Surgery of Chinese Medicine and emergency medicine

May 21, 2006

I have been reading various posts expressing a desire by practitioners

to be able to practice chinese medicine surgical procedures and or

emergency medicine. I was wondering if people could describe to me

exactly what situations they are thinking about when they say this.

Ive been having a think about it, and I feel that if a patient

presented to my clinic with an acute, emergency type illness I would do

what most GP's would do, and do what I could in a first aid context and

then kick them out of the clinic into the waiting ambulance so they

could go to an ER for treatment.

And as for surgical procedures, I've been thinking about that too, and

about the most common surgical procedures that were provided for

patients in the hospital I studied at in China. They tended to be

things like doing dilation and curettage for terminations of

pregnancy's or removing anal warts. And as for invasive diagnostic

tests, most western doctors dont actually tend to do things like bone

marrow biopsys themselves, do they? I thought they tended to refer the

patient to a specialist who does the procedure. Other surgical

procedures were western surgical techniques and not specifically

chinese, like appendectomies, etc.

Could you describe some of these other surgical procedures that you're

talking about for me? I looked at my " Surgery of traditional Chinese

Medicine " textbook and its mostly all dermatology.

Is chinese bone-setting actually different in technique to western bone

setting in the actual reduction of the fracture or dislocation? Or is

it just different in the management of the limb after it has been set?

(Cane splints instead of plaster casts, etc.)

I have to say, that even though I think that some western medicine

falls short of the mark. I feel that orthopaedic surgery has got to be

one of the high points of western medicine. Hats off to orthopaedic

surgeons, when you need one, you really need one.

Thanks,

Lea.

May 21, 2006

Hi Lea,

I can't speak for anyone else, but for me the issue is legality. I want to be

able to utilize therapies and clinical procedures that I have been taught, and

which I can competently perform. If I have been adequately trained to do

something, I want to be able to make the decision to do it, without fearing

that I will lose my license. As I mentioned in a previous post, an example

that comes to mind is sterile injectables. If I receive the training to

inject a particular herbal formula to treat a particular condition, I don't want

my hands tied. I'm not in the least suggesting that our medicine should

replace emergency medicine, rather, I hope for the day when we will be able to

attend to medical emergencies along side Western physicians as equal partners,

or be able to treat them independently if we so desire, (again, of course with

appropriate training). However, the key to this ever happening is autonomy

apart from those agencies which govern and enforce

western medicine, ie. the FDA and the DEA in the US.

Respectfully,

Yehuda Frischman, :L.Ac.

leabun1 <leabun1 wrote: