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Western and Eastern Medicine Compared Depending on how you look at it, you may see two silhouettes or a vase. [中汶] Ever see that drawing of two silhouettes looking at each other? One moment you see two faces, the next moment, it’s a vase. Which is it? Obviously it is just a matter of your perception or the way your brain links together visual clues. That’s the difference between Western medicine (WM), and Chinese or Oriental medicine (CM). Same symptoms, same signs, same patient, but very different ways of organizing the information. An excellent example of how we can look at the same body with two perspectives is diabetes. Diabetes happens when sugar (glucose) is unable to pass through the wall of cells. When the glucose doesn’t get into the cell, the amount of glucose in the blood stream increases and this is what causes the problems associated with diabetes. Two Perspectives – Two Solutions: However, CM sees doesn’t see diabetes as just one issue (or two, as is the case in WM). Rather, CM sees many possible conditions depending on the particular signs and symptoms of a given patient. One of these disease patterns is known as “xiao ke” or “wasting and thirsting”. Extreme thirst is a well-known symptom of diabetes, and Chinese medicine agrees. However, the mechanisms (and hence, treatments) are somewhat different. We look at this as the cell (or the inside of the body, as CM describes it) as being dry or lacking water. Drinking more water only results in more urination (another sign of diabetes). The problem isn’t how much water you’re drinking, but how little is being absorbed. Guess what helps water be absorbed by the cell? Glucose. When the body’s functions that enable the body to absorb (or “transform” as we say in CM) fluids are stimulated, the glucose also gets pulled in to the cell and out of the blood stream at the same time. So, while Western medicine says that the cell can’t absorb glucose, leading to a dry cell. Chinese medicine says that the cell is un