As my education progresses, Oriental medicine continues to reveal to me more and more methods and perspectives of extraordinary perception into a person’s being. I’ve been learning a detailed system of pulse diagnosis and asking diagnosis in school; I just came back from an extracurricular training in Japanese meridian therapy that involves significantly more emphasis on sensation of qi (or ki, as it’s called in Japanese), and various other methods of diagnosis. The totality of it is staggering to me.
So, to help organize it in my own mind, I’ve decided to present a brief little introduction to Oriental diagnostic methods, so far as I’ve experienced them in my brief sojourn into the medicine.
Oriental medicine rests on what is called the Four Examinations, or the Four Pillars of Diagnosis. They are:
- Looking
- Listening/Smelling
- Palpation
- Asking
However, it gets much more in depth than this! There are many, many systems and microsystems that can be examined and plundered for information, and all of them rest on the assumption that the microcosm reflects the macrocosm. That is, that a small area, like the ear or the pulse, is a holographic representation of the larger whole of the human body. This means that nearly any part of the body can be an image of the entire body. The methods that I list here are only a few of the major ones.
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