance each others strengths and compensate for each others weaknesses.

So with Chinese medicine, we think about what’s the overall problem that beleaguers the patient, and then formulate a strategy (usually with multiple components) to address the overall problem. You then form a “team” of medicinals to try to address the situation. If the problem is analogous to a clogged drain pipe, one might give a medicinal that will soften the clog, combine it with another that increases the flow of the water in the pipe, etc.

A common, innocent, yet tragic mistake when the western medical mind looks at a Chinese herbal formula is to look at the ingredients ONLY in terms of individuals. Not as a team. Don’t look at the singular medicinals, look at the entire formula and treat it as a unit.

This is why studies done using Chinese herbology must be studies made using the formulas, the combinations, not the individual herbs. Thankfully, such studies do exist.