Many of you will be a bit confused by the title of this blog. The word “subjective” is used in many different ways. Thus, I must clarify what I mean by using the term, “subjective”, here. Most people hear the word “subjective” and they automatically understand it as being opposite than objective or tangible. I am not saying that the methods in TCM diagnosing are not quantifiable. What I am saying is that the TCM practitioner is trained to consider factors that are not readily measured in forming his diagnosis.
Along this line, I made a distinction between that TCM practitioner and the Western trained practitioner in a previous blog. A Western practitioner is trained to diagnose based on a generic paradigm of symptoms that he learned in school and in his training. In contrast, the TCM practitioner learns to treat each patient according to their uniqueness. He is trained to appreciate that each patient may present unique variables, some “subjective”, that he must take into consideration when making the final diagnosis.
I have treated many patients where the quantifiable measures don’t match up with my final diagnosis. As an aside, I will explain the diagnostic tools that a TCM practitioner learns in future discussions. You will certainly appreciate that discussion more if you gain the proper insight from this one.
Pain cases exemplify the influence of these outlying, “subjective” factors the best. I have treated many patients whose chief complaint is pain in a certain area like the lower back or knee. Most of these patients have had prior treatments by Western practitioners. Thus, they automatically assume that I am going to treat only the area where the pain resides. That is, they view all pain cases as simply reflecting structural problems related to the bones, tissues or ligaments.
When I perform my history and ask them how their pain was treated by their Western practitioner, they all tell me that he treated the pain simply as a physical, structural issue. Then I ask them how the pain responded to the treatment and most would say that the pain was treated but it would come back after a period of time. Those treatments essentially masked the pain and did not address the underlying issues…