ACCORDING to Chinese mythology, the origin of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) can be traced back to three legendary Emperors/mythical rulers: Fu Xi, Shen Nong, and Huang Di.

Historians believe that Shen Nong and Fu Xi were early tribal leaders. Fu Xi was a cultural hero who developed the trigrams of Yi Jing (I Ching) or Book of Changes.

Shen Nong, the legendary emperor who lived 5,000 years ago, is hailed as the "Divine Cultivator"/"Divine Farmer" by the Chinese because he is attributed as the founder of herbal medicine, and taught people how to farm. In order to determine the nature of different herbal medicines, Shen Nong sampled various kinds of plants, ingesting them himself to test and analyse their individual effects.

Legend has it that Shen Nong tasted a hundred herbs, including 70 toxic substances in a single day, in order to rid people of their illnesses. As there were no written records, it is said that the discoveries of Shen Nong were passed down verbally from generation to generation. It was only many years later that the oldest known book on agriculture and medicinal plants was compiled - Shen Nong Bencao Jing.

In 1578, after reading 800 medical references and conducting 30 years of field study, Li Shizhen completed the Bencao Gangmu, also known as the Compendium of Materia Medica, which has been translated into 20 languages and used as a reference until today.

Clinical diagnosis and treatment in TCM are mainly based on the yin-yang and five elements theories. These theories apply the phenomena and laws of nature to the study of the physiological activities and pathological changes of the human body and its interrelationships. Traditional Korean and Japanese medicine are said to have been developed with the strong influence of TCM.

Following a macro philosophy of disease, TCM diagnostics are based on overall observation of human symptoms rather than "micro" level laboratory tests. There are four types of TCM diagnostic methods: observe (w'ng), hear and smell (w'n), ask about background (w'n) and touching (qi').

The diagnostics of an ailment not only includes its cause, mechanism, location, and nature, but also the confrontation between the pathogenic factor and body resistance. Treatment is not based only on the symptoms, but differentiation of syndromes.

Therefore, those with identical ailments may be treated in different ways, and on the other hand, different ailments may result in the same syndrome and are treated in similar ways.

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