Done skillfully, Chinese medicine need not, indeed cannot, separate a person into segmented parts treating one symptom or part at the expense of another. It is designed to treat the person, not just the disease. Chinese medicine has individualized diagnostic and treatment techniques. For example, five women may come into a clinic with hot flashes, but each of these women's hot flashes is accompanied by a variety of different signs and symptoms, no two of which are exactly alike. Instead of each women getting the same hormone replacement therapy, each of these five women will receive an individually tailored treatment plan with different herbs, different acupuncture therapy, and different lifestyle suggestions.
Chinese medicine has no side effects.
Because treatment is so specifically tailored to each person, if the diagnosis has been correct, the treatments prescribed by Chinese medicine should have no side effects. Any mild side effects that may arise in the initial stages of herbal treatment can be corrected by adjustments to the herbal formula and acupuncture rarely has any unwanted side effects at all. Chinese medicine's emphasis is on prevention. In Western medicine, diagnosis can only be made and treatment given if there are measurable material or tissue changes that show up in pictures or in blood or fluid tests. If a person complains of symptoms which cannot be measured by these means, Western medicine calls this a functional disorder, and it is usually undiagnosable and untreatable.